Fred Friend on the state of Open Access: Where are we, what still needs to be done?

This is the third Q&A in a series exploring the current state of Open Access (OA). This time the questions are answered by Fred Friend.

By profession a librarian, Friend has long been an energetic and committed advocate for Open Access. He is also one of the small group of people who attended the 2001 meeting that led to the Budapest Open Access Initiative (BOAI). It was at that meeting that the term Open Access was coined, and a definition of OA agreed.

Friend has also worked for the UK organisation JISC, and has recently undertaken consultancy work for the European Commission and for Knowledge Exchange.

Other contributors to this Q&A series include palaeontologist Mike Taylor, cognitive scientist Stevan Harnad, director of the Harvard Open Access Project Peter Suber, and SPARC's Heather Joseph. The index of all twenty interviews conducted is here. 

Fred Friend

Q: What in your view have been the major achievements of the OA movement since you helped draft the definition of OA in Budapest in 2001?

A: I am continually amazed by the fact that the concept of open access to publicly-funded research outputs, as we drafted in the Initiative, is now on the agenda of governments and funding agencies across the world. 

We proved to be the “butterfly effect” that has led to the winds of change blowing through scholarly communication, not because we planned it that way but because what we proposed in the BOAI chimed with the until then unexpressed hopes of hundreds of thousands of researchers to use the Internet in ways which benefit human society.

The BOAI was only the catalyst for change. The real achievements of the OA movement lie in the way the ball we threw in 2002 has been picked up by others who have made freely available the huge volume of content now in open access repositories, despite considerable pressure to do nothing about open access. The story of BOAI can be a source of encouragement to any who feel depressed by the power of vested interests to block changes needed to release the power of human endeavour.

Q: What have been the main disappointments?

A: I really should not be disappointed, because the take-up of open access has been remarkable in such a short time-period, but for those of us who can see the opportunities ahead, the day on which there is payment-free access to and re-use of 100% of publicly-funded research outputs cannot come soon enough. That achievement is now not in the hands of those of us who drafted BOAI but lies with the thousands of researchers across the world who could so easily bring the day closer by simply depositing their work in an open access repository.

I understand the pressures many researchers face to follow the old path to academic recognition. My trust is in the growing awareness of the foolishness in chasing after recognition through three-decimal-point journal impact factors which tell us nothing about the quality of an individual journal article.

Open access opens up new ways of assessing the value of research publications on a single-article basis. It is in shaking up many aspects of research communication as much as in opening up access that the OA movement has been valuable. 

Q: There has always been a great deal of discussion (and disagreement) about Green and Gold OA. In light of recent developments (e.g. the OSTP Memorandum, the RCUK OA Policy, and the European Research Council Guidelines on OA) what would you say are the respective roles that Green and Gold OA should be playing today?

A: The view of myself and many other OA supporters has remained consistent, i.e. that both green and gold routes to OA are valid and therefore both should continue to be recognised in a level playing-field in scholarly communication. Deposit by authors in an open access repository is the easiest first step but that will not prevent publication in an OA journal. Most governments and funding agencies have also continued to follow that even-handed policy, the only exception being the UK Government, which chose to bow to persistent lobbying by the publishing industry, set up a Finch Group dominated by publishing interests — both societies and commercial publishers — and chose to give preference to APC-paid gold OA.

This rushed and expensive decision will not assist the publishing industry in the long-term, because it has focused attention on the value for taxpayer money from the various research dissemination models. How long can the subscription/licensing model continue when it is the least cost-effective model? How long can APC-paid gold OA continue with payments at such at a high level when there are more cost-effective university-managed gold OA journals requiring no or very low payments from authors? How long can publishers continue to dismiss green OA as “unsustainable” when their own businesses are at greater commercial risk than the university repositories providing green OA?

No open access advocate I know wishes to see the fall of a publishing house, but sooner rather than later the research funders and taxpayers maintaining the current publishing infrastructure will realise that the public funding underpinning the present research journals can be better spent. There is certainly hope for the publishing industry in the new publishers who have embraced OA completely, instead of trying to fit OA journals into a subscription-based infrastructure, provided that they do not mimic the practices of established publishers.    

Q: What about Hybrid OA?

A: The concept of hybrid subscription/APC-paid gold OA journals looked attractive when they first appeared but the model has not been implemented widely. Even ignoring suspicions of “double-dipping”, the model has suffered from the flaws in both the subscription and APC-paid models. Rather than overcoming the flaws in the subscription model, hybrid journals have added to those flaws the flaws in the APC-paid model.

In principle hybrid journals could have assisted in a transition to an individual-article publishing model, but the continuing publisher accounting model by journal title rather than by individual article has rendered hybrid journals ineffective as a mechanism for change. Journal titles are a convenient way of grouping related articles but are not a good basis for cost-effective business models. 

Q: How would you characterise the current state of OA, both in the UK and internationally?

A: OA remains in a healthy state both in the UK and internationally, in that the volume of OA content continues to grow.

Perhaps the part of the world with the most promising OA infrastructure is the European Union, where the repository-based OpenAIREplusprogramme for research publications and data is transforming access and re-use of publicly-funded research outputs. The research programmes in all EU Member States will benefit from this new infrastructure as the Horizon2020 EU funding kicks in.

European leaders understand the potential benefits to innovation and economic growth from this investment in OA-communicated research. The UK Government also understands the potential benefits and its commitment to open-ness in research data is strong, even if its policy on research publications has taken the wrong path.

Q: What still needs to be done, and by whom?

A: So much needs to be done to achieve 100% OA coverage of world-wide research publications and data that no OA advocate can be complacent.

The OA movement represents a radical shift in the culture, policies and behaviour of researchers, institutions, funding agencies and governments. That shift is part-way along its spectrum and the momentum is, I believe, unstoppable. The number of OA publications continues to grow along a steady path, so the trend is clear. The available technology continues to open up new research opportunities which suit an OA environment.

However, such a massive change in research culture will take several more years to work through, and many individuals and organisations can contribute to the process of change.    

Q: What in your view is the single most important task that the OA movement should focus on today?

A: Open access repositories are the most cost-effective and sustainable route to open access, but they have to be shown to be so. We have to prove to authors that depositing their work in an open access repository is the best step they can take, not only for their own research and careers, but for the entire world.

Countering the lobbying against open access repositories from vested interests should be undertaken through rigorous research into the costs and benefits of the various publishing models. Open Access advocates have nothing to fear from such research.

Q: What does OA have to offer the developing world?

The developing world was very much in our minds when we met to draft the BOAI, and the beauty of the BOAI text — not drafted by me! — never ceases to inspire me. It is still important to “share the learning of the rich with the poor and the poor with the rich”, working to “lay the foundation for uniting humanity in a common intellectual conversation and quest for knowledge”.

Q: What are your expectations for OA in 2013?

A: Obviously more growth in OA content and commitment, but perhaps even more important are the stories we are beginning to hear of the value of sharing research and teaching resources freely across the world.

Open access is good in itself, but the real benefit from the ability of researchers, teachers and learners to share content without financial, legal or technical barriers lies in the intellectual, economic and social growth which results from that sharing.

Q: Will OA in your view be any less expensive than subscription publishing? If so, why/how? Does cost matter anyway?

A: Cost does matter, but not on its own. Cost always has to be related to benefit.

I do believe that repository-based OA and non-APC gold OA will be less expensive than both APC-paid gold OA and the current subscription/licensing model for research publications, but the important point is that the cost-benefit from publisher-led models will be poorer than the cost-benefit from the academic-led models. The reasons are the high overheads and high profit levels in the current publishing infrastructure, and equally important the ability of the research and teaching communities to grow the benefits from internet-based technology.

———

Fred Friend studied history at Kings College London, obtained a postgraduate library qualification at University College London, and then began his library career in Manchester University Library.

After Manchester Friend moved to the University of Leeds and then to the University of Nottingham before obtaining his first library director post at the University of Essex.

This was followed by a move to University College London, where he was library director for 15 years before starting a new role as Honorary Director Scholarly Communication, leading to involvement in the international open access movement.

Friend is one of the authors of the Budapest Open Access Initiative and he worked for JISC for several years as their Scholarly Communication Consultant. More recently Fred has undertaken consultancy work for the European Commission and for Knowledge Exchange. His website can be access here. 

Lion sketch

Started a new sketchbook recently.  I often do theme sketch books.  I've had an alligator sketchbook, an elephant, zombies, sharks, monkeys.  I like them because they force me to go beyond my comfort zone.  After the third or fourth alligator I had to try and find new answers to "what does this alligator look like?"  I'm really excited about this one.  It's going to be all big cats, which actually may wind up being 90% tigers cause those stripes are so fun to draw.  anyway, the first one that turned out to my liking was a lion.  threw on some quick color for you.  enjoy.

Where are we, what still needs to be done? Stevan Harnad on the state of Open Access

The interview below is the second in a series exploring the current state of Open Access (OA) and what the priorities ought to be going forward. It is with self-styled archivangelist Stevan Harnad, who is currently Canada Research Chair in cognitive science at Université du Québec à Montréal (UQAM) and professor of web science at the University of Southampton.

In 1994 Harnad posted an online message calling on all researchers to archive their papers on the Internet in order to make them freely accessible to their peers — a strategy that later became known as Green Open Access, or self-archiving. The message — which Harnad headed “The Subversive Proposal” — initiated a series of online exchanges, many of which were subsequently collected and published as a bookin 1995.

Harnad was also one of the small group of people who attended the 2001 Budapest Open Access Initiative (BOAI). It was in Budapest that the term Open Access was coined, and a definition first agreed upon.

The first interview in this series was with palaeontologist and computer programmer Mike Taylor, and can be read here.

 

Stevan Harnad

Q: What in your view have been the major achievements of the OA movement since you posted the Subversive Proposal on a mailing list in 1994?

A: The creation of institutional OA repositoriesand the adoption of mandates by institutions and funders to deposit in them — the Liège model mandate especially, and, if it is adopted, the proposed HEFCE/REF mandate.

Q: What have been the main disappointments?

A: Growth of mandates is still too slow, and it is still too often not the most effective mandate (Liège/HEFCE) that is adopted. (The Finch Committeerecommendation to downgrade Green OA self-archiving and finance Gold OA fee payment also set things back, in the UK at least. Disappointing because the UK had been in the worldwide lead previously, on OA.)

Repeated setbacks have also come — and are still coming — from “Gold Fever” (the mistaken notion that OA means Gold OA publishing, and that the goal of OA is not OA, but OA publishing, because Green OA is not “real” OA, or not OA enough) and from “Rights Rapture” (the mistaken impression that “Gratis OA” — free online access — is not important enough to focus on getting OA first: we must have “Libre OA” — free online access plus various re-use/re-mix-re-publication rights — at all costs, even if the cost is not having Gratis OA till we can get Libre OA). 

Gold Fever and Rights Rapture have both been holding us back from OA in exactly the same way: They have held us back from grasping the Gratis, Green OA that is already fully within reach of mandates, and kept us over-reaching instead for still more, which is still beyond our grasp. Worst of all: (1) Neither Gold OA nor Libre OA are urgently needed today (the latter perhaps only by a few specialty fields) whereas Gratis OA has been urgently needed by all for decades. (2) And if only the Gold OA and Libre OA enthusiasts could set aside their impatience long enough to let 100% Green Gratis OA prevail thanks to mandates, they would have their Gold and Libre OA more quickly and surely that way then if they keep on over-reaching for it pre-emptively now, at the expense of Green Gratis OA.

Q: There has always been a great deal of discussion (and disagreement) about Green and Gold OA. In light of recent developments (e.g. the OSTP memorandum, the RCUK OA policy, and the European Research Council guidelines on OA) what would you say are the respective roles that Green and Gold OA should be playing today?

A: Green OA should be effectively and globally mandated by institutions and funders worldwide first, rather than pre-emptively double-paying (essential subscription journals + Gold OA fees) for today’s vastly over-priced Gold (and even allowing hybrid Gold publishers to double-dip). In my view, all that pre-emptive Gold today is Fools Gold.

Only after Green OA has prevailed worldwide and thus made it possible for institutions to cancel subscriptions should (a fraction of) the institutional subscription savings be used to pay (not double-pay) for the much lower-priced, affordable, sustainable Fair Gold that universally mandating Green will have made possible:

Universal Green makes all articles OA, thereby making subscriptions unsustainable, forcing publishers to cut needless costs and downsize to managing peer review alone. No more demand for a print edition. No more demand for an online edition. All access-provision and archiving offloaded onto the global network of institutional OA repositories.

Q: What about Hybrid OA?

A: A waste of money (and time). Subscription journals price their hybrid OA in such a way as to keep their total subscription + Gold OA revenue constant (or increasing, if they double-dip). If we bought into this, it would protect them from ever having to do the downsizing that would be by far the cheapest and best for research, researchers, their institutions, their funders, and the public that funds the research.

Hybrid Gold is double-paid, over-priced, unnecessary and potentially also double-dipped Fools-Gold. It delays reaching 100% OA by holding it hostage to publishers’ current revenue streams.

You didn’t ask about publishers’ embargoes on Green OA, but it’s time that everyone understood that those embargoes (now gratuitously given new gravitas by Finch/RCUK’s folly) — far from being natural or necessary in order to prevent catastrophic collapse of journal publishing and peer review, as publishers keep pretending, in performances worthy of Chicken Little — are in reality publishers’ ploy to keep holding research-access hostage to publishers’ prevailing revenue streams for as long as possible, and to prevent online publishing from evolving naturally to the post-Green Fair Gold, that the online medium itself has made possible.

Q: How would you characterise the current state of OA, both in the UK and internationally?

A: Compared to where it might have reached since the early 1990’s, OA’s current state is needlessly, shamefully retarded, worldwide. But the transition to the optimal and inevitable seems to be accelerating, at long last.

The UK, which has led with both institutional and funder mandates since the early 2000’s, was soon joined by the EU and the US (especially the Harvard and OSTP mandates). Last year, the UK lost its lead with the Finch fiasco and the RCUK ruckus, but HEFCE/REF may now be remedying that. Australia and Canada have been coming along too. Asia has been slow to awaken, despite some hopeful signs from India, Indonesia and China.

Once the funder mandates are adopted, optimized and effectively implemented worldwide, the next really big wave will come from the slumbering giantof OA, the institutions (universities and research institutes worldwide), for they are the universal providers of allresearch output, funded and unfunded, across all disciplines. Once they are up to speed too, we will have the 100% OA we could (and should) have had two decades ago.

Q: What still needs to be done, and by whom?

A: Research fundersall need to mandate (require) that the final, refereed, accepted draft of every journal article must be deposited in the fundee’s institutional repository immediately upon acceptance for publication (whether or not access to the article is made immediately OA) as a condition for research funding. Publisher embargoes on making access to the deposit OA, if allowed at all, should not be allowed to be longer than six months — and during any OA embargo, the repository’s eprint request Button should be implemented to provide individual copies to users who request them.

Funder mandates should on no account require institution-external deposit. Metadata (or full-text) can be automatically harvested, imported or exported where needed. Institutional deposit engages institutions in monitoring and ensuring timely compliancewith funder mandates, and it also gives institutions a strong incentive to adopt complementary institutional mandates of their own, for all their research output not covered by funder mandates. Institutions and funders should also designate repository deposit as the sole mechanism for submitting publications for institutional performance review or national research assessment, as in the Liège model and the proposed HEFCE/REF model.

Q: What in your view is the single most important task that the OA movement should focus on today?

A: The creation of institutional OA repositoriesand the adoption of mandates by institutions and funders to deposit in them – the Liège model and HEFCE/REF models.

Q: What does OA have to offer the developing world?

A: Exactly the same thing it offers the developed world — maximal research access, uptake, usage, applications, impact, productivity and progress — except that the Have-Not nations need it all the more desperately.

Let us not forget, though, that there are plenty of Have-Not institutions in the developed world too — and that even the Harvards cannot afford access to all the journals their users mi      ght need; nor does the research output of Harvard authors reach all of its potential users, in either the developing or the developed world.

OA is win-win for the entire global research community.

Q: What are your expectations for OA in 2013?

A: I’ve long exhausted my expectationsacross the past two and a half decades; all I have left is the hope that the worldwide research community will at long last come to its senses and realize that 100% OA is (and has been) fully within their reach, so all they need do is grasp it.

Q: Will OA in your view be any less expensive than subscription publishing? If so, why/how? Does cost matter anyway?

A: Yes, I do think it will be much cheaper, because it will just be the cost of managing peer review. Researchers do all the rest for free already. Journals will continue to manage the peer review, but the costs of print and PDF will be gone, and the costs of access-provision and archiving will have been offloaded onto the distributed network of institutional OA repositories. (And peer review, being a service, not a product, will be provided and paid for per round of review, regardless of outcome— acceptance, revision or rejection — instead of wrapping the cost of rejected articles into the price of accepted articles.)

But I have to remind everyone that OA means Open Access. It is about refereed research access, not about journal affordability. The accessibility problem and the affordability problem, though not entirely unconnected, are not the same problem. So once we reach 100% Green OA, my OA work is done. I am confident it will soon lead to a transition to Fair-Gold OA, copyright reform, publishing reform, Libre OA and all the re-use rights users need and authors wish to provide. But OA is OA, even if universal Green does not make subscriptions unsustainable — it will just make affordability no longer a life or death issue for institutions and their researchers.

But first the research community needs to grasp what is already within its reach: The creation of institutional OA repositories and the adoption of mandates by institutions and funders to deposit in them — the Liège model and HEFCE/REF models.

———

A longer 2007 interview with Stevan Harnad can be read here.

Open Access: Where are we, what still needs to be done?

Making Open Access (OA) a reality has proved considerably more difficult and time consuming than OA advocates expected when they started out. It is now 19 years since cognitive scientist Stevan Harnadposted his Subversive Proposal calling on researchers to make their papers freely available on the Web; and it is nearly 12 years since those who took part in the Budapest Open Access Initiative (BOAI) adopted the term Open Access, and agreed on a definition.  

However, few now doubt that OA is inevitable, and a number of developments this year have served to confirm that. In February, for instance, the US Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) published a memorandumon public access in which it directed federal agencies with more than $100M in R&D expenditures to develop plans to make the published results of federally funded research freely available to the public within one year of publication.

Then last month agreementwas finally reached in Europe on the details of the next EU research programme. Amongst other things, this will require that papers arising from research the EU funds will have to be made OA.

And two weeks ago G8 science ministers issued a joint endorsementof the need to increase access to publicly-funded research.

In the meantime, OA mandates continue to be introduced by research funders around the world, including recently in Belgium, Denmark, Ireland, Iceland, and Australia.

In addition, of course, on April 1^st Research Councils UK (RCUK) introduced its highly controversial new OA policy, a policy that sparked a great deal of bad-tempered wrangling, and led to two inquires (hereand here) and the publication of a number of clarifications. Yet many continue to have serious doubts about the policy, and fear its likely consequences. Indeed, opinions on the best way forward for OA remain generally divided.

So where is OA right now, what still needs to be done, and what should be the priorities going forward?

With the aim of airing the views of a range of different people on these matters I hope to publish a series of Q&A interviews in the coming weeks, starting today with Mike Taylor, palaeontologist, computer programmer and indefatigable OA advocate.
 

Mike Taylor

Q: Why did you become an OA advocate?

A: I didn't really set out to be an advocate, just to do science. OA advocacy happened on its own, progressively, as the insanity of our current publishing traditions became increasingly apparent to me. If I had to pick one key moment, it would be reading Scott Aarronson's review of The Access Principle, which is mostly a tangential discussion of the academic-journal racket. It contained this crucial observation:

“In my view, once we've mustered a level of anger commensurate with what's happening, we can thendebate what to do next, which journals are overpriced and which aren't, what qualifies as ‘open access’, and so on. But the first step is for a critical mass of us to acknowledge that we are being had.”

This is right on target. It's why I'm so frustrated by the compromises that researchers, librarians and even funders make to the legacy publishers. Those publishers are not our partners, they're our exploiters. We don't need to negotiate with them; we don't even need to fight them. We just need to walk away.

Q: What is your definition of OA?

A: The term “open access” was given a perfectly good definition by the Budapest Open Access Initiative back when it was first coined: “free availability on the public internet, permitting any users to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full texts of these articles, crawl them for indexing, pass them as data to software, or use them for any other lawful purpose”. Immeasurable confusion has resulted from people proposing alternatives – either through ignorance or malice. Let's stick with the original and best meaning of the term.

Q: What should be the respective roles of Green and Gold OA?

A: This actually isn't an issue that I get very excited about: Open is so much more important than Green or Gold. I suppose I slightly prefer Gold in that it's better to have one single definitive version of each article; but then we could do that with Green as well if only we'd stop thinking of it as a stopgap solution while the “real” article remains behind paywalls.

So much for fundamentals. But when we come the current RCUK policy on Open Access, the specific conception of Green OA that it requires is badly degraded, to the point where it's not really open access at all. Green articles in the RCUK sense can be encumbered by non-commercial clauses, stripping them of much of their value to the taxpayer, and can be delayed by embargoes of up to two years – a truly disgraceful state of affairs given that the old RCUK policy only allowed six months.

So in the context of RCUK specifically, Green is virtually useless, and the only way to obtain actual open access is by paying for Gold. Which I don’t doubt is exactly what the publishers wanted. It's to RCUK's eternal shame that they rolled over and allowed this, after having made such a strong opening statement.

Q: What about Hybrid OA?

A: There are two very fundamental problems with hybrid OA.

First, new born-digital publishers like Hindawi, PeerJ and Ubiquity have shown that open-access papers can be published at literally an order of magnitude less than the $3000 APCs that are typical of legacy publishers offering a hybrid option. It's not clear what proportion of that $3000 is simple profiteering (though the 32–42% profit margins of the Big Foursuggest it's somewhere north of $1000), and what proportion is due to the cost of dragging the print-and-subscribe carcass around behind the OA operation; but whatever the reason, hybrid OA tends to be sensationally expensive.

The second problem is that, while most publishers offering hybrid promise a “no double dipping” policy, it's plainly impossible for anyone to verify whether this is true — and probably impossible for the publishers themselves to know. When the subscription costs paid by any given library are closely guarded secrets, and when in any case virtually every journal subscription is part of a Big Deal, is it even meaningful to talk about how much the price of any given journal is reduced to account for APCs paid? I don't think so. The only way to move forward with hybrid is by taking the legacy publishers' word on the financials. And no-one with half a brain or a few months' memory is going to do that, when they have shown over and over again that they're not trustworthy.

So, no, I am not a fan of hybrid!

Q: How would you characterise the current state of OA, both in the UK and internationally?

A: I'm constantly amazed at how much progress has been made in the last year or two, and constantly appalled at how much further there is to go. I think it's only gradually dawned on me just how many different ways the traditional academic publication game was broken – not just by publishers, but by administrators consistently rewarding the wrong things, and by researchers in every field and at every career stage finding special-pleading reasons why they can't be expected to be the ones who break free of the system.

Still, there's no question that we're much further forward than even a short time ago, and we have a lot of momentum in mostly the right direction. It's just a delight to watch the streams of new OA mandates flowing from every corner of the world. We're nowhere near where we need to be, but we're moving fast towards that destination.

Q: What still needs to be done, and by whom?

A: Most fundamentally, we have to end to the childish notion that the value of a piece of research is dependent on what journal publishes it. The San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment (DORA) is an enormous step in the right direction, and it's very heartening to see that it's been signed not only by the people you'd expect (PLOS, eLife, PeerJ) but by groups like the European Association of Science Editors and the AAAS, which publishes Science. Even Elsevier has expressed sympathy with the DORA (though without signing) which goes some way to showing how widely recognised this issue is.

The problem for the legacy publishers (and the reason none of the Big Four has signed) is that the venue-causes-importance myth is the only thing keeping them in business. Soon the world will clearly see that newer journals do an equally good editorial job, but with fewer limits and better design, without paywalls and at lower APCs. And when everyone recognises that sticking to objectively inferior established journals doesn't magically make their research better, the jig is up for their publishers. They will have to compete on quality and price, rather than continuing to enjoy a monopoly based on owning the established journals.

Once we hear the end of “I'd like to publish in Journal X, but I have to publish in Journal Y for my career”, everything will get much saner very quickly. I hope that today's new undergraduates won't even have to think about these issues.

Q: What in your view is the single most important task that the OA movement should focus on today?

A: Education. Without exception, every single researcher, librarian, university administrator, government official and funding-body executive who understands open access is in favour – how could they not be? The great barrier to universal open access is not opposition but inertia. It's true that there is a whole industry doing its best to preserve ignorance of, and promote falsehood about, open access. But this deliberate damage is insignificant compared with the sheer weight of tradition.

Maybe the best resource we have for education is Peter Suber's little book Open Access, which is itself open access, free to download as PDF, ePub, HTML or Kindle format (or to buy as a paperback). As well as laying out a persuasive case for why OA is important, it's particularly good on practical details of how various kinds of OA mandates work – just the kind of thing that busy academics and administrators need to know.

Q: What does OA have to offer the developing world?

A: Everything. A seat at the table as equals. The chance to participate in the worldwide project of research on a level playing field. A route into the academic world for impoverished but motivated students. Immediate access to crucial medical advances. A path towards research that's targeted to these nation's issues. It's almost impossible to overstate how important OA is for the developing world; for me, I think this is the single most important reason why we need OA.

Q: What are your expectations for OA in 2013?

A: Nothing very surprising: the legacy publishers will continue trying to neuter open-access mandates, with some success; but more mandates will keep coming in. The PLOS journals will continue to grow in volume and recognition, eLife will push on, PeerJ will keep growing and pushing the envelope of what a modern journal can be, and no doubt more new OA initiatives will start up.

At some point, I foresee a catastrophic collapse of barrier-based publishing, as a critical mass of researchers and administrators pulls up short and says “Wait a minute, what we've been doing makes no sense at all”. But I don't see that happening this year or next. The question then will be whether these legacy publishers can make the jump to embracing, rather than tolerating OA. My best guess is that they will do so initially, but quickly be out-competed on price and features. But again, not in 2013. This year, I just foresee consolidation. Which is important.

I do hope this year will see a decision made on how to implement the White House OSTP's OA recommendation, and I hope that it will elect to do this by expanding its own PubMed Central system rather than by acquiescing to land-grab attempts by either publishers (CHORUS) or libraries (SHARE). Of the two, libraries are obviously more aligned with the world's interests than publishers are; but since the government exists in order to represent citizens, it seems like the safest bet.

Q: Will OA in your view be any less expensive than subscription publishing? If so, why/how? Does cost matter anyway?

A: The best numbers I have suggest that OA is going to cost us about 9% of what we're currently paying in subscriptions — in other words, we'll be able to save more than nine tenths of what we're spending now. Here's how I work that out. The STM Reportfor 2012estimates $9.1 billion in subscription revenue for English-language journals, with 1.8–1.9 million articles published. That's an average of $5000 for each article. By contrast, Solomon and Björk (2012)found an average APC of $906 across 100,000 articles for which they were charged; but since only about half of all OA articles attract APCs, the true average is half that, or $450.

No doubt there is some slippage in these figures; the final result could easily be out by a factor of two in either direction. But even allowing for that, it's evident that a Gold OA economy is going cost a small fraction of the current subscription economy.

Finally, I love it that your questions end with “Does cost matter anyway?” That's the key issue. OA is cheaper, but that's not why it matters. What counts is not that it has lower cost, but that it has higher value. The real cost in all this is the opportunity cost of not having universal open access.

———

Mike Taylor is a mathematician by training, a library software engineer by profession and a vertebrate palaeontologist by avocation — so he combines a unique set of perspectives on academic publishing.

In his day-job Taylor designs and builds discovery systems for libraries, managing credentials and proxies to access subscription journals. In his spare time he researches the palaeobiology of sauropod dinosaurs, struggling to access the subscription literature that he needs for this work.

An open access advocate, Mike has written for the Guardian, Independent and Times Higher Education. He holds a Ph.D in palaeontology from the University of Portsmouth and is currently an Associate Researcher in the Department of Earth Sciences at the University of Bristol.

The second interview in this series -- with Stevan Harnad -- can be read here.