Saving scholarly publishing, and saving civilization.

In 16 minutes.

The full text, and the YouTube videos, are at:

http://www.nap.edu/staff/mjensen/scarcity.html

or you can watch Part I (missing my preface, that’s available in the full text):

and Part II:

A few segments from the text:

The realities I see ahead of us, in the next ten to fifteen years, militate for some radical strategic choices, in the next three years.

I believe that we must shift our business models — publicly, transparently, intentionally, thoughtfully, but radically — to a digital one, with open access as the backbone of scholarly publishing. We must do this to survive a tremendously turbulent next decade, and to ensure that our mission, and its survival, continues to be fulfilled.

…

But CO2 does something much worse. While we bicker with global-warming deniers, the ocean is getting more acidic. Excess CO2 plus ocean produces carbonic acid. Ocean acidification is a clear and present danger. A slight rise in acidity dramatically affects calcium-carbonate-based lifeforms, like most plankton, shellfish, and coral, the cornerstones of the ocean biosphere.

If humans do not drastically reduce our CO2 output in the next ten years, our rich, biodiverse ocean will become an acidic, jellyfish- and algae-filled cesspool, in our lifetimes.

If, over the next decade, humans continue doing what we have done for the last fifty years, then we will construct our own hell, and our grandchildren will curse our names.

…

Within the context of a world in crisis, we *must* demonstrate that we’re radically rethinking our relationship to the future. We must demonstrate that we are part of the solution, not part of the problem. We must seize initiative now, and start making changes as fast as we can.

Open access + digital publishing will help get us to a sustainable world, and keep us in the mix.

Imagine, in five years, a different income stream where 50% of your income comes from some kind of value-added digital sales, and 25% from print-on-demand, and 25% through institutional support of fixed costs. Dissemination and societal impact will increase 50x, because the material is openly available and promoted online.

With that kind of documented dissemination of scholarly value and University brand, to the broadest public, no dean would be motivated to cut the support that enables scholarship to thrive online. And, our CO2 production will be radically decreased.

The presentation was controversial, and raised both some hackles and some hair-on-the-back-of-the-neck. Far more congratulated me than condemned my analysis — and many said they were rethinking strategy in light of what I showed them.

It was risky, but knowing what I’ve learned over the last two years doing the Apocadocs project, it was a risk I needed to take. Time’s a-wasting.

I’ve been interested to see the  responses, and this post can become a response locale — I’m linking back here from the fulltext, in hopes that some discussion can ensue.

I have dusted off that proposal and reproduce it here, with a bit of editing for context-building. An interesting (to me) aspect of the original post was that it garnered a fair number of offline inquiries, all from commercial publishers. This was despite the fact that the post clearly stated that there was nothing in the proposal for commercial ventures. I interpret this response to indicate that publishers are studying all new business models for academic materials and are determined to come to the dance even when they are not invited.

Almost Open Access begins with institutional repositories, which align themselves, understandably, with their parent institutions. Since most institutions at least in part serve undergraduates, for whom the goal of creating “the well-rounded person” has not been entirely abandoned, IRs set out to cover everything–to put the universe into the university. Let’s call this the vertical axis: the self-contained institution, with the IR that reflects the institution’s goals and constituencies. Researchers, on the other hand, tend to align themselves with other researchers in their fields. The expert on the use of microalgae for CO2 mitigation happens to reside at Tulane, but his or her intellectual colleagues may sit at the University of Hawaii or in Tokyo. Research thus is horizontal, straddling multiple institutions. This is the world of professional societies and academic fields (which are reflected in journals publishing). There is a tension here: libraries and IRs are being asked to face in two directions, vertically and horizontally, straining resources.

Not surprisingly, the actual use of IRs is less than many had hoped for, and much of the use is for such things as students’ papers. Nothing wrong with that, but it is not in keeping with the often-declared goal of “capturing the intellectual output of the university.” What I propose is that in addition to IRs (which ultimately are simply going to be extensions of course-management systems, so why not just hand off this function to Blackboard and be done with it?), libraries organize disciplinary repositories or DRs. These would be horizontal, not vertical, and reflect the actual research activities of the global intellectual community.

These DRs can be assembled on a consortial basis, with institutions sharing access to DRs and each institution taking charge–exclusive charge, so as to avoid redundancy–of a certain number of topics. How to assign who does what will not be easy, but it simply makes no sense for there to be competing DRs for some segment of nanotechnology or Keats research. One would expect that Harvard and the University of Chicago would do more than Middlesex Community College or an emerging institution in the developing world, but there is a case to be made for every institution to do something. Universities can save a great deal of money by recognizing that in some cases, there is no need to be universal.

How would this work? Progressively, I would hope. The larger institutions would take over the curation of more disciplines, but even the smallest would have to contribute something in order to get access to all the rest. The definitive DR on stem-cell research may be curated at John Hopkins and the history of Silicon Valley at San Jose State–not really comparable, to be sure–but Hopkins and SJS would each have access to the other’s DR. To each according to his means. To join the consortium, an institution would have to propose to the governing board what DRs the prospective member plans to sponsor and curate. The stern gaze of the board would prevent free riders or “cheap riders”: Carry your weight in curation or be an outcast.

As for independent scholars without institutional affiliation, I propose that they would gain access by doing the equivalent of purchasing a library card from a member institution. For $50 you get everything.

This plan solves a number of problems. It aligns repositories with the research community–horizontally, in DRs. It saves money by negating the need for institutions to try to cover everything, a pointless and unnecessary endeavor in the world of the Internet. For those uncomfortable with commercial organizations operating within the academic community, it provides a purely consortial arrangement among similar not-for-profits. It is progressive, enabling the participation of Third World scholars on the same level of access as their lucky counterparts in Oxford and Palo Alto. It provides a good ROI for major institutions, and a fabulous ROI for small ones. It eliminates the free-rider problem by mandating some level of curation, however small (but scaled to an institution’s resources), and thus provides an incentive for all institutions to get involved. And it captures the output of academic institutions in such a way as to provide significant incentives for researchers to participate (which is the problem with IRs: little researcher participation).

Open Access purists will note that this plan falls short of full OA. That is correct: this is Almost Open Access, as it requires institutional affiliation (which you can get for the cost of a library card). The virtue of AOA as opposed to OA is that AOA is sufficiently suasive to ensure economic commitment and participation. Traditional publishers (for whom there is absolutely nothing in this plan) will remark that AOA is what they have advocated all along. That is also correct. But publishers will never grow comfortable with pure OA, as their business training will not permit them to expend 100% of their effort to satisfy 1% of demand.

But they are not needed for this plan, so their comfort is besides the point.

I am a great admirer of Krugman, but I don’t think this column on publishing is as astute as his comments on, say, health care and Social Security.

What Krugman doesn’t reflect on is “the trouble with free.” That trouble is precisely what John Perry Barlow (who apparently gave the idea to Esther Dyson) saw from the other end of the telescope: that rather than selling copyrighted works, many authors and artists will use their work to promote other things. The classic example is tickets to Grateful Dead concerts. My concern is that not all content should be promotional. It will affect the nature, and the integrity, of the content.

Let’s be clear that I am not saying that all free content is corrupt, nor am I opposed to free content strategies, nor, for that matter, do I have any real gripes with advertising, promotion, or market capitalism. I do, however, like to know what a person’s agenda is.

A trip years ago to Epcot Center was chilling: an entire park dedicated to promote the images of corporations and governments. Thus the China pavilion included a video noting (ahem) that China extended from Manchuria to . . . Tibet. Well, I guess that’s the price you pay for going to the China pavilion: you hear the Chinese version of the history of Tibet.

For some content, the mechanisms of the marketplace can support editorial integrity. This is the principle behind Consumer Reports. For this category of content, the contract is, You pay for content on its own terms, not because you are being nudged to purchase something else. There is a virtue to this, though this implied contract does not apply to all publications.

Thus, the trouble with free: content that is free is free of everything except the agenda of the sponsor. In the world of politics, we call this propaganda.

]]> http://pubfrontier.com/2008/06/08/the-trouble-with-free/feed/ 1 http://pubfrontier.com/2008/05/25/provostial-publishing/ http://pubfrontier.com/2008/05/25/provostial-publishing/#comments Mon, 26 May 2008 04:11:10 +0000 Joseph J. Esposito http://pubfrontier.com/?p=39 On one side we have user-generated content (UGC), exemplified by Wikipedia; on the other we have traditional publishing, which is characterized by an editor or series of editors (acquiring editor, developmental editor, copy editor, production editor), who review submitted material and make judgments as to its shape, argument, and suitability for publication. UGC is on the rise and is now a distinguishing aspect of the consumer Internet, with such busy sites as FaceBook, MySpace, Digg, YouTube, and many others benefiting from it. Traditional publishing, on the other hand (perhaps we should call it “editorial publishing”), has been having a harder time in the digital age. The New York Times gets scooped by a blogger somewhere, Encyclopaedia Britannica gets corrected by a band of anonymous enthusiasts, and network television is increasingly dependent on YouTube for promotional support.

What do you look at online? Speaking for myself, my surfing day is divided between the two wings of Internet content, almost in a parody of CNN’s old Crossfire show: sites such as that of The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal (on the Right), but also sites such as Slashdot.org and Publishing 2.0 (on the Left). Still and all, these choices seem too stark, out of touch with the reality of how content gets created and brought to our attention. Unlike computers, the world of content (and the society that creates it) is not binary. The choice between UGC and editorial publishing is not a real one.

One would be hard pressed to find a traditional publishing form that is not experimenting in some way with the tools of what has become known as Web 2.0. Many old-line newspapers now sport an expanded stable of columnists, but they are called bloggers and appear online exclusively. Returning to The New York Times, I was surprised to see myself now waiting as eagerly for new posts by blogger Stanley Fish as I have long waited for the columns of Thomas Friedman, Paul Krugman, and David Brooks. Stories now routinely come with a “comments” section, which typically undergoes a wee bit of moderation to weed out commercial messages, pornography, and overly exuberant spirits. Traditional book publishers now post sections, and in some instances the entire text, of their publications online to stimulate book purchases; not unusually, these product samples are accompanied by user comments. As Bob Stein of the Institute for the Future of the Book likes to point out, content inevitably will be embedded in a conversation, for which the online medium has clear advantages over print. The original publication may often be an instance of editorial publishing, but the commentary is likely to be UGC. The binary split is disappearing; just about everything now is a hybrid.

Over on the UGC side, there are a great number of techniques to refine the raw output of the solitary user. Online communities vote on the merits of a particular post almost as though content were running for office. To get a comment to the top of the pile at Digg is a challenge. It helps to have been around a bit and to know how the game is played. On Wikipedia every new contribution goes through a series of checks, which attempt to weed out fraud, self-interest, simple knuckleheadedness, and pranks. It is probably no longer enough to say that content may be user-generated; increasingly it is community-refined.

Of particular interest to me is what I will call “membership publishing,” an umbrella term for the phenomenon of “provostial publishing,” which serves as the title of this post. We can imagine a club or community that seeks to qualify its members. Not everyone gets into the Rotary Club or the Boy Scouts; very few have a chance to become members of elite institutions such as Amherst or Cornell. A membership community has a gatekeeping committee and attempts to ensure that all who are invited to join are distinguished representatives. In the academic community (the publishing segment that most interests me) the iconic gatekeeper is the provost, among whose many tasks is the appointment of faculty. While there are always some who will challenge a provost’s decisions, the merits of the faculty speak for the institution as a whole. Insofar as the faculty serves as authors, their publications represent the provost’s choices.

With the growth of institutional repositories, which aim to collect the output of research faculty, a new model of publishing is emerging. It would be wrong to think of the output of research faculty in the same way that we think of the comments on Digg or even in Wikipedia. Anyone can contribute to Digg, but very, very few can place a document into the repository at MIT. Research faculty are experts; some of the contributors to Wikipedia may be experts as well, but there is no gatekeeper, no provost, to vouch for them. So this is UGC, but it is expert UGC.

What it is not, except in special instances, is an aspect of editorial publishing. Faculty may deposit preprints, working papers, conference presentations, whatever into an institutional repository, but it is entirely possible that no editor has reviewed the material first. (There are also instances where the faculty deposits papers after they have gone through traditional peer review by a journal or book publisher, so-called Gold Open Access publishing.) If the faculty is a community of experts, their output is likely to be superior to that of anyone with an opinion and a keyboard. On the other hand, if the faculty deposits material that has not gone through traditional editorial procedures, then their work has not had the benefit of those procedures–assuming, of course, that one values the work of editors and peer review, as most members of the academic community do.

Provostial publishing, then, is publishing where a gatekeeper, in this case the provost, chooses the authors but does not choose the works. Traditional editorial publishing is where an editor chooses the work. In UGC the choice of the author is made by the author him or herself–but this is not much of a choice, as we all believe our own thoughts are worth something. The more important choice for UGC is one of venue: Do I post this to my Facebook friends? to Digg? to Slashdot? to my blog?

We are likely to see a huge surge in provostial publishing in the years ahead. Part of this is simply a function of the growth in research: all that research will yield outputs. Another part is the increase in the number and sophistication of institutional repositories and also the policies that govern them, which in some instances include mandates (by the provost’s office, of course) for faculty to deposit papers. More and more publications will bear the brand not of traditional publishers (Elsevier, Wiley, Random House) but of parent institutions (Harvard, Princeton, the University of Chicago). These brands will come to compete in new ways in the marketplace, likely crowding out brands of lesser distinction.

Time past long past, in the mid-90s, I held the lucky position of being the first electronic publisher at a major university press, holding the unlucky responsibility of bridging the divide between the digitizing journals division, and the not-yet-digital books division.

While not as extreme as Snow’s “two cultures” of sciences and humanities, the distinctions between the two cultures of books and journals became clear, as I learned the two enterprises. (Sometime later I’ll address the distinctions between library culture vs. publisher culture, and between technologist culture vs. library vs. publisher culture).

What I learned, in short, and necessarily bluntly:

Journals are about throughput. Books are about craftsmanship.

This is not to demean either publishing variant — they both serve key scholarly needs. But in much of the discussions on these topics, too often “open access” is thought to mean the same thing for every kind of document. Non-publishers in particular often presume that the same rules apply to encyclopedias as apply to monographs, as apply to journal articles. But in publishing, at least, it’s not the case.

Every book is unique. At that time they were each treated uniquely: in editorial treatment, in type and cover design, in marketing plan, in discount schedule, in presumed audience. Each book was a child, nurtured in its embryonic and infant stages, eventually dressed up really nicely as a toddler, and sent out into the world once grown-up.

The acquiring editor had a vested parental interest in ensuring that this special, wonderful thing would get the life it deserved. He or she pressured the Marketing department for appropriate promotion. She or he pressured Production to make sure it was designed appropriately for the content. It was a unique, special, rich, complex, discipline-affecting work of staggering value, at least within a tiny slice of academia. The editors were proud to have acquired it. They wanted to reach the people who would be moved by it. As a consequence, each book was a polished gem.

Journals, however, were all about throughput, driven by the schedule of subscription: every quarter, or every month, the articles were bullied out of editors, who bullied their writers and their reviewers for material. And the articles came through the pipe.

Each article needed to be fit into the specific journal’s style, look, and feel, and turned into something that could be distributed to subscribers and libraries. There are no “acquiring editors” on most small-market, scholarly journals. Each article is one of ten, or twenty, in the issue. It’s not an act of craft — it’s an act of meta-craft. Each article is a small part of what will, overall, improve or sustain the value of the journal.

These two cultures may explain why, at least to my mind, journals were among the first to “go digital.” It made eminent sense: it’s easier to “digitize” the throughput process than the nurturance process.

Journals were already template-based (essentially, CSS-ready). Journals publishers were already greatly focused on automating processes. Economies of scale could make journals production and throughput much more efficient. It also meant that the throughput process could be undertaken by libraries, using smart software (as seen by how many libraries are becoming “journals publishers”).

But I’m not so sure that template-based automated publishing makes sense for book-length scholarly monographs, and other book-length works. Perhaps that’s one of the reasons that e-book standards have been so slow to catch on, in the book publishing industry.

We book publishers each think that we know what is right for “our kind of publication” — each of which is unique, special, and unmatched. We want what is right, in terms of marketing, and promotion, and audience, and significance, for that special child.

Is that so wrong? I don’t think so — in fact, I think it’s a powerful strength we don’t want to lose, as we march toward digital universality.

But it’s also a powerful constraint.

Libraries, who are also about throughput (and organization) of products, are an ideal partner for journals production. I’m not so sanguine about libraries being ideal partners for production of the “special.” They didn’t evolve that way, nor are they optimally staffed for the sort of specific promotion, marketing, and outreach required for each unique book-length publication.

How publishers make things “open access” depends on technical infrastructure, and publication content types, and available skill sets and online savvy. But it also depends on the nature of the product.

That every book-length monograph deserves special treatment is open for debate; that some of them do, is beyond discussion. How our academic culture makes that happen — how the funding, the staffing, the nurturance is enacted — may depend on how we understand the processes and purposes of publishing.

Recently, the University of Pittsburgh Press has announced that it is working to make its entire back catalog available online, free of charge, through Pitt’s University Library System (ULS). New titles will be added to UPP Digital Editions, part of ULS’s D-Scribe program, after the books have been in print for two years.

The reason this is extraordinary is that it violates the basic economic principle of book publishing, namely, you lose money on frontlist and make money (sometimes) on the backlist. Pittsburgh’s program will over time (it won’t happen overnight) erode backlist sales, reduce the Press’s income, and thus make it more difficult for the Press to underwrite new books. (I don’t know the specifics of the Press’s financial situation, but if it is like most other university presses, part of its operations are subsidized by its parent institution. Having said that, revenue from book sales, especially of the backlist, is surely part of its overall economic picture.)

Backlist sales are the bedrock of book publishing economics, and they are tied to an important corollary: Good books backlist, bad books disappear. (Yes, the term “backlist” is a verb as well as a noun. Publishers are not always the most zealous guardians of the language.) It may be that Pittsburgh is not concerned about the erosion of backlist sales because they don’t have any. If so, then what appears on the surface to be an open access initiative may in fact be the outcome of undistinguished editorial judgment.

There is a fundamental difference between book sales and the subscription sales of academic journals. Most revenue for journals are for current issues. Thus many journal publishers now make their backlists or backfiles, as they are called, open access after six months or one year; sometimes this form of open access is mandated by funding agencies. The revenue loss to such journal publishers is likely to be negligible. The economics of book publishing and journal publishing are precisely the reverse of one another. It would make more sense for a book publisher to post new books for free online for six months and then charge for them thereafter. (The ratio of frontlist to backlist sales varies by publisher, subject category, author, and publishing segment.)

This is not to say that open access cannot be used to help to sell books. One of the real innovators in this regard is a contributor to the Publishing Frontier blog, Michael Jensen of National Academies Press. NAP has done extensive testing of the relationship between open access material and the sale of books, whether in print or digital form. Shrewd publishers can and should learn from NAP. I advise all my clients to test various forms of open access as a form of product sampling. Unfortunately, there is no evidence that Pittsburgh has put into place the various marketing techniques that have enabled NAP to experiment with open access and still manage its operation responsibly.

The AAUP uses the word “innovation” in its story about Pittsburgh. Wrong word, I believe. Somewhat paradoxically, the Press’s initiative is a bet that digital media don’t matter. I believe the opposite, that digital media matter very much and that the flirtation with hybrid models that marry print to electronics is a useful but transitory phase; in the end (I won’t predict when that will be) all publishing will be digital. Pittsburgh is counting on print and electronics occupying parallel universes forever, where one medium does not effect the other (except, perhaps, positively, but this is wishful thinking). This is myopia, not innovation.

The University of Pittsburgh Press has started down the slippery slope. While it may receive some support from its parent now, over time that support will grow until all the costs for the Press must be covered by the parent. The parent may then decide, as many universities have already determined, that the support for the Press is too great. Support gets cut back, the number of books published then drops, and scholars everywhere lament the fact that there are fewer and fewer outlets for their work. No one should be surprised when commercial publishers increase their presence in academic publishing, picking off the most profitable programs. This is not a way to build a university press, nor is it a harbinger of a bright future for scholarly communications. Open access is not an innovation but one aspect of a complex marketing program. I wish the University of Pittsburgh Press had such a program in place.

What Doctorow doesn’t say, however, is that if the Kindle or its ilk (meaning useful ebook devices) becomes successful, Doctorow is going to have to come up with a new marketing trick.

Some background is in order. As a founding contributor of Boing Boing, frequent online poster, and established author of science fiction, Doctorow is something of an Internet celebrity. He is also a frequent commentator on that all-absorbing subject, How the Web is Intended to Work. And one way it works, he says, using his own fiction-writing as an example, is as a promotional medium for hardcopy books. Doctorow was among the first to experiment putting the entire text of a book online for people to sample, with the aim of then having that sampling drive the sale of hardcopy. It works for him; his sales are up. And, I should add, for every single example of similar online product sampling I have been able to study, it has worked as well. Free text on the Internet sells hardcopy books. There may be exceptions to this among reference titles (e.g., cookbooks, dictionaries), where viewing a short entry online may sate a reader, but generally, Doctorow is onto something, and he has personally profited from it.

Two important limitations to this marketing tactic, however. Since few current book-length works are available online at no cost, Doctorow’s free books are something of a novelty. If everyone took Doctorow’s advice and made the full texts of books available for free online, however, it would require greater and greater effort to call attention to individual titles: free online texts may drive hardcopy sales, but you have to find the online texts first. Thus if everyone followed Doctorow’s lead, few or none would prosper. Doctorow might have to go back to trying to get an appearance on Oprah.

More fundamentally, however, the great gamble that Doctorow is making is that the reading of a digital text will always be inferior to the reading of hardcopy. Print is better than digital formats for most people, especially those who read what have come to be called “long-form works,” which is supposed to call to mind something that looks like and is structured like a novel, meaning 200-1,000 pages long and organized more or less linearly. Sample a longish book online, sure, but read it all the way through? Not for most of us. Thus Doctorow’s business model: post texts in a “disergonomic” manner online and invite readers to get the better format through Amazon or your local bookstore.

Kindle and the Sony reader and some other devices, not to mention the many on their way, are making a different bargain, however: they propose that reading a digital text could be as satisfying as reading hardcopy; and on top of that, you get all the bells and whistles (search, bookmarking, etc.) that are peculiar to digital forms. Now we post the full text of a book online for free. Do we read it through a browser? Probably not. Instead we download it to our ebook device, where the text is displayed in a highly satisfying manner.

Thus, as ebooks get better (and Kindle is very good, if not what many observers were hoping for) the opportunity to use online texts to market hardcopy versions of the same books disappears. Doctorow needs a new marketing plan; he is battling with the giant behemoth of Amazon, IT innovator and marketer extraordinaire.

There is an intriguing implication here. Free text (also called Open Access content) is becoming more plentiful for a number of reasons, and one of them is the canny ability of marketers (Doctorow included) to begin to use OA as a marketing tool for other formats or services. Widespread use of ebooks may thus put downward pressure on the growth of OA texts, as the open content may come to be viewed as cannibalizing sales rather than promoting them.

Doctorow may or may not be aware that if many or most writers and publishers followed his lead, he might have to find another way to earn a living. It is a curious position to be in: To have the distinction of being a leader, but having a personal interest in having no one follow.

But I, at any rate, wish to follow, at least part of the distance. The noise Doctorow has made about himself and the virtues of free online texts has made me want to read one of his science fiction novels. So I am now browsing the used bookstores near my home. Buying a used copy is an article of faith, as it would be inappropriate for any money to find its way back to the author or publisher. Free means free. Cory Doctorow taught me this.

It’s really time we put some science into science publishing.

There is a lot that is right (meaning well-argued, credible, and substantiated) about OA, but here is a partial list of what is not. For starters, there is the repeated insistence that librarians are stupid. The form this assertion takes is to argue that librarians will continue to pay for something that they can get for free. Yes, you heard that right. A professional librarian, working for a research university, is responsible for purchasing academic journals. Now let us imagine that some of those journals are available at no cost to that library or any other, but the librarian, knowing full well that there is no longer a need to pay for the publications, continues to write checks to the publishers. How did we reach this preposterous conclusion? Because we note that the “evidence” (Orwell would love this) doesn’t show any cancellations of journals that currently have at least a partial OA policy. What is ignored here is the simple fact that it is too soon to say. OA is a new thing, it is rarely implemented across the board for any publication, and the services that provide it are not always deemed to be reliable (e.g., experimental institutional repositories), at least not yet. Apparently the point of this argument is to lull publishers into a false sense of security (“Make your publications OA and nothing bad will happen”), so it is not only librarians who are deemed to be stupid but publishers as well.

It’s not enough that librarians are stupid, but with similar logic it has been concluded that authors are mostly law-abiding. (Who would have thought otherwise?) This nutty argument is harder to untangle. It’s a demonstrable fact that most authors of research publications have not shown much interest in OA. This could change, but it hasn’t to date. (And, I hasten to add, that “most” is not the same thing as “all.”) There is clear evidence here: Many researchers work at institutions that provide free OA repository services (DSpace is the best known, Digital Commons is the most used), but only a fraction of the institutions’ output has been deposited into these repositories. One way to change that would be–surprise!–to have the senior administration of these institutions mandate that faculty deposit papers with OA services. Thus in a survey conducted by Alma Swan et al, it was found that 81% of researchers say that they would comply with mandates. Now, what does this prove exactly? More than 81% of Americans comply for the most part with the U.S. Tax Code, but that is hardly indicative of support for the current administration or the way tax monies are spent. What it does reveal is a healthy respect for the punitive powers of The Man. In OA circles, however, a forecast compliance with a mandate is viewed as the equivalent of democratic support.

A more complicated item, and one that is more susceptible to reasoned argument, is what is called the Open Access Advantage. No, this is not a frequent flier program but the notion that authors who work in OA formats are more likely to be cited than authors who work in proprietary or “toll-access” media. Superficially, this may appear to make sense; after all, if everyone can read an OA article, surely it has a better chance of getting cited than an article that has more limited distribution by virtue of the constraints imposed by subscription barriers. On the other hand, an article in the toll-access Lancet is much more likely to be cited than an article deposited in a no-name repository, with only Google keyword searching enabling the poor, already overburdened reader. Once again we find Alma Swan behind this.

The problem with the alleged Open Access Advantage is, first, it entirely ignores the overall marketing context of any particular work. The fact is that some OA venues are brilliantly marketed; I would point to the Public Library of Science in particular. But marketing is not a constant; it varies journal by journal, issue by issue, and article by article. Swan’s analysis does not take these variables into account.

More fundamentally, though, we have here the common but huge mistake of many people who have not been thinking about the dynamics of the Internet for a long time, and that is the unstated belief in “once and for all computing.” This paradigm–once and for all–assumes that the Internet has arrived, that its current state pretty much resembles its future state. (A corollary to this error is the assumption that we control the network, when in fact, for better or worse, the network is largely and increasingly independent, with its own properties, almost an emergent life form.) Better to think of the current stage of the Internet (switching metaphors) as the second inning of a nine-inning ballgame. Before this game is over, entirely new and as-yet undreamed-of ways to call attention to content on the Internet will arise, and whatever advantage OA may hold today (in some circumstances for some articles) will be handed off to other publishing forms–which may, in time, hand them back to OA. The wheel goes ’round; where it stops, nobody knows.

Advocates of toll-access or traditional publishing should take no comfort from this. While many of the arguments for OA are offered in bad faith or with the best of intentions but the worst of reasoning, there is one stubborn fact about the Internet and OA, and that is that it is very, very easy for someone to connect to the Internet and upload content. OA is thus at a minimum an inevitable and unstoppable phenomenon. The justifications for it may be doubtful, but the fact of it is indisputable.

I was somewhat startled, however, to stumble upon this comment in support of SCOAP3, which appeared on the popular liblicense listserv:

Of course SCOAP3 would also benefit non-contributing institutions and the general public.

As a member of the general public, I want to thank the people and institutions behind SCOAP3 for working to make research articles in high energy physics available to me. I look forward to similar initiatives from the brain surgeons and rocket scientists.