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Fytton Rowland, retired, formerly Senior Lecturer in Publishing, Department of Information Science, Loughborough University
Two recent reports have addressed the vexed issue of paying for open access, especially when it has been mandated, that is, insisted upon, by a research funding body. There are three main arguments for OA. The first, which appeals to academics, says that an author's work has more visibility and impact if it can be seen by everybody free of charge to readers. A second, which appeals to librarians, says that something has to be done about the problem of journal prices, which leads to annual cancellation exercises and to libraries thus becoming steadily less complete in the collections needed by their users. And a third says that if taxpayers have paid for research to be undertaken, then taxpayers should be able to read the results of that research without further payment. OA can be achieved in two ways - either by publication in a journal that accepts author-side payments to provide access free of charge to readers, or by deposition of the published paper in a repository that is freely available to readers.
SQW Computing undertook a study for Research Councils UK, Open Access to Research Outputs, which was reported in Times Higher Education on 30 April. RCUK's collective stance is broadly pro-OA, but the different Research Councils have adopted varying policies towards mandating OA, with only the EPSRC standing out against it completely. The SQW survey found that OA is increasing in popularity with researchers in the UK, and that most higher education institutions now have Institutional Repositories up and running. But three-quarters of academics were ignorant about the funding bodies' OA mandates, which seems to show that these are currently not very effective. SQW laid out several alternatives for RCUK to consider: stick with the (rather unclear) status quo; adopt a stronger and more uniform policy favouring repositories; and support OA publishing so that publishers could build their business models with more clarity. RCUK's response to the SQW report was to say that they would continue to strengthen their mandates to deposit copies in repositories, and would extend support for the pay-to-publish model as well.
Meanwhile, a study of the same problem has been published jointly by Universities UK and the Research Information Network, Paying for open access publication charges. The recommendations of this report have been endorsed by The Biosciences Federation - a collective body of a large number of learned societies in the biological area. The Federation's spokesperson said, "The Biosciences Federation has been aware for some time that the main stumbling block to effectively implementing open access policies is the need for a sustainable model of funding".
The report recommended that HEIs "should each set up a dedicated budget to pay author-side OA publication charges", and that funding bodies should "clarify how they will provide support for researchers to meet their open access policies, especially regarding the payment of OA publishing fees". So far as the UK Research Councils are concerned, it seems probable that they will do precisely that, as a result of their deliberations about the SQW report.
Perhaps predictably, Professor Stevan Harnad, a leading advocate of achieving OA by the repository model, is reported in the THE as opposing the idea that Research Council funds should be used to cover publishers' author-side charges, while other OA advocates - including myself - have been calling for this to be permitted by the Research Councils for many years. It was perhaps inevitable that a body representing many learned society publishers would emphasise the OA publishing model over the repository one.
There are indeed good arguments for seeking a stable financial future for learned societies and other not-for-profit scholarly publishers. Learned societies' financial support to UK academia was recently quantified in the results of a Biosciences Federation survey Learned Societies and open access. "The 17 societies surveyed made direct contributions to UK academia of £ 3.9M, whilst taking only £ 1.8M in journal subscriptions, a net direct contribution of £ 2.1M."
The Biosciences Federation's current position does represent progress - from an OA advocate's perspective - from the earlier position taken by some learned society publishers, which was to ally themselves with the for-profit publishers in outright opposition to OA. The increased support for OA found among academics by SQW Computing seems to be leading to slow but steady progress towards some sort of grudging consensus between academics, research funders, publishers and librarians that OA to scholarly research publications is going to have to be provided somehow.
(See also the Pfizer BioMed Central agreement reported in this issue of Serial-eNews.)
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