Update on the OA discussion at the U of California

Mengfei Chen, Journals: The Cost of Free Access, New University, April 20, 2009.  This excerpt picks up after Chen discusses the MIT OA policy and rising journal prices:  

...[Rising journal prices have], according to Lorelei Tanji, [the University of California at Irvine's] Assistant University Librarian for Collections, made it increasingly difficult for libraries to afford the journals that researchers and student use. Libraries around the United States, including the UCs, have been forced to cut the less-used titles in their collection.

Tanji pointed out that part of the problem is that authors are often unknowledgeable about their rights.

"[Often] people are so focused on publishing that they don't always read what they are signing. Sometimes authors are also afraid to change the [release] form because they are worried of not being published. So they may just sign away their rights," Tanji said.

In the past, this meant that some researchers would sign an agreement only to find out later that they couldn't freely use the material in their classrooms or post it onto online repositories.

However, Tanji believes that things have changed in publishing. Many publishers are now willing to amend their agreements to allow authors much more control over their work.

John Tagler is the former vice president of Elsevier....After 30 years at Elsevier, Tagler left the publisher to serve as vice president and executive director of the Association of American Publishers Professional and Scholarly Publishing Division. He agreed with Tanji's assessment that publishers are now more willing to accommodate authors.

However, Tagler refused to answer specific questions about Elsevier, whose profits rose by about 30 percent last year. Instead, he insisted that it is impossible to make general statements about journal publishers because not all publishers are the same....

Tagler questioned whether MIT's policy is really an open-access policy.

"The term is bandied around too often. Open Access is a model, MIT's policy is a repository," Tagler said.

According to Tagler, supporters of open access are seduced by the concept, but most have not thought it through.

Tagler insisted that advocates of open access forget that publishers fulfill the basic function of validation and certification. They set up the infrastructure and the peer review panels that assure the public's trust in research results.

Tagler explained the reason behind rising prices as being that the number of journals has increased.

There are more articles, including many that don't make it to publication, that need to be put through the review process. He also blames the financial difficulty faced by many libraries on their stagnant budgets.

However, in a study published on First Monday, a peer-reviewed open-access Internet journal published by the University of Illinois, author Roger Clarke found that for-profit publishing is inherently more expensive than their counterparts.

"Their much greater investment in branding, customer relationship management and content protection [makes them expensive]," Clarke said.

Few proponents of open access, including Tanji and Stephen Bondy, UCI's representative on the UC Committee on Libraries and Scholarly Communication, believe that open-access journals can or even should realistically replace traditional publishers....

The last system-wide effort to adopt an open access policy at the University of California happened in 2007. The proposed policy was similar to the one adopted by MIT. After going through eight draft forms, the policy was abandoned due to academic senate concerns. Many members of the academic senate, which represents the interests of UC faculty, supported the principle of the policy but were concerned over the implementation. Eventually, UCI, along with several other UCs, adopted a non-binding Joint Resolution on Scholarly Communication and Faculty Copyrights....

An Academic Senate report on the proposed system-wide policy documents concerns from UCI, UC Santa Barbara and the Committee on Planning Budget over possible delays in publication and the possibility of fewer publishing options and opportunities. Another major concern was that the opt-out provision would be too burdensome for the author to use.

Daniel Greenstein, the vice provost of Strategic Academic Planning, Programs and Coordination...acknowledged that more could have been done to answer faculty concerns. He pointed out that other institutions that have adopted some sort of open access policy, including MIT and departments at Stanford and Harvard, were much smaller than the UCs. They have fewer people to convince.

Abelson, the MIT professor, put it more bluntly.

"Like anything else [adopting open access policy]," Abelson said, "faculty live somewhere in the stone age … they have tunnel vision and it takes strong leadership to get them to do anything."

Greenstein believes that the UCs will get another chance to consider a binding open access policy in the near future....

Comments

• "Tagler questioned whether MIT's policy is really an open-access policy.  'The term is bandied around too often. Open Access is a model, MIT's policy is a repository,' Tagler said."  This is confused and confusing.  Of course MIT has adopted an OA policy.  It's a real policy as opposed to a mere model.  It's a policy about OA as opposed to something else.  Is it possible that Tagler believes that OA only pertains to journals, and not to repositories?  Could he really be the former VP of Elsevier and current VP of the AAP/PSP and not understand that green OA is OA?  (Elsevier and AAP/PSP both lobby against the green OA mandate at the NIH precisely because it delivers OA.)  In any case, it makes no sense to say that "MIT's policy is a repository," especially after raising expectations about heightened precision.  Policies are not repositories and repositories are not policies.  The MIT policy is to deposit in a repository, and the policy, the deposits, and the repository all have the purpose of providing OA.
• "According to Tagler, supporters of open access are seduced by the concept, but most have not thought it through.  Tagler insisted that advocates of open access forget that publishers fulfill the basic function of validation and certification. They set up the infrastructure and the peer review panels that assure the public's trust in research results."  This is wishful thinking.  I don't know a single OA supporter who has forgotten that publishers facilitate peer review.  But I know many OA critics, especially in the publishing lobby, who have forgotten that OA journals are peer-reviewed too, and that support for peer review does not entail opposition to OA.  If any of them wants to think it through, I can recommend my 2007 article analyzing the frequent but unargued publisher assertions that OA will undermine peer review.
• "After going through eight draft forms, the [draft University of California OA] policy was abandoned due to academic senate concerns."  I don't believe this has been reported in public before.  The last we'd heard, UC was inspired by the Harvard OA mandate to keep working to muster system-wide consensus on its draft policy.  But at least "Greenstein believes that the UCs will get another chance to consider a binding open access policy in the near future...."