Europeans urged to plan carefully, work together to achieve open access
DOI: 10.1063/PT.5.8001
Christoph Kratky, professor of structural biology at the University of Graz, Austria, served as president of the Austrian Science Fund from 2005 to 2013. Commenting in the 29 August issue of Nature, he predicts that full conversion to open access (OA) to research publications will take years, maybe decades—and he emphasizes that delay will make conversion more expensive.
He summarizes progress, citing, for example, the Public Library of Science and BioMed Central, and declaring that “disciplines such as high-energy physics have set their sights on moving to OA.” Nevertheless, he cautions that in Europe, “a confusing patchwork” of policies and practices has resulted from “a worrying imbalance ... between the efforts of research funders (including organizations that perform research), which can act only at a local level, and big publishing houses, which act globally.”
Kratky sees green OA, in which researchers archive papers in publicly accessible ways, as possibly “workable ... at least in the short term,” but also as a confusing “mess” involving the “controversial question of whether [it] can work as a cheap way to force reluctant publishers to adopt OA.” He continues:
Some argue that it will succeed, because libraries will cancel subscriptions as soon as enough self-archived articles are available. Others point out that archiving often happens only after an agreed embargo period—during which the only way to access the work is to pay the journal—and they say that subscriptions will endure. After all, who wants to settle for last week’s newspapers? If publishers find it economically sustainable to establish a green world of subscription journals with embargo periods of six months or more, this road would turn out to be a dead end and thus fail to promote the desired transition to full OA.
Kratky stipulates that the “quality control imposed by publishers helps to ensure the integrity of the scholarly system” and declares that this “warrants financial compensation.” Yet in two places, the article conflates the raw results of research with the finished products and services of scientific publishers: The editors’ subhead mentions “making research freely available” through OA, and Kratky mentions the principle that “the public that funds the research should have free access to the results.” He pronounces the “current system of subscription journals ... a classic example of a dysfunctional market, leading to high costs for the mostly publicly funded scholarly system,” and adds: “It is naive to expect that publishers might be persuaded to exchange a profitable business model for a potentially less profitable one.”
Near the end, he offers prescriptions for all that he has diagnosed:
Those who push for full OA must take firmer steps, and Europe should take the lead. Funding bodies should agree through their umbrella organizations on clear and uniform rules for the self-archiving of publications for both authors and users, with the support of appropriate legislation by the European Commission. Embargo periods of 6 to 12 months should be allowed, but only for the first few years.
Non-profit publishers need funds to move their high-ranking journals—which offer better value for money than commercial rivals—to OA. Funders should help to establish new, non-commercial academic publication models, which could be hosted by institutions such as universities, research organizations and learned societies. This strategy could contribute to revitalizing the market, which is hindered by a lack of competition between few oligopolistic publishers.
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Steven T. Corneliussen, a media analyst for the American Institute of Physics, monitors three national newspapers, the weeklies Nature and Science, and occasionally other publications. He has published op-eds in the Washington Post and other newspapers, has written for NASA’s history program, and is a science writer at a particle-accelerator laboratory.