University of California announcement renews open-access debate
DOI: 10.1063/PT.4.2528
The University of California’s new policy for open public access to scholarly research articles has begun drawing media attention—much of it scanting the value that publishers can add and overlooking multiple stakeholders’ efforts to develop sustainable internet-age publishing practices.
A press release summarizing the new policy begins by asserting that it ensures ‘that future research articles authored by faculty at all 10 campuses of UC will be made available to the public at no charge'—through eScholarship , UC’s central open-access repository—'in tandem with their publication in scholarly journals.’ To protect the peer-review process, nearly every paper submitted to the repository will be under embargo, unless the author pays the journal publisher a processing fee.
UC’s press release continues:
The policy covers more than 8,000 UC faculty...and as many as 40,000 publications a year. It follows more than 175 other universities who have adopted similar so-called ‘green’ open access policies. By granting a license to the University of California prior to any contractual arrangement with publishers, faculty members can now make their research widely and publicly available, re-use it for various purposes, or modify it for future research publications. Previously, publishers had sole control of the distribution of these articles. All research publications covered by the policy will continue to be subjected to rigorous peer review; they will still appear in the most prestigious journals across all fields; and they will continue to meet UC’s standards of high quality.
The release doesn’t mention the following key stipulation, quoted from UC’s FAQs about the policy: Faculty members may ‘opt out on a per-article basis’ and ‘may waive the open access license for each article permanently, or delay appearance of the article (embargo it) for a specified period.’
The release calls UC ‘the largest public research university in the world,’ points out that it accounts for about 8% of all US research funding, and declares that the initiative aligns with the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy’s open-access directive from earlier this year. At the end it adds a note about underlying intent:
The adoption of this policy across the UC system also signals to scholarly publishers that open access, in terms defined by faculty and not by publishers, must be part of any future scholarly publishing system. The faculty remains committed to working with publishers to transform the publishing landscape in ways that are sustainable and beneficial to both the University and the public.
Little or nothing in the general press coverage picks up on that reference to multi-stakeholder collaborative efforts , with publishers included, to achieve sensible, workable solutions. Instead, much of the coverage reflects widespread suspicion that the chief impediment to full open access is publishers’ profit-maximizing single-mindedness.
A posting at the Atlantic conflates the product of research—that is, the submitted manuscript—with the products of scholarly publishing, thereby scanting the value that publishers can add. So does a report at the Verge. The Atlantic author apparently doesn’t know that some publishers incur expenses like paying professional scientific editors.
An article at the San Jose Mercury News completely overlooks the issue of added value. It quotes a politician who unwittingly illustrates the conflation of research product and publication product: ‘Taxpayers pay for this research, and we the people, we own it. So it just makes sense to cut out the middlemen who charge taxpayers for something we already own.’ In fact, taxpayers do not own the value that publishers add.
Ars Technica too adopts the adversarial focus, emphasizing that the policy ‘leverages the power of the institution...against the power of publishers who would otherwise lock content behind a paywall.’ At the Scientist, more than half of the news report discusses not the new policy, but Michael Eisen’s criticisms of it. Postings at Nature and the Chronicle of Higher Education report Eisen’s views too.
Eisen, a UC Berkeley biologist, ardently and vocally supports open access. Under the blog headline ‘Let’s not get too excited about the new UC open access policy ,’ he charges that the opt-out provision renders the policy ‘completely toothless.’
Toothless? Apparently by coincidence, UC’s FAQs also use that dental metaphor, though with a different bite:
Doesn’t the opt-out approach mean that the policy has no teeth? Won’t publishers just demand that all authors opt out?
Many publishers already allow deposit of articles in their standard agreements and will have no issue with this policy. The intent of this policy is not to make publishers capitulate to Faculty demands for open access, but to find ways to make our work have greater impact and accessibility. If there is any message to publishers, it is that we hope they will continue to explore options for more sustainable open access publishing solutions in the future, so that policies such as this one become unnecessary.
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.