Berlin 6 is over – and what a week it was! From the perspective of an organizer it is surreal seeing something that you’ve been planning for almost a year happen in a matter of just three days. I think it was a very diverse and interesting conference that succeeded in bringing together stakeholders from a wide range of areas (researchers, publishers, scholarly societies, funding agencies, libraries etc) to discuss issues vital to Open Access.
Here’s a relatively unsorted list of thoughts that I’ve mentally penned since the last attendee headed for the exit of the Roy Lichtenstein Atrium.
We (as ‘the Open Access movement’, however vaguely that term is defined) need to…
- …do a much better job at bringing the scholarly societies to the table. The session on that topic was a good start, but it revealed that there is a communicative and perceptual rift between societies, who are by necessity conservative (they need to survive!), and OA activists, who can afford to be progressive. How will going OA impact a society’s membership? The common assumption is that members will defect if they no longer pay for the society journal with their fees, but there is no entirely conclusive evidence for that. Does going OA mean cutting off a source of revenue? Not always, as some societies heavily subsidize their print operation, meaning that going digital and OA may actually be a way of reducing costs for them.
- …look at more constructive ways of working with commercial publishers. In some disciplines and areas their role is more important than in others (in the natural sciences they are powerful because they frequently control impact, in the human sciences their expertise is important for the publishing process itself) and I don’t think it is impossible to publish or assure quality without them. But there is no reason whatsoever to shut them out and ignore their experience and ability to innovate – if they can find ways of recouping costs from non-subscription sources (author fees, advertising, associated services, POD…) we’ll all be better off if we have them with us.
- …convince funding agencies and politicians that publishing is not free, and that moving to a model in which access is both free and open means that costs must be recouped elsewhere. I’m entirely aware that this is widely known and accepted, but understandably public institutions are not jumping at the opportunity to spend additional money, especially while both the closed access system of subscriptions and the Open Access system of publishing subsidies must be funded in parallel.
One strong argument for OA from a political perspective is global competition when it comes to cutting edge research. This presentation given at Berlin 6 by Solange Santos from Brazil on the immense scope of the SciELO network drove home that point: if we (in the [more] developed countries) do not move towards OA swiftly enough, and OA turns out be a significant catalyst for research innovation (as some claim it will be), we may find ourselves losing footing to developing countries that embrace OA more quickly at some point. - …get librarians to work much more closely with researchers to support the publishing process. There has already been significant change in how libraries and librarians regard their role, but I think there is still a vast potential for change, especially here in Germany (my excuse for making blatant generalizations!).
Librarians tend to see themselves as guardians of physical objects (books) and of digital objects which can be treated like physical objects (papers, dissertations, stuff that can be put into an institutional repository). In my (admittedly limited) view, they tend to be too far away from the researchers who desperately need someone to help them with the financial, legal and technical issues of publishing. I greatly recommend watching this presentation by David Weinberger for insight on the physical/virtual ‘objects of knowledge’ issue and some of the questions it raises. - …and finally, approach researchers in a new, completely different way. There is still the belief among many involved in financing, supporting and disseminating research that those who undertake it have both the ability and the motivation to “move to open access” by themselves. I don’t believe that this is true. Many junior researchers who might be in favor of OA cannot choose freely where they want to publish, because the wrong choice is a risk to their career. Many senior researchers who have the influence and standing in their discipline to drive a paradigm shift do not embrace OA because the formats, publishing channels and procedures involved are unfamiliar and appear unreliable to them. But at the core, neither of these issues is decisive.
The pivotal problem is that most researchers, regardless of where they stand on the career ladder, are not impacted personally by whether or not something is Open Access, and that their perspective as individuals, and not the common good, shapes their views. As Steve Anderson (I believe) pointed out in his talk at the conference, there’s a difference between free beer and free speech, between “I don’t have to pay for it” and “It’s in the public domain”. Researchers are by and large shielded from the subscription costs of the closed access system by their institutions and I honestly believe that many of them are not too concerned over the privatization of public assets that follows from the entrenched system. The business of business is business, to quote Milton Friedman, and similarly in our modern, globalized research environment the business of research is research, and not a whole lot of anything else.
Let me drive the economic analogy a bit further. Those in favor of deregulating the world’s financial systems often cited the self-interest of lending institutions to protect shareholder’s equity (Alan Greespan) as a strong fail-safe, one that made third-party intervention unnecessary. But just as investors (primarily) focus on short-term profit, researchers (primarily) focus on immediate career benefits, not on the public good or the taxpayer’s burden.
Open Access is a societal issue and not an individual one, therefore we cannot expect individuals with individual interests to be the driving force behind it, but only institutions with collective interests. Only by providing the right mix of incentives, mandates and support (both financially and in terms of know-how) can we get the horse to drink, to use Dieter Stein’s metaphor of the horse and the trough.
So how do the parties listed above succeed at supporting Open Access?
I believe that one very effective way of enabling OA in the long term is to push for entirely new forms of publishing, forms that are ‘OA by nature’, such as blogs and wikis. The entrenched forms are conceptually associated with the entrenched system and it will probably be harder to disassociate the one from the other than to popularize entirely new forms of science communication (i.e. ‘journal’ and ‘article’ are conceptually associated with ‘paper’, ‘commercial publisher’ and ‘subscription’, while ‘blog’ and ‘wiki’ aren’t).
New forms of scholarly communication that have novel advantages over existing forms will be adopted not because they are open (because, as outlined above, by itself that hardly matters) but because they offer specific benefits to the individual scholar. Obviously they will exist side by side with established forms. But they could act as a catalyst that raises awareness among researchers for the benefits of Open Access, because the reach and openness of hypertext publishing is what makes it so attractive.
I think it’s necessary to work on many different fronts at once. One thing that institutions (specifically those with a disciplinary anchoring) should do, is to give all their researchers easy-to-use tools for personal hypertext publishing.
What about starting a wiki-based platform similar to OpenWetWare as an inter-institute channel to facilitate collaboration among Max Planck institutes? Why does no major university (that I know of, at least) operate an institutional blog planet so that I can see what my colleagues in psychology, economics or computer sciences are working on? If these tools can facilitate collaboration at transnational companies, why not at universities and research institutes, which should be about collaboration by default?
Update: I have found a blog planet at an academic institution after all – at the University of Cape Town. I think this underscores my point about so-called ‘developing countries’ being more innovate than we are. While I’m sure there are other examples of institutional blog aggregators in different countries, I am not aware of a single one at a German university.
