The view from the USA
The USA is a pivotal country in the development and success of the Open Access project. There is no federal mandate obliging authors to observe the tenets of OA, but some states have come close to making this a requirement. Funders are particularly powerful in this context, since they can not only influence the publishing models used by scholarly authors, but actively withdraw funds unless the author signs up to making his or her work “free” at the point of use. The USA is, of course, also a major contributor to the revenues of most international scholarly publishers.
In this post, Professor Michael Levine-Clark, Dean of the University of Denver Libraries, reflects on the stage that OA has reached in the USA and how it might further develop in the next 5 – 10 years.
Linda: To what extent do you think Open Access has been successful?
Michael: One measure of success is that funders have gotten behind the idea – as witnessed by Plan S and the Nelson Memo. Especially if they are funded by federal agencies, authors are obliged to make their work OA. More researchers now understand OA – and some have always been behind it – but in the past there was a persistent misunderstanding that it represented lack of quality. The fact that major publishers have embraced it is another measure of success – they all operate OA models to some extent. OA now accounts for roughly half of all published scholarly articles, and if you include those published under the Green model, it is considerably more. A third measure of success is that scholarly information is being disseminated much more quickly. What we saw happening with Covid research shows the power of OA data: the speeding up of vaccine development and the general understanding of the health impacts of Covid couldn’t have happened without OA.
Linda: What have been the greatest triumphs and challenges, from your own perspective?
Michael: From the institutional perspective, the influence of OA is largely neutral. To some extent, OA helps to secure funding and increase the visibility of scholarly work, and is therefore embraced by the institution; but when it comes to choosing between making their research open or high impact, most institutions and researchers would go with high impact.
APCs are a challenge. They’re not working as well as people had hoped. There is a large number of have-nots, even in the USA and Europe: institutions that are not particularly well-funded; and of course the problem increases dramatically in the “economic south”. Other barriers to publication include disciplinary differences. The disciplines in which research is well-funded and the traditional vehicle of publication is the scholarly article, succeed; but for disciplines that are less well-funded, especially those in which research is traditionally published as the monograph, it doesn’t work out as well. The key question is where does the money come from? Read & Publish deals are a nice idea in theory, but at the institutional level we can’t continue to fund them. The hybrid journal is also less successful in terms of fulfilling the desired outcome. Hybrid journals are not easy to manage at the library level; and researchers consulting the articles they contain are not clear on whether the article is “free”. It is a model that doesn’t seem quite fair; they’re not great as part of the scholarly ecosystem, but they do have a positive aspect, and that is that they provide opportunities for researchers in disciplines where it is hard to publish.
Linda: What, if any, have been the unforeseen consequences of OA?
Michael: Well, the hybrid journal, for a start: I don’t think any of us imagined the model working out the way it has. The APC, as well: it is reasonable to assume that there is a cost attached to publishing, but as I’ve indicated, there are wide disparities in the ability to pay at both disciplinary and institutional levels. Another concern is the degree to which publishers can make money from OA. Some seem to be making more money than under the subscription model, while others are undoubtedly making much less and therefore sustainability is a problem for them. The Transformative Agreement is a good example of this disparity. A truly transformative deal would take publishing to the level where everything is open, but we’re not making much progress. Under the subscription model, the librarian made decisions on what was useful or necessary and how, therefore, to provide access at the article level. With OA, we haven’t figured that out.
Linda: To what extent has OA truly created a “level playing field” for both authors and readers?
Michael: I don’t really think it has helped researchers in the economic south, which was one of the original intentions. We have somewhat levelled the playing field for readers, but the opposite is the case for authors. On the contrary, we have dug up the turf and made life harder for the great majority of authors. The APC is itself a barrier to publishing. It is interesting to think about Read versus Publish: if the goal is making more content available to more readers, it has worked; but it hasn’t improved accessibility to publishing for authors.
Linda: Do you think it will ever be possible for all scholarly publishing to become available via OA?
Michael: No. I think it will be possible for some disciplines to get close to 100% – those with a lot of funding and a culture of disseminating preprints; but for disciplines where the monograph is the main vehicle, which typically have little funding, there is little incentive. Some OA publishers of monographs have said that libraries have not taken them seriously; in fact, libraries have not necessarily taken OA for journals seriously, either. If you consider the R & P model, we haven’t had the funding to convert articles to open. Funding for the APC versions certainly falls far short, and in addition there are restrictions on how this funding can be used: for example, not for publication in hybrid journals; not beyond a certain figure per article. North America is becoming a big supporter of the Green model, which involves the depositing of the preprint in the Institutional Repository – but this is an imperfect model, too. And ironically books are more expensive but generally required for disciplines for which there is no institutional funding.
Most of the OA book models exist to support a “transition to open”. S20 – the JSTOR model – or contributing to such initiatives as Knowledge Unlatched – have been enterprising, but do not necessarily support the publications of the individual institution. Instead, they are supporting publishing in general. There is a disconnect here which makes it hard to contribute to open book projects at the level at which we have supported journals.
There are compelling reasons why Green is better: it incurs no additional cost for the author and only a small cost for the institution (maintaining the IR) which in itself is a justifiable expense. Gold costs are hard to justify. There’s a clear incentive to publish more if you’re a publisher operating an APC model: you may be providing more opportunities to publish, but you’re also making more money and the incentive to publish more carries the danger of reduction in quality.
Linda: How do you think the OA movement will progress in the next 5 – 10 years and how would you like to see it progress?
Michael: I’m most interested in what happens to the book model. The JSTOR S20 model is a good example of widescale adoption. I think we’ll see more university presses making books open and this is a positive – so we’re heading in the right direction. If it happens that most university presses make a significant number of their titles open within two years of publication, this helps authors. Transformative Agreements will continue, but in 10 years at most will have died. The R & P deal is just a bigger “Big Deal” – and if we couldn’t afford the Big Deal in the first place, how could we afford this? I think libraries will pull back from TAs and embrace Green. This is an important indication of how some publishers, especially not-for-profit society publishers, are thinking. We’ll see more Diamond publishing, too, but it’s not a scalable model. I’d love to see librarians and publishers jointly coming up with models that allow us to transfer costs from R to P. S20 seems to be the best model available at present, but it’s not perfect. Similar models have yet to be thought of that will genuinely create a sustainable future.
[This interview was first published by De Gruyter Brill here.]
Gold Leaf 