Shaddock:Could you briefly describe the open access OA (Open Access) movement?
Suber: Basically, the OA movement is the worldwide campaign to provide open access
to peer-reviewed journal articles and their preprints. For this purpose,
OA literature is digital, online, free of charge, and free of most
copyright and licensing restrictions. There are two primary ways to
deliver OA, through journals (which provide peer review) and archives or
repositories (which don't). The two approaches are complementary and are
both spreading in every country and every discipline. OA is not about
bypassing copyright or peer review, since we use both. It's about taking
advantage of something very new --the internet-- and something very old
--the tradition of scholars writing journal articles without payment.
Shaddock:When did you first become involved with OA?
Suber: In the mid-1990s I started providing OA to my own publications at my own
web site. Almost immediately I started receiving more serious email from
serious readers than I'd ever received when these publications were merely
in print. I've noticed the same pattern with other OA activists: there
are lots of good policy arguments for OA, but the real conversion
experience comes after you provide OA to your own work and see the signs of
rising impact. That's when you realize that OA isn't just a geeky way to
play with new technology. It's a superior way to fulfill the purposes of
scholarship and publication.
Shaddock: Does the idea of OA threaten the legitimacy and integrity of scholarship for readers? How is academic integrity to be maintained through such free available resources?
Suber: We maintain the integrity of OA scholarship in exactly the same way that we
do for non-OA scholarship, through peer review. If you submit your work to
an OA journal, it undergoes peer review just as it would at a conventional
journal. If you submit your work to a conventional journal and have it
peer-reviewed there, then you can deposit the refereed result in an OA
repository. OA removes the barrier of price, not the filter of quality
control.
Shaddock:Assuming that readers receive the direct benefit of OA, by having access to free and credible scholarship, what are the benefits to academic authors?
Suber: The chief benefits are a greatly enlarged audience and increased
impact. The potential audience for OA literature is literally thousands of
times larger than the subscription base of the most widely-subscribed
journals. It's not surprising that as the audience grows, so does the
number of citations. Steve Lawrence was the first to document the fact
that OA increases citation impact, which he did for computer science in
1991. Since then, the effect has been systematically studied in other
disciplines, in both the sciences and humanities, and his conclusion has
been confirmed in every one. OA increases citation impact between 50 and
250% compared to non-OA papers in the same journals. Steve Hitchcock
maintains a bibliography of the studies, <http://opcit.eprints.org/oacitation-biblio.html>.
Shaddock:How about the relationship between enforcing intellectual property rights and the originality or creativity of scholarship? Does such a link exist? Does OA necessarily challenge copyright or other rights? Or, might it even serve to empower individual academic authors at the expense of publishers?
Suber: The legal basis for OA to new work is the consent of the copyright
holder. OA doesn't require the infringement of copyrights or even the
reform of copyright law. For that reason it should never be considered the
scholarly version of file swapping. Scholars and scientists may be paid
for their books, but they aren't paid for their journal articles and
haven't been since the first journals were launched 350 years ago. As
authors of journal articles, therefore, they are very differently situated
from musicians and movie-makers. They have everything to gain and nothing
to lose by consenting to OA. As long as we have copyright-holder consent
to OA, there's no infringement.
As for creativity, there's a common argument that copyright is a necessary
incentive to keep creative people creating. If that argument works, it
works in domains where creators are paid for their work, like fiction and
music. In those domains, enforcing the temporary monopoly of copyright can
secure or increase a creator's revenue. But for scholarly journal articles
the argument simply doesn't apply. Scholars are not paid for their journal
articles and don't expect to be paid. Their incentives for writing them
have nothing to do with royalties and everything to do with the prestige,
citations, and impact that advance their careers. Where copyright operates
as an incentive, it is by limiting the circulation of published work to
paying customers. But limiting the circulation of scholarly journal
articles to paying customers actually harms authors. It reduces their
impact without increasing their revenue.
Similarly, if the copyright-as-incentive argument works, it works in
domains where creators keep their copyright and use it for their own
benefit. But most scholarly authors of journal articles transfer their
rights to publishers who use them to limit access to paying customers
--again, a truncation of the audience that harms authors. Since scholars
are not protected by copyright --their publishers are-- copyright does
nothing to increase their willingness to publish. Copyright may still help
the copyright holder, but in scholarship the pattern has been that it helps
publishers at the expense of authors.
Scholars have not been deterred from writing new journal articles by the
custom of giving away their work without payment. Nor have they been
deterred by the custom of transferring copyright to publishers. On the
contrary, they are eager to publish their work even on these onerous
terms. This doesn't show that scholars are foolish. It shows how
different they are from other kinds of creators. They write for impact,
not for money. That's why they don't need the incentive of copyright
protection. It's why the OA movement doesn't need to violate or reform
copyright law. And it's why scholars tend to be enthusiastic about OA as
soon as they hear about it.
Finally, let me tie up a loose end. I said that OA to new work depends on
the copyright-holder's consent and that most scholars transfer copyright in
their journal articles to publishers who limit circulation to paying
customers. To be more precise, most journals are still not OA and still
demand that authors transfer copyright. That's the sense in which they
limit circulation. But one achievement of the OA movement is that about
70% of non-OA journals now allow authors to deposit their work on OA
repositories. Hence, when authors take advantage of this opportunity, the
work is OA with the copyright-holder's consent.
Shaddock: While the cost of many print and other fee-based journals can restrict access to scholarship, free networks and journals also require funding for their creation and maintenance. Certainly the internet provides the possibility for reducing some costs, but overall who do you believe should be responsible for funding such OA initiatives? What roles should our public institutions play, or individual private donors?
Suber: In general, the cost of OA dissemination should be regarded as part of the
cost of research. One reason is that it's so inexpensive. Another is that
research isn't complete until it's communicated. Research funding agencies
increasingly agree with this point of view. The Wellcome Trust is the
largest private funder of medical research in the UK and it requires OA to
all the results of Wellcome-funded research, and of course it gladly pays
the costs. The articles are still peer-reviewed and accepted or rejected
by independent journals. But if accepted, then Wellcome requires its
grantees to deposit digital copies in an OA repository. The National
Institutes of Health is the world's largest funder of medical research and
it encourages its grantees to do the same. There are promising movements
afoot to convert this encouragement to a requirement. The eight Research
Councils in the UK are about to mandate OA to all publicly-funded research
in the UK. (Their policy may be public before this interview comes out.)
The OA movement has never denied that producing OA literature costs
money. We simply want to pay the bills without charging readers and
thereby creating access barriers. Broadcast television and radio are good
examples of mature industries that provide their content free of charge to
users because they've found other ways to pay the bills. There are many
business models for OA journals and repositories, but they're all
variations on this theme.
Shaddock: Where do you see initiatives that focus specifically on the scholarship and establishing of networks among students (such as NeoAmericanist and others) fitting into the OA movement?
Suber: I used to maintain an online list of student journals like NeoAmericanist
but for my own field, philosophy. I was pleasantly surprised by how many
there were (over 40) and by the fact that almost all of them were
OA. There must be equivalents in nearly every field. I know that these
journals were well-known at my school, but I really have no idea how well
known they are to students at large.
Students should consider publishing in student journals, OA or not, because
showcasing their work can give them a leg up with employers or graduate
schools. Students should also know about the professional OA journals in
their field and how to search OA repositories across all fields. Even if
they don't often need to consult journal literature for assignments, it's
good to know how to do it, especially for the day when they won't have
access to all the subsidized content through the university
library. Graduate students and those planning to become professional
researchers should know about OA if only to increase the audience and
impact of their own work. All students show know about OA in order to
understand its benefits and take this understanding with them into their
jobs in universities, laboratories, libraries, foundations, journals,
publishers, learned societies, foundations, and governments. We will need
their knowledge and support to finish the job started by the present
generation.
Students should know about FreeCulture.org, the student wing of the
worldwide free culture movement, which embraces OA research as well as
open-source software and copyright reform.
If OA isn't as hot with students as open-source software or file-swapping,
it's because scholarly journal articles don't play as large a role in their
lives. But students should know that there's also an OA textbook
movement. Those that are interested should look up the California Open
Source Textbook Project, CommonText, Free High School Science Texts,
Freeload Press, Libertas Academica OA textbooks, Medical Approaches,
MedRounds Publications, next\text, Open Textbook Project, Textbook
Revolution, and Wikibooks.
Shaddock: Do you believe that OA serves to blur the lines of academic disciplines allowing for greater interdisciplinary exchange? Is this a positive development? If so, might OA be considered more important in a field such American Studies, which incorporates the more traditional studies of English, History, Philosophy, Political Science, Sociology, Technology and the Media, among many others?
Suber: Digital scholarship blurs these lines, whether it's OA or non-OA. Even if
we can browse or search digital scholarship by discipline, the default is
usually to search it by keywords, which cross disciplinary
boundaries. This helps users find relevant work they would never have
found if they used traditional discipline-based indices. Contrary to many
people's original expectation, online research increases serendipitous
discovery.
Shaddock: You have mentioned previously in interviews that the humanities and social sciences have been lagging behind the pure sciences in the movement. Does this continue to be the case?
Suber: Yes. All fields are making progress toward OA, but the humanities and
social sciences are moving more slowly than the natural sciences. There
are many reasons for this. The main one is that the natural sciences are
better funded than the humanities and the funding is available to subsidize
OA. Another is that journal prices are higher in the sciences, on average
about 10 times higher. That raises the urgency of finding a viable
alternative to the subscription system and helps recruit allies to do
so. Another is that by far the largest part of taxpayer-funded research is
in the sciences, and by far the most compelling OA argument for
policy-makers is that there ought to be public access to publicly-funded
research. There are also some subtle reasons, such as the differences in
disciplinary cultures. For example, online preprint exchanges have caught
on in nearly every scientific field but in very few of the
humanities. Moreover, in the sciences, young faculty have to publish
journal articles to get tenure, while in the humanities they have to
publish books. Because books can generate royalties and journal articles
never do, the logic of OA applies much better to journal articles than to
books.
Shaddock: With the increase of scholarship and the establishment of academic networks online, might intellectual interaction become less personal? Will technological innovations/initiatives such as OA complement existing forms of exchange, such as seminars, conferences, and lecture series or might they serve to supplant them?
Suber: Seminars, conferences, and lecture series don't really compete with
journals. If subscription-based access to journal articles gives way to
OA, seminars and conferences shouldn't be affected at all. But we are
finding that OA knits together online communities much more effectively
than conventional publication does. With OA, it's easier to find other
people working on the same problems or topics, and easier to launch
discussion lists and new forms of sharing and collaboration. Sharing
deepens community and community deepens sharing. I've co-authored pieces
with scholars I know well but have never met face to face. If OA does
affect conferences, it will be by sharing the proceedings with people who
couldn't attend and by enhancing the value of face-to-face meetings. As an
example of the second, I've often met people at conferences whom I've known
"virtually" for years, or who know my work. It's much less like meeting a
stranger than an old friend.
Shaddock: Could you describe some of the current and future challenges to OA and scholarly publishing in general?
Suber: One of the most important is to get more governments to commit to the
principle that there must be OA to taxpayer-funded research. There's
widespread support for this principle, but so far only two governments have
made the commitment, while many others are watching to learn from their
experience. Another challenge is to get more universities to launch OA
institutional repositories and adopt effective policies to get their
faculty to deposit copies of their journal articles in them. There are
over 500 OA repositories worldwide, but only five of them hosted by
universities that mandating deposit. Finally, after all our progress we
still see the same myths and misunderstandings in circulation --that OA
bypasses peer review, that OA violates copyright, that OA proponents don't
realize that publishing costs money, and half a dozen others. Fortunately,
when we can get the attention of publishing scholars and make the case
directly to them, they're easy to persuade. They see the logic and the
benefits immediately. What's hard is to get their attention and to get our
message to them unfiltered by publishers and professional associations that
often misunderstand or have an interest in sending a different message.
Shaddock: What projects and/or initiatives are you currently involved in at the moment?
Suber: I update Open Access News, my blog, every day, and write monthly OA
analysis in my newsletter (the SPARC Open Access Newsletter). I also write
for journals and news media and speak at conferences, though I have to cut
back. I educate legislators and agency officials in Washington about OA in
order to build support for stronger OA policies at the federal level. I
work with international organizations on treaties to facilitate access to
knowledge and consult with formal OA initiatives, like Science Commons, and
informal groups of activists on strategies for launching new initiatives or
working to influence OA policy in their country. While OA has great
momentum, it still far from the default method of sharing research and
there's a lot of work to be done.
For more details on Peter Suber you can visit his home page
<http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/>.
Or for more on the Open Access Movement see:
Open Access Overview
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/overview.htm
(my introduction to OA for those who are new to the concept)
Open Access News blog
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/fosblog.html
(my blog, updated daily)
SPARC Open Access Newsletter
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/newsletter/archive.htm
(my newsletter, published monthly)
Writings on Open Access
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/oawritings.htm
(my articles on OA)
Timeline of the open access movement
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/timeline.htm
(my chronology of the landmark events)
What you can do to help the cause of open access
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/do.htm
