I am not a US citizen so cannot influence any representative about the NIH bill (see my post US citizens: please lobby for House vote on OA mandate next Tuesday). But in case you think this doesn’t matter, here’s the sort of thing publishers were saying to the UK government 3 years ago (see my last post). From the select committe report. [Mr Robert Campbell == President, Blackwell Publishing; Dr John Jarvis == Senior Vice President, Europe, Managing Director, Wiley Europe Limited]
PMR: The chairman is Ian Gibson, MP. The first shows the tenacity from Gibson and the flanelling from the publishers.
(Q 1-19)
Mr Campbell: Yes, and we have put that model to several societies for whom we publish; and their publications committees are considering it. At this stage none of them have decided to take it any further. We submitted an application for the JISC programme where they have a three-year programme funding some open access experiments. We were unsuccessful with that. We are certainly looking at the model, and we have several proposals out with societies, trying to cost the impact of—
Q6 Chairman: Does this model have an impact on publishers and institutions, in your view?
Mr Campbell: We could talk about that for the next hour.
Q7 Chairman: No, you have not got an hour; you have got one minute.
Mr Campbell: As we said in our submission, we think it will have an impact. We think there is a danger that an author-paid model could lead to lower standards. It is also not popular amongst authors, less well-funded institutes or from other countries, where even a ten-dollar charge to an author would seem excessive.
Q8 Chairman: What effects would open access models have in costing terms, compared to existing publishing models?
Mr Charkin: There are many answers because there are many journals for many disciplines, and the impact will be different depending upon which discipline or which journal you are talking about. In our letter to you, speaking on behalf of Nature Publishing Group, in the case of Nature itself, the British international journal, in order to replace our revenues you would have to charge the author somewhere between £10,000 and £30,000 because the costs of editorial design and support are so high. The reason for the big disparity is how much advertising—
Q9 Chairman: Are you saying it is per article?
Mr Charkin: Per article; it is a huge price and would, I believe, be completely unsustainable because I think people would not pay that. In that particular model it is a very serious and different answer to the one that one would get for a more specialised journal.
PMR: I am becoming increasingly concerned about publishers’ statements that “Societies do not want OA”, “OA author pays does not work”. It is much truer to say that publishers do not want societies to have OA and that they have failed to try to make it work.
Later…
Dr Jarvis: One of the things that intrigues me is that there is evidence that some of the support for open access is coming from outside the research community. There are some reports of members of the public wanting to read this kind of information. Without being pejorative or elitist, I think that is an issue that we should think about very, very carefully, because there are very few members of the public, and very few people in this room, who would want to read this type of scientific information, and in fact draw wrong conclusions from it. As publishers of this very high-level, sometimes esoteric, information, when we have information that is of use to a broader audience, we make sure we use all the channels by contacting the press to make that happen. Having said that, I think the mechanisms are in place for anybody in this room to go into their public library, through inter-library loan, get access to any article they want. They can go to a machine now and press a button and see it on their screen. I don’t believe that a section of our society is excluded from seeing this information. I will say again; let us be careful because this rather enticing statement that everybody should be able to see everything could lead to chaos. Speak to people in the medical profession, and they will say the last thing they want are people who may have illnesses reading this information, marching into surgeries and asking things. We need to be careful with this very, very high-level information.
(continued Q20-)
Q20 Geraldine Smith: That is not what Dr Virginia Barbour is saying, the molecular medicine editor at the Lancet. She feels that patients should be able to access papers about their medical conditions. What are you doing to ensure that patients who are not scientists have access to quality medical journals that could help them have a better understanding of their own illnesses?
Dr Jarvis: As I say, I think the mechanisms really are in place. Members of the general public get access to an article at no cost. They might not get it immediately on their desktop screen at home, which sounds like a good idea, but there is a lot of available information which most of us need to be interpreted. You could get yourself in trouble if you wrongly interpret this kind of information, much of which is arcane.
I had not realised that one of the roles of a publisher was to stop people reading the scientific literature. Of course I see it now. Much of the published medical literature is arcane (“mysterious, secret or obscure; understood only by a few; difficult to understand.” Chambers). Well, who publishes this arcane material? And might they not feel a duty to make it less arcane?
Now that was three years ago, and isn’t it unfair to quote that? Surely they won’t say things like that to the US House will they? No, they have hired a pit-bull PR firm to do it for them. Hopefully the US representatives are as on the ball as Ian Gibson and colleagues.
I hope now you are agitated or even angry enough to write to your representative. For details see Peter Suber’s Blog – there may be last-minute changes. And don’t feel that your voice doesn’t count. In Europe we lobbied against software patents successfully. Politicians are keenly aware that information, the Internet, etc. matter. The smart ones see that Openness is a business opportunity.
And when we win this battle – the NIH – it will have so much impact that it will be difficult to resist the change towards OA.