Peter Suber offers some OA predictions for 2008 in the December issue of the SPARC Open Access Newsletter. Peter is very clear-headed and I think they should be taken seriously. However if they come to pass I think we will have an even more complicated situation than now. Here are some relevant prediction:
(4) The US National Institutes of Health (NIH) will mandate OA for NIH-funded research. If the mandate doesn’t come as part of the NIH appropriation for fiscal 2008, then it will come another way.
When the dust settles and the OA mandate has been adopted, some publishers will sue to prevent it from taking effect. They won’t have strong legal arguments, but they will dress up what they do have and try to delay implementation as long as they can. After losing in the legislative and executive branches of government, a hard core of publishers who oppose government OA policies will keep fighting in the judicial branch. The Terminator may be reduced to a metal skeleton, but it will keep on coming.
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(5) Publishers will always market their OA projects as boons to authors and readers, which is perfectly justified. But with or without more OA mandates to force the issue, we’ll start to see more OA and near-OA projects designed to help publishers themselves. These projects may not directly increase a publisher’s revenue, but they will prepare it to compete with free.
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(7) We’ll see more publisher-university deals, like the Springer deal with Göttingen and the similar deal with the Universiteitsbibliotheken en de Koninklijke Bibliotheek. These deals create a new body of OA content –articles by faculty at participating institutions– for about the same price that institutions currently pay for subscriptions. They don’t make whole journals OA, and hence don’t make subscriptions unnecessary, but they do make articles OA. We’ll see more of them because they benefit both parties. They benefit universities by delivering more bang for the library budget buck and by widening the dissemination of some faculty work. They benefit publishers by reducing the risk of cancellation.
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(8) We’ll see more funder-publisher deals, like the Wellcome Trust deal with Elsevier, the NIH deal with Elsevier, the deals of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) with Elsevier, Springer, and BioMed Central, and the Elsevier deals with most of the funders in the UKPMC Funders Group. Some of these deals pay publishers for gold OA when green OA would suffice, and some pay publishers for green OA when publishers don’t need to be paid at all. But we’ll see more of them because some funders are willing to pay to have the published edition of an article OA from birth (as opposed to the author’s manuscript OA after an embargo) and because many publishers are looking for ways to be paid for any concession to OA.
PMR: What I take from this is that most publishers will move some of the way towards OA and almost every publisher’s offering (apart from the out-and-out OA advocates such as PLoS, Hindawi and BMC) will be different. The situation for permission barriers will be complex and chaotic. We could end up with a situation where “most” offerings were “Open Access” (price barriers removed) but where it was almost impossible to determine what any publisher’s policy was on permission barriers (full BBB Open access). It’s currently a nightmare, to find out what you can and can’t do with many OA offerings – and it looks like it will get worse.
But maybe I’m too pessimistic. Maybe the funders will insist on absolute permission barrier removal. Maybe the publishers will decide that managing Open content could actually be a profitable business. Maybe…