I am going to bore some readers by jabbering on relentlessly about why publishers should not use CC-NC. But every time you switch off it costs the academic community another few hundred million dollars. That will be cut from your research grants. Because CC-NC is simply handing money and goods and control and restriction and monopoly to the commercial publishers.
The current Gold Open Access model (the only one that works in science) is that papers are freely available on the web, for ever. And can be copied without permission, for whatever purpose. Including (yes you have seen this before):
- Re-using in textbooks
- Using as advertising by pharmaceutical firms
- Creating added value through text- and data-mining
The bargain of Gold OA is that the author/funder pays the publisher for the privilege. Most major funders are coming round to this. However how much do you have to pay? And whatdo you get for this?
The problem is that the authors have zero bargaining power. Let’s call the publisher the Sirius Cybernetic Corporation (SCC) so I don’t get sued. Of course it bears no resemblance to any earthly publisher. I submit a manuscript to SCC, it gets accepted, and then I say I want to publish it as CC-BY.
SCC: “We don’t do CC-BY”
PMR: “But I’ll pay for it”
SCC: “Ha!”
PMR: I have some funds from EPSRC to publish my work as Open Access (this is true)
SCC: “You can have CC-NC or stuff it”
PMR: “How much do you charge?”
SCC: “Well we told the UK House of Commons it costs about 15 000 GBP to publish a paper, so you can have it for 5000 GBP”
PMR: “That’s absurd. It doesn’t cost more than a few pounds to add a copyright notice and an OA notice. That’s extortion.”
SCC: “Well spotted. Publishers are about maximising profit. We don’t care about the scholarly community. Hand over the money.”
PMR (feebly): “I’ll publish it elsewhere.”
SCC: “Good luck. By the time you get it through their system (which is even more inefficient than ours) you will have been scooped”
PMR (inspired): “I’ll publish in PLoS ONE. They do CC-BY AND they’re massively cheaper”
SCC (bluffing): “Good luck. No one cares about PLoS ONE” (This is rubbish because SCC has spent energy dissing PLoS ONE and is starting its one pale imitation.)
The problem is that this is an artificial monopoly of the worst possible kind. The only thing that SCC is selling is brand – perceived worth. It’s roughly similar to the difference between mineral waters and tap water. But academia is hooked on perceived brands, and spends billions, yes billions, of taxpayer money in library subscriptions. If I were a taxpayer and not an academic I would be very angry. (hang on, you are a taxpayer – yes and I am very angry).
I am not an economist but I cannot think of any other area where government simply hands over unlimited money to a monopoly market sector. Gas, railways, health are all regulated. (what about bankers? Shut up – bankers violate the laws of thermodynamics – there is nothing we can do). So there are only two reasonable ways forward:
- Customers (yes, the universities) get together and reform the market. Yes, they could – but they are so hell-bent on competing against each other there is no chance.
- Regulation. Let’s write to our MPs and expose the scandal of wasted academic subscriptions. Ask them to regulate it. It’s their/our money. But that will never happen.
So we are doomed?
No – there’s a third force – the funders. They’ve got real teeth. Their goal is to see the research they fund actually read and used. Publishing in closed access journals is the most efficient means yet devised of destroying scientific information.
SCC: But all academics can read this in their libraries. We give them BIG DEALS which mean they can read more journals and pay a bit (PMR a lot) more for them.
FUNder: But we want everyone to read our funded work. That means full Open Access.
SCC: “Ha!”
FUN: “We will pay reasonable Author Processing Charges (APC)”
SCC: “15000 GBP per article”
FUN: “Rubbish”.
SCC: “We’ll lobby in Congress. The glory of America is its ability to produce capitalist monopolies. We’ll lobby the Congressmen” [PMR: lobbying costs money. The money that libraries pay in subscriptions to publishers is used to protect the monopoly].
At this stage my mole’s recorder failed, so I have no record of the conversation. I know from second hand that the publishers have fought every inch of the way. The current state of (UK)PMC is the “market equilibrium” [sorry, political] between SCC and FUN. It’s messy and vastly suboptimal for science. There are very strict conditions put on the re-use of material from (UK)PMC. Much of it cannot be formally re-used. Much of it carries CC-NC – which effectively means there is little you can do with it other than read and print it. And, for this, FUN has had to pay (I’m guessing) >>1500 USD per paper.
Recap: This money is pure profit for the companies. They do not have to produce extra goods or services. They simply reliable the existing articles.
Scientists don’t care because they will continue to publish in SCC journals.
But not for long. Because the publishers are losing their monopoly. Unlike authors (who have no power) the funders do have power, Because their funding is vastly greater than the publishers’ incomes from subscriptions. They can mandate authors to publish OA-CC-BY.
And authors will ignore the mandate.
Oh hon. Not in the US. Mandates carry the real threat of not getting funds next time round. Even for Nobel Laureates. Europe has a bit further to go. But it will change.
But the real problem remains:
“How much should one pay for a CC-BY article?”
Clearly it’s way above cost at present. In theory the market should decide. But it can’t.
The solution may be coming with the Wellcome/HHMI/MaxPlanck journal. Here we have publishing run by the funders. There is no incentive to create monopoly pricing. So we’ll find out what the true cost is. And the cost will not include:
- Profits for shareholders
- Overpriced marketeers
- Professional denigrators and lobbyists
- Services for content restriction (DRM, web paywalls, etc.)
That’s a lot of cost that can be sliced off. Commercial publishers might start to get the occasional bad dream
But in the meantime we have the wholly unacceptable business of paying large amounts of money for the nearly useless CC-NC. Here’s an excellent article from PLoS highlighting the dangers, and the implied unethicality, of CC-NC. http://www.plosbiology.org/article/info:doi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pbio.1001210 Abstract:
Scientific authors who pay to publish their articles in an open-access publication should be congratulated for doing so. They also should be aware that they may not be getting full open access from some publications that charge for publication under the “open access” label. Two features define an open-access publication: (1) the published contents are freely accessible through the Internet, and (2) readers are given copyright permission (see Box 1) to republish or reuse the content as they like so long as the author and publisher receive proper attribution [1]. Recently, some publications have begun offering an open-access option that charges for Internet publication without granting readers full reuse rights, such as Springer’s Open Choice or Nature’s Scientific Reports. These publishers have adopted a business model through which authors pay for immediate publication on the Internet but the publisher nonetheless keeps commercial reuse rights for itself. This is not full open access (see Box 2).
And a snippet:
I offer one example to illustrate the danger, but many others abound. Imagine an evolution in digital formats and a pseudo open-access publisher that has gone bankrupt. The journal’s content is on the web but its host site will soon be shut down. A new, for-profit venture sees value in republishing the defunct journal’s content in the new format. However, while the journal has died, its copyrights live on (for the life of the author plus another 70 years!). Because the journal demanded the commercial reuse rights even after collecting a hefty publishing fee from the author, the new venture would likely lack the legal right to copy and republish this piece of the scientific record in the new format to the detriment of those authors and the research community at large. We are living through a moment of fundamental opportunity. Let’s be clear. Only those publishers willing to fully seize this opportunity deserve to call their publications “open access.”
PMR: For me Open Access should only be used for CC-BY or CC0. The Budapest declaration mandated full re-use without permission. The messy thinking in the Open Access movement led to the term “Open Access” becoming operationally meaningless. So many funders are paying for a service which is far less value than they ought to get for their money. Any often it’s nearly valueless.