Research Councils UK: Open Access Policy (S&T Report)

Viscount Hanworth Excerpts

Thursday 28th February 2013 Lords Chamber

[Viscount Hanworth]

My Lords, I, too, am grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Krebs, for introducing this debate. I should begin by saying unequivocally that I am in favour of the open access to academic journals for anyone, without distinction or qualification. Having said as much, I declare that I am not in favour of the proposals of the Finch report. I shall voice my severe misgivings later.

The backdrop to these proposals is the manner in which digital technology has impacted upon the production of the journals and the manner in which their vast legacy is nowadays handled and controlled. At present, a few overpowerful commercial suppliers are dominating the markets for academic journals. They are deriving excessive profits from their position as virtual monopolists. The profitability of these enterprises can be explained by their market power and by the extraordinarily favourable way in which they acquire their principal assets, which are texts for publication. They are in possession of valuable legacies of published material stretching back in time, often by as much as a century, from which they can derive considerable rents by granting access to their electronic archives.

To my knowledge, the oldest collection of back issues is from the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, which dates back to its beginning in 1665. This collection has been digitised by JSTOR, which is a not-for-profit operation for the electronic archiving of journals that began in 1995 under the auspices of Princeton University. JSTOR represents a countervailing force, which is limiting the strength of the commercial monopolies. The principal clients of the commercial monopolies, the universities, often feel greatly aggrieved. University librarians and bursars are angered by the expense of paying for access to the legacy, which is an expense that cannot be avoided by any institution of higher education that supports research. The academic staff are angered by the manner in which the commercial journals presume upon their time and exploit their labour without offering any financial recompense.

The free services of academics consist not only in the supply of articles for publication but also in their services as editors and referees. In recent times, authors of technical papers have been rendering another valuable service; that is, typesetting the articles. Nowadays, the authors can typeset their own papers in the universally recognised languages of TeX and LaTeX, which can be converted to the publisher’s formats with few, if any, editorial or typographical intercessions.

The outcome is to relieve the authors of unnecessary drudgery and to enhance the profitability of the journals. If anyone wonders why this unpaid labour is supplied so plentifully, the answer is that the achievement of publication is essential to the advancement of an academic career. The journals, therefore, have a captive workforce. The commercial journals have been acutely aware of the threat that digital technology in the hands of its clients can pose to their enterprises and they have taken steps vigorously to protect their interests.

Their greatest fear surely is that the workforce might decide to serve its own interests by publishing rival journals that do not presume to profit financially from their labours. Such journals already are in existence and they are becoming quite numerous. In the main, they dispense entirely with printed volumes and rely on the web freely to disseminate their output. Already, many of these electronic journals have acquired a status and an esteem that is commensurate with that of many of the time-honoured journals. For that reason, they attract submissions of the highest quality.

In my perception, such journals offer a paradigm of open access. There is open access on both sides. Authors can submit their articles without paying submission fees. Access is also free to any reader. I suggest that there is nothing to prevent the national research councils from taking the unprecedented step of providing small subventions to such journals. The monopoly of commercial journals is under threat from such developments. Also, their monopoly over the legacy of journals is only partial. Many of the journals owned by learned societies have contributed their back issues to JSTOR, which, ostensibly, has impeccable charitable motives.

It is against that backdrop that we must scrutinise the recommendations of the Finch report. Before doing so, we should note that the membership of the committee that produced the report contained representatives from the big commercial academic publishers. Surely, it was they who cautioned that the development of open access should not be allowed to destabilise what, in their estimation, is most valuable in the research communications ecosystem; namely, their own position.

From the committee’s deliberations has emerged a recommendation in favour of the so-called gold option. As we know, this proposes that articles should be made available immediately and free of charge in return for a payment by an author, or by their institution, to the publisher of an article processing charge, an APC. An estimate of £1,750 per article has been mooted, which would provide a very generous income to the commercial publishers, seemingly of an assured nature. Where would this money come from? It is blithely assumed that it would be provided by research councils or by the author’s institution, using a block grant given for the purpose. This would surely deny authors access to journals unless they were in receipt of a research grant, or unless they could prevail upon their institution to support their submission. It would give those institutions powerful control over what has hitherto been regarded as the province of an essential academic freedom: the freedom of authors to submit their articles whenever and wherever they choose.

Clearly, not all journals would merit the submission fee, or APC. Journals would be divided into those that were sanctioned to receive the APC and those that were denied it. It would be difficult to start a new journal, because the APC would not be granted before it had established its reputation. The commercial suppliers of established journals would come to occupy impregnable positions, and they would become even more profitable. This is a nightmare scenario, and I hope it will never materialise. Now is the time to stop the prospect of any such eventuality. However, it is doubtful whether the UK has sufficient leverage over the international market to influence it to any great extent. I hope therefore that this will never materialise.