Tim Worstall (and nearly everyone else) is wrong about open access publishing

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I get it that Tim Worstall as an independent researcher is on the sore end of the historically dominant publishing business model. To remind you, this model is where the authors of research get published for nothing, get paid nothing and the publisher flogs the journals back to academic libraries for expensive subscriptions. Hence this what Tim is celebrating:

Knowledge is a public good, such research papers are meant to be read to spread it and almost all of the research was tax funded to boot. It does seem odd there’s a there’s a few gatekeepers waxing fat off the journals.

Now I'm not going to get into the economics of all this so won't be asking whether or not knowledge is a public good. However, it is moot whether what we buy from academic publishers is knowledge per se or whether what we're buying is the publishing process. After all there's absolutely nothing to stop researchers doing what Tim does and just plonk their work on a free to air blog. There won't be any peer review, it'll be hard to find and it is tricky to protect against copying or plagiarism but authors can do this right now without restriction.

Unless they choose to submit is to a recognised journal so as to secure the peer review, the editing, the abstracting, the writing of key words, the indexing, the dissemination and the guarantee that the work will be seen alongside other similar work with the assurance of quality. Plus - since the copyright has transferred to the publisher - the assurance that copying and plagiarism will meet with a robust response. Under the terms (they vary from publisher to publisher, these are Elsevier's) the author will be able to:

Share their article for Personal Use, Internal Institutional Use and Scholarly Sharing purposes, with a DOI link to the version of record on ScienceDirect (and with the Creative Commons CC-BY-NC- ND license for author manuscript versions)

This means the author can but a copy onto a personal site, can use the article in teaching, can share the work with other researchers and can put the article into an institutional repository. All of which uses are open and sit outside the article cost or journal subscription. Nearly everyone who wants or needs to view the research can do so. Indeed, for credentialed science journalists the big publishers mostly give free access to published research and nearly all research is free to air within six months to a year following initial publication (in Elsevier's case this extends to post-docs not in academia).

So wholesale theft aside, what's the alternative to this model? This is what's called open access and, far from being free, it replaces subscriber pays with author pays. And, because the authors of articles in academic journals are academics, they aren't about to start paying personally for something they've had for free up till now. So the 'author pays' is, in reality, 'author's institution pays' or 'author's funder pays'. All we have done is to shift the cost from the library budget to the faculty budget and research budget. And the cost is anything up to £3,000 per article (depending on the particular journal) so it's not really accessible to the independent researcher in the way the old system was accessible.

The bigger problems with open access publishing, however, relate to who gets published and the quality of the published work. Firstly, the control of publishing shifts from the editorial boards and academic peers to either the institution or the funder (most typically a government body or a private corporation). An academic can only get published what his institution is prepared to pay for since they have to stump up the three grand to pay the publisher for the privilege. We move from the system where the gatekeeper is the publisher to one where, overwhelmingly, it is the government or an institution dependent on the government for its funding, authority and existence.

The second issue is one of quality - here's Beale's List:

This is a list of questionable, scholarly open-access publishers. We recommend that scholars read the available reviews, assessments and descriptions provided here, and then decide for themselves whether they want to submit articles, serve as editors or on editorial boards.

The worst of these publishers are indistinguishable from a vanity publisher - except that they're exploiting institutional budgets rather than a personal, individual wish to be published. Other simply play fast and loose with the peer review process, with systems for citation and loopholes within the infrastructure around open access publishing. Also, given the way in which people (and especially non-academic people) search, there is a big risk that poor quality, under-reviewed research is given the same credence as high quality, fully reviewed research.

Here from one publisher is an example:

You may suggest information of some particularly qualified reviewers who have had experience in the subject of the submitted manuscript, but who are not affiliated with the same institutes as the contributor.

And

You may also submit a list of reviewers to be excluded.

There's nothing wrong with open access systems but we need to understand that this isn't about whether knowledge is a public good but rather about whether the value added by the publishing process - however it's paid for - is worth the price. The simple 'research should be free to everyone' argument is essentially identical to the 'free access to medicine' argument - it may be right, even a good idea but it certainly isn't free. Which is why Tim Worstall - and many others banging on about open access and 'free knowledge' - are wrong.

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Possible predatory open-access publishing and public health...

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A couple of days ago I wrote about a piece of research published in a journal called "Food & Public Health" and written by authors including one Dr Ricardo Costa from Coventry University. I commented:

Nothing in the research suggests that Jamie, Nigella and Delia are making us all obese with their glorious culinary temptations. The authors however make a huge leap from these temptations to suggest that these wicked TV chefs are affecting our food preparation habits (again without any evidence) and that they are, as a result:

...a likely hidden contributing factor to Britain’s obesity epidemic and its associated public health issues.

Yesterday, while talking with Cullingworth's resident academic publishing guru, I mentioned that "Food & Public Health" was an open access publication. Kathryn's response was to wonder whether this journal - an its publisher - was on Jeffrey Beall's list of  "Potential, possible, or probable predatory scholarly open-access publishers". I'd never heard of this list but it's a consequence of the open access publishing model:

This is a list of questionable, scholarly open-access publishers. We recommend that scholars read the available reviews, assessments and descriptions provided here, and then decide for themselves whether they want to submit articles, serve as editors or on editorial boards. 

Beale (who is an American academic librarian) provides a comprehensive list of the criteria he uses to determine whether the publisher or journal is included on his list.

"Food & Public Health" is published by Scientific & Academic Publishing, a publisher that is included on Jeff Beall's list. To indicate part of the problem check out the guidance to authors on review:

You may suggest information of some particularly qualified reviewers who have had experience in the subject of the submitted manuscript, but who are not affiliated with the same institutes as the contributor.

So in effect you can certainly influence - and maybe even pick who'll review your paper. But it gets better:

You may also submit a list of reviewers to be excluded. 

So any academic who might disagree can be excluded from the review process - hard to see how this is open and transparent publishing. Letting authors direct or influence review is, quite simply, a recipe for bad science, ideological capture of academic disciplines and the exclusion of challenge. Precisely the problem we see with public health.

What we can't determine from the publisher website is the publication fee - remember that in an open access academic publishing model the cost of publishing shifts from user (or user's institution) to author (or author's institution). The typical open access charge is $3000 to publish an article so we can assume that Dr Costa - or Coventry University or the Heart of England NHS Foundation trust - paid a charge of this sort to have the article published.

What some predatory open access publishers do (although we don't know this is the case for Scientific & Academic Publishing) is, in effect, spam academics to get material for publishing. This takes advantage of pressures to publish, especially for academics in less well-known institutions. Worse still, the journalist (say at the Independent) probably can't distinguish between this sort of predatory publishing process and processes of higher quality. With the result that ideological and weak articles such as Dr Costa's get the same credence as articles in established subscription publications - to that journalist it's all "academic publishing".

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Open Access: It's not free you know - not even a little bit...

The Internet I mean. Yet that's what people persist in believing - and worse that somehow forcing it all to be 'free' (it isn't free by the way) is some kind of righteous moral crusade:

"The world's entire scientific and cultural heritage, published over centuries in books and journals, is increasingly being digitized and locked up by a handful of private corporations."

Now let's deconstruct this argument.

Firstly, prior to the arrival of the Internet and digital technologies, that scientific and cultural heritage was found typed onto paper stored as journals, books, monographs and so forth in myriads of libraries across the world. Nothing that MIT has done - or for that matter any of the publishers of academic research - changes this situation. Those books and other source materials are still 'locked up' in libraries and archives. Some of which have public access but most of which don't.

The point of JSTOR and other similar digital archives isn't to wickedly exploit the world's heritage but to ensure that, whatever happens to the current holders of that heritage, it remains available to the world's researchers. And the process of digitizing that heritage isn't cheap but right now is being paid for by the fact that JSTOR is able to recover costs from users (who otherwise might have to trip round the world to view the documents in question unless the holders of those documents were happy to use the well-established 'inter-library loan' system).

The question for all these self-righteous campaigners for "open access" is therefore, who pays? After all there's still a cost to digitizing content - it has to be scanned, key-worded, indexed, abstracted and stored in a searchable and recoverable way. And funnily enough all that work costs a lot of money. Then it has to be made available, promoted, catalogued and the server space paid for. This also costs a lot of money.

If the user isn't going to pay - directly through a per-use fee or indirectly via their institution - then somebody else has to cough up. And the only remaining candidate for stumping up the cash is the government - the taxpayer. So, far from being a liberation, so-called "open access" simply involves handing control of the entire system to the government and the costs to a load of people who have no interest in accessing the information.

So we replace a system where the world's intellectual heritage is largely available when needed to people who want to use it but which costs the taxpayer nothing with a system where everyone - including all those folk who aren't interested - can access but where there's a multi-billion dollar cost to the taxpayer.

This isn't about copyright but about how we pay for things we want - like saving the world's heritage for posterity. And it's much better done without loads of extra cost on the poor old taxpayer don't you think?

Finally, let's remember that seeking - through hacking and illegal downloading - to undermine this process serves nobody. It threatens the work of academic societies, it undermines the librarianship and archiving role of libraries and it means that access can only be sustained if it is the government's wish for that access to be sustained.

However we look at it, Open Access isn't free. Unless of course you steal the books.

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...a thought about 'open access' publishing (from someone cleverer than me)

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So the great and good want academic research published 'open access' at enormous cost - probably to the taxpayers (nearly all of whom won't have any need or interest in 'accessing' said publications). It is, was and always will be something of a daft idea.

However, Cullingworth's resident publishing expert (yes we have one) suggests that a far simpler solution would be to negotiate a national public library licence with the publishers and aggregators. It would cost a lot of money but far - the expert's precise words were "far, far, far, far" - less than the cost to taxpayers of the nonsensical 'open access' proposals.

Just a thought.

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Academic publishing and the 'tragedy of the commons'

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I'm sure Mr Worstall did so inadvertently but his castigation of the Royal Society's 'save the planet' report also explained another first world problem - why 'open access' publishing doesn't work:

"...if you have an open access commons and then demand for that resource exceeds the regenerative capacity of the resource, then you have to move away from a Marxian (his word) open access commons to some form of limitation of access. This limitation of access could be social (socialist) or private property (capitalist) but some form of limitation there must be."

You see that the problem for academics (and university libraries - although this is mostly special pleading to protect their budgets) is that 'open access' still uses up the limited resource of time and money available for the purpose of publishing. And because the user is not paying, that money and time isn't replaced. Or rather, the taxpayer's representatives trim the money available as they choose to direct it to other purposes.

So the outcome of 'open access' publishing won't, in the end, be open access but will be access that is rationed or controlled in someway. Most likely, since this is how the world works, by charging users for the use they make of the resource. However, it will be the Universities that collect this money rather than publishers.

And where did all those publishers start? Oh, yes - universities. Looks to me more and more like a power grab rather than a liberalisation of access.

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