March 07, 2007
AAUP Calls for Cautious Approach to Open Access
By Pillarisetti Sudhir
In a statement released on February 28, 2007, the Association of American University Presses (AAUP) outlined its position on the problematic—and often contentious—issue of providing open access to scholarly information, and declared that what was needed at this juncture was careful experimentation and development and not any risky plunging straight into “pure open access.”
Arising mainly out of the high costs associated with scientific, technical, and medical (STM) journals’ articles, the open access movement has been gathering momentum and support over the past few years. Various models of access have emerged, ranging from fully free-to-user model to more modulated arrangements that seek to coexist with, or build upon, market-driven, fee-based systems. The question of providing free access to scholarship is not without problems, and has evoked much attention from various groups and provoked considerable debate. The Budapest Open Access Initiative which arose from a 2001 conference sponsored by the Open Society Institute, and Our Cultural Commonwealth, the 2006 report of the American Council of Learned Societies’ Commission on Cyberinfrastructure for the Humanities and the Social Sciences are among the notable recent attempts to grapple with the challenges of freely disseminating scholarship in the age of the internet. But some have criticized these efforts as being too visionary or as not being realistic enough (see, for example, Robert Townsend’s critique of the ACLS report).
In its February 28 statement, the AAUP points out that “the conversation should expand to address the different creation and distribution needs of scholarly literature in all fields and formats, including monographs, and to consider a variety of models for providing open access—all of which entail risks and benefits to the entire system of scholarly communications that are not yet fully understood.”
Because the production and dissemination of knowledge carries costs—irrespective of the mechanism of transmission—the AAUP statement stresses that calls for changing the system of scholarly communications “need to take careful account of the costs of doing so, not just for individual presses, but for their parent universities, and for the scholarly societies also contribute in major ways to the current system.”
According to the AAUP, “being embedded in the culture of higher education that values experimentation and advances in knowledge, presses have been open to new ways of facilitating scholarly communications,” and many AAUP members “have begun experimenting with varieties of open access that seek to balance the mission of scholarly exchange with its costs.” The statement concludes by stating, “The AAUP and its member presses welcome the opportunity to collaborate with university administrators, librarians, and faculty in designing new publishing models, mindful that it is important to protect what is most valuable about the existing system, which has served the scholarly community and the general public so well for over a century, while undertaking reforms to make the system work better for everyone in the future.”
Commenting on the AAUP’s statement, Arnita A. Jones, the executive director of the AHA—itself a major not-for-profit scholarly publisher—declared, “The statement from the American Association of University Presses is a welcome addition to the conversation on the costs and benefits of providing open access to scholarly publications in the humanities. The AHA is a member of AAUP and participates regularly in discussion with them and other scholarly societies on the difficulties of negotiating new financial models designed largely to address problem in science, technology, engineering, and medicine.”
Commenting on the AAUP statement for “AHA Today,” Abby Smith, a cultural heritage resources consultant who had served as the director of programs at the Council for Library and Information Resources and as an adviser to the ACLS Commission on Cyberinfrastructure for the Humanities and the Social Sciences, writes:
The AAUP is surely right that high-quality scholarship does not come cheap. The main focus of the debates around so-called open access is rebalancing the cost allocation among the actors in scholarly communication—scholars, publishers, and librarians. But to the extent that it focuses exclusively on cost allocations, it misses what’s really going on—what scholarly communication is becoming, and what is at stake. Of course, the costs of our business are significant. We are greatly disadvantaged by the fact that we don’t yet know what the costs—especially of digital scholarship, publishing, and archiving—actually are. This ignorance is compounded by the fact that to many academic users, information can appear to be “free” because the cost (to libraries) of acquiring and preserving, as well as the cost of production (to publishers) invisible. Moreover, authors do not make money, though they surely receive many benefits, as publication in peer-reviewed literature is “the coin of the realm” (see “The Influence of Academic Values on Scholarly Publication and Practices” by Diane Harley et al.)
In both the print and the digital worlds, it is rare that scholars pay the cost of producing and distributing their own scholarship, just as they seldom pay transaction costs to gain access to journals or monographs. Publishers usually serve as proxies for the scholars in their role of scholar-as-author. In the same vein, libraries play the role of proxy for scholar-as-researcher or user. Same person, different roles—and different interests, which are now clashing. Scholars make critical contributions in largely nonmonetary ways; their proxies—publishing houses and libraries—shell out hundreds of millions each year to print, distribute, collect, preserve, and serve the fruit of scholarly labor. Cutting costs by getting rid of the proxies—the “disintermediation” of publishers and libraries through easy creation and distribution directly to the Web, a system of open access first modeled by high-energy physicists through arXiv.org—still begs the question in most disciplines of who pays for such critical functions as quality review, editing, and preserving.
Part of the problem in determining appropriate allocation of costs is the fundamental difficulty of knowing precisely what the costs are. We have no idea how much it will cost to build and sustain the necessary digital infrastructure for research and publication. More than that, how deep the transformation of scholarship will be when we realize more fully the potential of digital technologies, will present deeper challenges for us. For in truth, we do not want just open access to content. We want open content. We want to be able to download material, to unbundle and disaggregate it, to recombine it, to comment on it, to include it in our blogs, to tag, to repurpose, to curate and to put it into our own digital library.
Comment:
AAUP conflates distinct journal-article and monograph issues. OA pertains to the former, without exception, not the latter (mostly exceptions).
See:
http://openaccess.eprints.org/index.php?/archives/181-guid.html
Stevan Harnad
http://www.eprints.org/openaccess/
— Stevan Harnad Mar 7, 11:23 AM
Comment:
While articles and monographs might be distinct in Dr. Harnad’s definition, they are conflated in the ACLS’s Cyberinfrastructure report (pages 23-24), which targets the university press community and serves as part of the context for the AAUP report. If Dr. Harnad objects to that conflation, he should take it up with the authors of the Cyberinfrastructure report.
— Robert B. Townsend Mar 7, 12:43 PM
Comment:
(1) The Budapest Open Access Initiative’s definition of Open Access (OA)—free online access, primarily to peer-reviewed journal articles—pre-dates the ACLS Cyberinfrastructure report:
http://www.soros.org/openaccess
(2) The reason OA’s primary target is journal articles and not books is that journal articles are all, without exception, author give-aways, written solely for research usage and impact, not for fees or royalties: Not so in the case of books:
http://cogprints.org/1639/01/resolution.htm#1
(3) Hence a coherent OA policy must be based on the canonical case, not the exception-ridden one:
http://openaccess.eprints.org/index.php?/archives/136-guid.html
(4) In particular, the OA self-archiving mandates now being adopted and proposed by research funders and universities all over the world are quite naturally applicable to journal article output but definitely not to book output:
http://www.eprints.org/signup/fulllist.php
— Stevan Harnad Mar 7, 03:51 PM
Comment:
The OA movement consists of many positions and many proposed solutions (as Roy Rosenzweig articulated in Perspectives two years ago: http://www.historians.org/perspectives/issues/2005/0504/0504vic1.cfm). As the presses and scholarly societies worry about how they will sustain and perform their missions into the future, it seems perfectly reasonable to weigh all the definitions on the table. To the extent the cyberinfrastructure report focuses in on humanities monographs, an issue particularly important to our discipline and a core part of the university presses’ work, it cannot be ignored. The AAUP statement simply calls for cautious discussion and experimentation, in a way that is open to the diversity of positions on this issue.
— Robert B. Townsend Mar 7, 06:12 PM
Comment:
Some of the proposed approaches to addressing important issues surrounding digital scholarship appear to be constrained by attempting to work within the existing approaches to publication. With decreased funding for traditional print publications that also ultimately restricts access as most university and college libraries are forced to decrease their subscription budgets, we should be focusing more on the historical knowledge that could not only be more widely disseminated via new media versus print media but also how a wider scope of individuals with expertise in a particular scholarly area, including the teaching of history, would be able to more fully peer review the new historical knowledge that could then be made more widely available.
Heretofore, the composition and peer review of any new knowledge in history has been primarily conducted behind gated doors. Some of those doors appeared to be at least partially open, but that was usually only to a few within a small circle of mentors and/or colleagues and would certainly not be considered to be “wide open” to anyone and everyone with a potential interest and expertise in the topic or subject at hand. Furthermore, the existing publication apparatus presents significant lag time between formulating and developing ideas and having them published in the wider world due not only to peer review but also to the essential business end of physical publication.
As Professor Rosenzweig mentions in the article referenced above, reviews are an important component of any aspect of scholarship. One new media case that he mentions that is worthy of further discussions is H-Net Reviews [http://www.h-net.org/reviews/]. This online system has greatly shortened some of the wait time in many scholarly areas and made reviews available to a much wider audience – most notably those without access to university libraries providing access to a wide range of journals. Because H-Net Reviews is a much newer approach than the established gatekeeping of the print journals, its dynamics of figuring out how to handle the large volume of books available for review and matching them with the most appropriate and qualified reviewers is both similar and different than its print predecessors. Does a wider audience also mean a wider definition of those qualified to review books? On the other hand, is getting the discussion going sooner rather than later not another important component to consider? These are certainly issues we need to deal with in our discussions about the future of publishing any and all types of scholarly works in history.
With traditional publishing avenues becoming increasing constrained by increasing costs, it is important to consider where we go from here as this blog discussion does. However, we must also do more to think “outside the box” and start from scratch when we begin to think about how new knowledge is created. As a field, history has normally been a solitary writing enterprise in contrast to many other areas of study that primarily rely on more visibly collaborative writing efforts to produce new knowledge. This alone makes any new approach more challenging. How much involvement of others do we want as we think historically and produce knowledge that is worth publishing in any format? Do we want the doors wide open at least at the beginning of the formulation of historical scholarship? As individuals, how much do we need to guard our intellectual property so that our ideas aren’t co-opted by someone else in the competitive race for degree completion, tenure, and/or promotion? Thinking aloud on blogs has already greatly opened the doors to a wider audience but how does the new media-produced new knowledge add to what we need or want to know about history? Or, is it more important to make sure more people know about what other historians are thinking about so that shared interests and shared expertise can produce greatly enhanced scholarship in both the short run and the long run.
In other words, we have traditionally staked out our intellectual territory by writing articles and/or books because the inherent peer review in the print world is the ultimate stamp of credit and everyone coming later has to argue in light of what the previous person has published on the issue. How does this change in the new media world? Creative Commons [http://creativecommons.org/] and its numerous licensing options do offer some alternatives even though many historians are still uncomfortable even with this level of thinking outside the box. Is there a way to use this type of licensing (Creative Commons or something similar) to protect our ideas in the same way that print does? Or does this same protection still represent the gated doors of the traditional print publishing world?
As historians, we need to discuss what we have to gain and what we have to lose from more open access to scholarship in our field before others determine that access for us.
— Kelly Woestman Mar 9, 04:45 PM