The Occasional Pamphlet

Harvard’s provost Steven Hyman has submitted a response on behalf of the university to the White House Office for Science and Technology Policy’s RFI on public access policies. It should appear on the OSTP blog within a day or so, and is duplicated here as well. I am in strong agreement with the recommendations of Provost Hyman, and hope the White House process will lead to actual policies promoting open access to government-funded research. Read the rest of this entry »

Several publisher representatives have recently asked about why the Harvard open-access fund does not cover hybrid fees. I thought I’d explain my thinking on this issue, though I am certainly not doctrinaire when it comes to institutional underwriting of hybrid fees, and am perfectly in accord with institutions coming to different decisions on the issue.  In fact, as I mention below, I can imagine (counterfactual) situations in which I would support Harvard’s open-access fund underwriting hybrid fees.

In the case of the current Harvard policy, I’ll explain why for the time being at least we are not underwriting hybrid fees.  My comments extend the arguments I give in my PLoS Biology paper.

Hybrid fees would be worth supporting to the extent that (as their proponents claim) they provide an approach to smoothly transitioning to an open-access publication fee business model.  The argument is that as uptake increases in payment of the hybrid fees, revenue smoothly shifts from the reader side to the author side in a revenue-neutral way.  At the end, the journal is openly accessible, with hybrid fees (now become just publication fees) providing the revenue.  To the extent that the hybrid system works this way, there is no “double dipping” — using hybrid fees as a way to increase revenue rather than transitioning to OA in a revenue-neutral manner.  I’ll call such a model “true hybrid”.

There are two problems with supporting hybrid fee systems.  First, they may not be set up in the way just described as true hybrids, and determining whether this is the case may in fact not be possible.  Second, even if they were set up in this way, game-theoretic problems may inhere in the system that prevent them from realizing the transition.

Whether “double dipping” is going on is independent of when the hybrid option is set up.  In particular, whether a journal is hybrid from the start or a hybrid option is added well after the journal is founded is irrelevant.  What matters is the dynamics of how hybrid uptake affects subscription fees and revenues.  To be a true hybrid model, hybrid fees must be set at a rate no more than the true average revenue per article, so that universal uptake of hybrid payments is not a means to revenue enhancement.  Further, uptake of hybrid fee revenues must be directly offset by reductions in subscription fee revenues, so that incremental uptake of hybrid payments is not a means to revenue enhancement.

True hybrid journals must therefore have a degree of transparency that is difficult to imagine achieving.  The journal would have to demonstrate linearly decreasing subscription fees in direct proportion to the hybrid fee uptake.  Determining hybrid fee uptake is straightforward.  But determining subscription fee reduction is not.  Publishers practice price discrimination, bundling, and price changes over time, which separately and together make it impossible to tell what a subscriber’s costs would have been absent the hybrid fee discount.  The issue of transparency is not all or nothing.  Certainly some publishers, Oxford University Press for instance, may be more transparent than others in their hybrid discounting practice.  But determining whether appropriate reductions are taking place is difficult at best.

Even if there were some way to determine that a journal were a “true hybrid”, receiving no incremental revenue from its hybrid program, there is a more fundamental problem with the normal way in which hybrid programs are implemented, viz., that subscription revenue reductions are shared among all subscribers.  As institutions decide whether or not to underwrite hybrid journals, they are confronted with a kind of prisoner’s dilemma.

In a prisoner’s dilemma, a set of agents can either cooperate or defect.  If they all cooperate, all are better off.  But if any defect, all are worse off except for the defector.  In the case at hand, a cooperating institution underwrites hybrid fees, a defecting institution does not.  Given a status quo ante (as we have) of all institutions defecting, all would be better off if they cooperated, since they would pay the same amount (true hybrids being revenue-neutral) but would gain open access.  However, at the margin, an institution cooperating sees increased costs from the hybrid fees, but only a share (and a small one at that) of the subscription revenue reduction.  Defectors see a reduction in their subscription costs relative to the status quo ante at no cost to themselves.  Though both fully defecting and fully cooperating are equilibria,^[1] there is no transitional path from the former to the latter.  This is an inherent flaw in the hybrid system as traditionally conceived.  Empirical evidence accords with this analysis; uptake of hybrid fees has been exceptionally low.

It may be that institutions can be convinced to act temporarily against their financial interests in the expectation that others will join them and the cooperating equilibrium will be reached.  Especially in the current economic climate, I’m not sanguine about this prospect.  And without such temporary action against self-interest, the hybrid model is no transitional model at all.  If however, evidence accumulates that the transparency problem can be addressed and true hybrids can be identified and institutions appear increasingly willing to pay these fees against temporary self-interest, I can imagine that the Harvard fund might then change its policy for support.  Similarly, if changes to the hybrid model were made that eliminated the prisoner’s dilemma — I believe that this may be possible, and hope to talk about it in a future post — then again hybrid fees ought to be supportable for true hybrid journals.

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^[1]Actually, full cooperation is not an equilibrium per se, as each agent still has an incentive to defect from cooperation even at that point. However, once all agents (or even most) were to cooperate, the hybrid system could be jettisoned for a true OA model that effectively removed the defecting alternative.

Pride does not wish to owe and vanity does not wish to pay.
—Francois De La Rochefoucauld

Open-access journal publishing has been criticized on a whole range of grounds as being unsustainable, unfair, or ineffective.  Perhaps the starkest criticism is that open-access journals amount to a vanity publishing industry, and will exhibit a “race to the bottom” in which journals compete to lower editorial standards to capture the revenue for publishing articles.  Is open-access journal publishing prone to the problems of a vanity press?

There are both theoretical and empirical arguments that the concern is unfounded. From a theoretical point of view, the prerequisites for vanity press are not found in scholarly publishing.  From an empirical point of view, current open-access journals display a pricing structure that does not indicate a vanity press industry, as we demonstrate below in a new analysis of OA publication fee data. Read the rest of this entry »

Harvard’s participation in the open-access compact is being managed by the Office for Scholarly Communication, which has set up an open-access fund—the Harvard Open-Access Publishing Equity (HOPE) fund—consistent with the compact. Through HOPE, Harvard will reimburse eligible authors for open-access processing fees. Initially, members of the four Harvard faculties—Arts and Sciences, Education, Government, and Law—that have formally adopted open-access policies will be eligible to make use of the fund, with other faculties becoming eligible as they develop open-access policies. More information about Harvard’s fund can be found at the OSC web site.

Five universities—Cornell, Dartmouth, Harvard, MIT, and UC Berkeley—have now expressly stated their commitment to the importance of supporting the processing-fee business model for open-access journals just as the subscription-fee business model used by closed-access journals has traditionally been supported. These universities are the initial signatories of a “compact for open-access publishing equity” (COPE), which states:

We the undersigned universities recognize the crucial value of the services provided by scholarly publishers, the desirability of open access to the scholarly literature, and the need for a stable source of funding for publishers who choose to provide open access to their journals’ contents. Those universities and funding agencies receiving the benefits of publisher services should recognize their collective and individual responsibility for that funding, and this recognition should be ongoing and public so that publishers can rely on it as a condition for their continuing operation.

Therefore, each of the undersigned universities commits to the timely establishment of durable mechanisms for underwriting reasonable publication charges for articles written by its faculty and published in fee-based open-access journals and for which other institutions would not be expected to provide funds. We encourage other universities and research funding agencies to join us in this commitment, to provide a sufficient and sustainable funding basis for open-access publication of the scholarly literature.

MIT provost Rafael Reif says “The dissemination of research findings to the public is not merely the right of research universities: it is their obligation. Open-access publishing promises to put more research in more hands and in more places around the world. This is a good enough reason for universities to embrace the guiding principles of this compact.”

These universities realize that in the long run, underwriting processing fees for open-access journals is “an investment in a superior system of scholarly communication”, as Peter Suber says and as I have argued previously. As more universities sign on to the compact, joined by funding agencies as well, fee-based open-access journals may become an increasingly viable alternative to subscription-based journals.

Full details about COPE are available at http://www.oacompact.org/.

Prime Minister Gordon Brown has apologized on behalf of the British government for the appalling treatment of Alan Turing, who was obliged to undergo chemical castration for the crime of being gay. Prime Minister Brown’s statement in the Telegraph follows an online petition drive that enlisted over 30,000 British citizens and residents, and a follow-on global petition with over 10,000 signatories worldwide.

Much has been made in the discussions surrounding the petition efforts and in the Prime Minister’s statement of Turing’s code-breaking efforts at Bletchley Park, which directly contributed to the allied victory in World War II. Less mentioned, but also central to his legacy, are Turing’s seminal contributions to computer science. It is no exaggeration to say that Alan Turing was the progenitor of computer science, in his brief career providing building the foundation of theory, hardware, systems, artificial intelligence, even computational biology. His death at 42 as a result of the British government’s misguided “therapy” constitutes one of the great intellectual tragedies of the twentieth century. I commend Prime Minister Brown for his prompt and complete apology.

In response to my last post, Kent Anderson says:

August 24th, 2009 at 2:04 pm

I think you missed Phil’s point, Stuart.

What Phil was saying is that libraries can’t control the disbursement of open access fees precisely because of academic freedom, which makes these fees more susceptible to unchecked growth and possible abuse. If they establish an OA fund, librarians will be on the horns of a dilemma — allow unchecked spending or violate academic freedom. Since they won’t violate academic freedom, their only option will be to allow unchecked spending.

I think you’re responding to a misinterpretation of Phil’s post.

via » Three good things: open-access funds, fiscal responsibility, and academic freedom The Occasional Pamphlet.

Yes, that’s exactly how I understood the argument, so perhaps I didn’t make my own view clear. Let me try to clarify it. (The issue is important enough and my response long enough that it makes more sense to devote a post to it than to place it in the comments thread.) Just so that my conclusion doesn’t get lost below, here is what I am saying: What libraries will do is check spending but without violating academic freedom. The dilemma as stated is a false one. Read the rest of this entry »

Just as I posted a response to Philip Davis’s item on why open-access funds are putatively overly favorable to commercial publishers, out came another post by Mr. Davis, this time arguing that open access funds putatively violate academic freedom.

This new post, however, is so transparently spurious that it makes one wonder what Davis’s agenda is. Nonetheless, at the risk of giving the post more credence than it deserves, I’ll succinctly respond to the argument such as it is.^[1]

In summary, the claim is that open-access funds will either require vast amounts of additional funds, making them fiscally irresponsible, or will require aggressive filtering of claims on the fund, violating academic freedom. In fact, open-access funds are neither fiscally irresponsible nor contrary to academic freedom.

Open-access funds are not fiscally irresponsible

Open-access funds consistent with the “open-access compact” will require tiny amounts of funds in the short term (on the order of tens of dollars per faculty member per year based on extrapolations of current experience). My article on the compact discusses the issue at some length and I won’t reiterate it here.

Once open-access funds require large amounts of money (if ever), it will be because many journals have switched to a fee-based open-access business model, thereby freeing up subscription fees. We know that in aggregate there have been in the past sufficient funds in library budgets to pay journals for the services they provide. Moving the funds from subscription payments to publication-fee payments doesn’t change the macro situation for the worse.^[2] To the extent that the publication-fee model doesn’t have the manifest market dysfunctionalities that the subscription model has, it is in fact likely to improve the situation.

Open access funds don’t violate academic freedom

Davis argues that “Authors will view these [open-access] funds as a free lunch, and certainly much more appetizing than spending one’s own money paying those pesky page charges to non-profit society journals.” He assumes libraries will respond by filtering requests based on publication venue, and that will constitute an arbitrary imposition on where scholars can publish that violates their academic freedom.

Academic freedom requires that faculty be allowed to publish what they want, where they want. It does not require that universities pay arbitrary moneys to make that possible. That’s why it’s not a violation of academic freedom that universities don’t pay the thousands of dollars per article of page and figure charges that some journals charge. To the extent that universities add subsidies for some costs, that may change the incentives as to where to publish, but certainly doesn’t decrease anyone’s freedom. Thus, even if funds restricted disbursements, this would not constitute a violation of academic freedom.

Further, there is a variety of ways to set up an open-access fund that does not have the moral hazard that Davis imputes. The key is to make sure that funds for open-access charges are not fungible, as I’ve discussed elsewhere. It simply is false that open-access funds inherently can’t be set up in such a way that a reasonable market for publication charges ensues. On the other hand, we know that the existing market structure for the subscription-based model is broken for just the moral hazard reasons that Davis worries about.

Summary

It beggars belief that providing funds to make open-access journals more accessible to authors decreases their academic freedom, and only a lack of creativity limits setting up funds for that purpose in economically sustainable ways. If you want to worry about problems of open access, these are not the ones to worry about.

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^[1]This argument about academic freedom is distinct from one claiming that open-access policies of the type enacted at Harvard, Stanford, and MIT violate academic freedom. I’ve responded to that argument elsewhere, arguing that to the extent that the policies have any interaction with academic freedom at all, they enhance rather than limit it.

^[2]This macro argument has to do with costs in aggregate. Micro estimates based on extrapolating costs per article over the set of published articles are more problematic. The best known estimate, reported in a Cornell study, makes specific assumptions that indict the conclusions. But more generally, this type of analysis makes a range of assumptions about how contingent economic facts will be maintained despite the hypothesized wholesale shift in business model, for which there is no basis. (See for instance, this discussion about how moving from the subscription-fee business model to the publication-fee model turns complementary goods into substitutable goods, for just one example of how the markets completely differ.) For that reason alone, the sketched macro argument, which makes no such assumptions, is considerably more robust.

My paper on the “open-access compact” is now available from PLoS Biology and at my web site. An excerpt:

Scholars write articles to be read—the more access to their articles the better—so one might think that the open-access approach to publishing, in which articles are freely available online to all without interposition of an access fee, would be an attractive competitor to traditional subscription-based journal publishing.

But open-access journal publishing is currently at a systematic disadvantage relative to the traditional model.

I propose a simple, cost-effective remedy to this inequity that would put open-access publishing on a path to become a sustainable, efficient system, allowing the two journal publishing systems to compete on a more level playing field. The issue is important, first, because academic institutions shouldn’t perpetuate barriers to an open-access business model on principle and, second, because the subscription-fee business model has manifested systemic dysfunctionalities in practice. After describing the problem with the subscription-fee model, I turn to the proposal for providing equity for open-access journal publishing—the open-access compact.

One of the advantages of the Harvard open-access policies is that the university’s cumulation of rights allows it to negotiate directly with publishers on behalf of covered authors. Such discussions can lead to win-win agreements in which Harvard authors can more simply comply with the open-access policies they have voted and publishers can express solidarity with their academic community partners while avoiding bureaucracy like addenda or waivers on a per-article basis.

We first took advantage of this possibility with an agreement with the American Physical Society. The APS wanted clarity on some issues regarding how the Harvard open-access policies would be used in providing access to APS-published articles before they could see themselves clear to fully supporting the open-access policies. The university was happy to provide that clarity in that our plans were wholly consonant with what APS wanted. The result was an agreement that was a win-win for both APS and the university. APS agreed to acknowledge the policy and not require addenda to their publication agreements (much less waivers of the OA policy). In return, Harvard made clear that for articles covered by the OA policy it would

1. Refrain from using facsimiles of the publisher’s version of the articles unless the publisher permits;
2. Not charge for the display or distribution of articles;
3. Cite to the publisher’s definitive version of the articles and link to them where possible;
4. Authorize others to use the articles only subject to these same restrictions.^[1]

The formal agreement and announcement are available at the web site of the Harvard Office for Scholarly Communication.

We’ve now concluded a large handful of such arrangements and have started listing the publishers and journals that have been supportive in this way in a listing of publishers who are “easiest to publish with”. The listing provides a resource for our faculty to let them know which journals they can publish in without waivers or addenda.  Already, we have affirmations from scholarly societies (APS, American Mathematical Society, American Economic Association), non-profit publishers (Public Library of Science, Berkeley Electronic Press), commercial publishers (BioMed Central, Hindawi Publishing), and university presses (Duke, Rockefeller, and University of California Presses). We expect more to be added soon.

Publishers interested in being added to the list of “easiest to publish with” should contact the OSC. We’re happy to work with publishers to simplify compliance with the open-access policies.

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^[1]In fact, we were already operating under just such conditions. The OA policy only provides a license to Harvard for a version of an article if the author controls rights for the version in its entirety. We were not charging for the display and distribution of the articles, and the uses we had envisioned were noncommercial uses. We already viewed it as crucial that we highlight the definitive version, even going so far as to modify the repository software to provide links to the definitive version on search results pages as well as individual document pages.