Getting to 100%This isn't a comprehensive strategy for getting to the goal of 100% OA. It's an attempt to identify some of the continuing obstacles and give a short progress report on where we stand in removing them.
SPARC Open Access Newsletter, issue #84
April 2, 2005
by Peter Suber
* OA journals
There may be a way for OA journals to thrive in every discipline and nation. But we don't know that yet. We find OA journals in every field, but most OA journals are too young for us to know much about their long-term financial health.
Two large facts seem key to the spread of OA journals. First, there are many differences among the disciplines relevant to funding OA journals. Second, there are many different business models for OA journals. It's hard to know how these two facts interact. In the array of viable business models, will there be one for every niche? We just don't know.
Disciplinary differences relevant to funding OA journals
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/lists.htm#disciplines
Most of the OA journals in the DOAJ do not charge processing fees. According to the new Kaufman-Wills study, presented at the London Book Fair last month, only 47% of OA journals do so. Those that don't charge fees have many different ways to pay their bills. Unfortunately, these fee-free funding models are not always described at the journal web sites. To be conservative we can assume that they are uneven in their long-term viability. If we had a good catalog of the many non-fee business models, then we could encourage experimentation in different disciplinary niches as well as micro-economic study of their viability. Making that catalog and running those studies are both tasks still waiting to be done.
The Kaufman-Wills study
http://www.alpsp.org/openacc.htm
http://www.alpsp.org/2005ppts/OAstudyresults_rev1.ppt
Here's another. Author-side fees work, but if journals want to use them in disciplines without as much research funding as biomedicine, then we'll have to get employers (universities, laboratories, governments) to start paying these fees alongside the pioneering foundations and funding agencies.
Universities might be willing to pay author-side fees for their faculty if it would be less expensive than paying journal subscriptions. The Cornell study in August 2004 (updated in December 2004) suggests that it is not, at least not for high-output research universities like Cornell. But the Cornell study incorrectly assumes that all OA journals charge processing fees (when only 47% do so), and that all processing fees would be paid by universities (when some will be paid by funding agencies). It also assumes that the low-end fee would be $2,500, which is much closer to the high end than the low end. There are many subtle new costs and new savings in the transition from TA to OA journals. But if we leave them temporarily to one side, and only work on making these three large assumptions more accurate, then we will almost certainly reverse the conclusion. Universities would pay less for OA journals than they pay now for TA journals. However, another task for the future is to get good enough numbers to confirm this conjecture and then to make it widely known among universities.
Report of Cornell University Libraries Task Force on OA Publishing, 8/9/04
http://techreports.library.cornell.edu:8081/Dienst/UI/1.0/Display/cul.lib/2004-3
December supplement to the August report
http://dspace.library.cornell.edu/handle/1813/236
* OA archives or repositories
None of the uncertainties facing OA journals stand in the way of OA archiving. Most journals could continue to charge subscriptions and we could still have 100% OA through archives. We might never find business models for OA journals in many fields and still have 100% OA through archives. Universities might never pay OA journal processing fees for their faculty and we might still have 100% OA through archives.
These are reasons to push forward for OA through archives *no matter what we do* about OA journals. My choice is to support both paths. But it doesn't matter whether the dual strategy is appealing to others.
Every university can and should have its own OA institutional repository. Every discipline could have an OA repository as well, like the exemplary arXiv in physics. We could get to 100% on either path or on both together. So even if there are reasons to prefer one path to the other, those reasons are secondary.
There are two barriers to the spread of OA archiving. First, the process of depositing articles in OAI-compliant repositories is too time-consuming or intimidating for many authors. Second, many authors do not have OA repositories in their institutions or disciplines. Let's look at these one at a time.
(1) The process of OA archiving is not intrinsically time-consuming or intimidating, but even low barriers are too high when authors are desperately short of time. One piece of good news is that we are making progress on automating the generation of metadata. This will reduce both the time and the difficulty of self-archiving and one day may automate the entire process after an author clicks "yes". Another piece of good news is that a new study by Leslie Carr and Stevan Harnad based on "two months of submissions for a mature repository" shows that "the amount of time spent entering metadata would be as little as 40 minutes per year for a highly active researcher." The problem isn't a real time-sink but a groundless fear of a time-sink.
Jane Greenberg et al., Final Report for the AMeGA (Automatic Metadata Generation Applications) Project, submitted to the Library of Congress, February 17, 2005.
http://www.loc.gov/catdir/bibcontrol/lc_amega_final_report.pdf
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2005_03_27_fosblogarchive.html#a111219331954819324
Leslie Carr and Stevan Harnad, Keystroke Economy: A Study of the Time and Effort Involved in Self-Archiving. A preprint put online March 15, 2005.
http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/10688/
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2005_03_13_fosblogarchive.html#a111100690216360884
(2) Many publishing researchers don't have OA repositories in their institutions or disciplines. The missing piece of the puzzle is an OAI-compliant "universal repository" that will accept eprints from any scholar in any discipline. I'm very happy to say in public for the first time that Brewster Kahle of the Internet Archive (IA) has agreed to launch just such a repository. I'm working with the technical staff of the IA to set it up now. Not only will it host new content for scholars with no other place to deposit their work, but it will offer to preserve all the other OAI-compliant repositories in the world. The IA's proven commitment to open access and long-term preservation make this a most exciting prospect. Moreover, the good people at the Creative Commons are working on a drag-and-drop interface for depositing new eprints in the IA repository. More details later.
The Internet Archive
http://www.archive.org/
Automating or semi-automating the archiving deposit process won't help scholars without deposit rights at an OA, OAI-compliant repository, and a universal repository won't help scholars who believe they are too busy to bother. That's why it's important that we're seeing progress on both fronts at once. Each development removes another excuse for not archiving.
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