The Digital Downside
The Obsession with Open Access[1]
J.
Ewing
Scholars and librarians usually
focus on the advantages of electronic journals—faster processing, reduced
costs, and new features (such as searching and linking)—and there are indeed
many such advantages. But like all technology, electronic journals have a
downside as well. Most people have ignored this downside because these problems
are presently little more than annoyances. But we should understand the
downside in order to prevent these small annoyances from turning into big
crises in the future. In one or two cases, it may already be too late.
Here are five problems with
electronic journals—problems that arise when the miraculous new technology is
combined with the human frailities of carelessness, greed, myopia, dogmatism,
and infatuation.
1 Careless Scholars
In the digital age, we can do
things we could never do before. Here are some examples from the recent
literature of things we can do:
- A journal
posts an article in January; in April, without any notice, the editors
replace the article with a “corrected” version.
- A journal
posts an article in July; in November, the publisher simply removes the
article (without notifying the authors!).
- A journal
posts an article in April, but the author posts a corrected and
substantially changed version on a well-known server in October, with an
indication that the article appeared in April, but no indication that it
was different.
Mathematics relies on its
literature for its underpinnings; its literature is interconnected. Imagine a
world in which one percent of the mathematical literature is affected in the
above way, in which one percent of the articles one finds are not the
“authentic” versions. Over time, as work based on faulty references spreads,
the fraction of unreliable literature will increase. Experts may be able to
overcome this, but nonexperts will be overwhelmed. We ignore this potential
crisis at the peril of future generations of mathematicians.
These sloppy practices occur
because new technology allows us to do things never before possible. That
doesn’t mean we should do them! To prevent this from destroying the scholarly
literature, we need to insist on high standards. There are two ways to handle
this—back-linking or forward-linking—and both require discipline. Every author
regrets publishing mistakes (as do publishers!), but we have to resist the
temptation to hide them.
2 Big Deals
The electronic age has made it
possible for big publishers to offer big deals. Here’s the way they work.
Rather than subscribing to journals one by one, an institution is offered
electronic access to a huge package of journals across many fields (many of
which were previously unavailable to the institution). Initially, the cost of
this package is comparable to the cost of the publisher’s journals to which the
institution previously subscribed, and (the publisher points out) it’s always
far less than the total cost of the individual subscriptions. This seems to be
a wonderful opportunity for the institution, and the vice-president for
information (the one who negotiated the deal) crows about the fiscal prowess
that brought about this arrangement.
Big deals are now offered by Elsevier (an innovator in this area), Springer, Wiley, Blackwell, and Taylor & Francis. In a recent survey of US research libraries, 93% indicated that they held bundles with at least one of these publishers. Just about half (49%) held bundles with at least four. Wiley, Elsevier, and Springer have achieved 70% market penetration.[2]
Big deals are now offered by Elsevier (an innovator in this area), Springer, Wiley, Blackwell, and Taylor & Francis. In a recent survey of US research libraries, 93% indicated that they held bundles with at least one of these publishers. Just about half (49%) held bundles with at least four. Wiley, Elsevier, and Springer have achieved 70% market penetration.[2]
When asked about their
motivation, most said that it was a “good return on investment” and that the
“alternatives . . . were prohibitively expensive.”
But these institutions have paid
a heavy price for that “good investment.” Such big deals are almost always
multi-year contracts that do not allow cancellations or changes. The extra
titles are often of marginal value to scholars. Most importantly, decisions
about what is purchased are made at a high level, far removed from scholars
themselves. In the end, big deals make it more difficult for scholars to make
sensible decisions about journals based on price and need. Of course, big deals
give the big publishers a substantial advantage over smaller publishers, which
is their real purpose.
Big deals are hard to resist,
although a few prominent libraries have done so. But the commercial publishers
are winning. In 1985, roughly a third of mathematics articles were in
commercial journals; by 2004, over half the articles were commercial.[3] We need to fight back.
3 Walt Disney
The Walt Disney story is a
metaphor. The first Mickey Mouse cartoon was produced and copyrighted in 1928.
By the late 1990s, the term of copyright for Mickey Mouse (then 75 years for
corporate works) was about to expire in 2003. The Disney corporation was making
lots of money on the character, partly because new technology allowed new uses.
What did Disney do? It persuaded the US Congress to change the law, extending
copyright by 20 years. It is now 95 years for corporations; for authored
works, copyright extends for the life of the author plus 70 years.
Copyright—the ability to own
intellectual property—was never meant to be forever (the late Jack Valenti, as
head of the movie producers’ association, was overheard to say the term should
be “forever minus a day”). But as technology progressed over the past 400
years, copyright became longer and longer . . . barely indistinguishable from
forever. Until the digital age, this did not affect scholarly publishing much.
Now, however, there are new reasons to worry about copyright’s reach.
Scholarly publishers have never
made much money by selling journal back volumes. In the age of print,
publishers kept a few copies of old journals to sell to libraries when they
wanted to replace missing volumes or (rarely) to start a new collection.
Typically, such sales of back volumes amounted to one to three percent of
journal revenues. Publishers expected to recover their initial costs (and make
a profit) by selling current subscriptions, not by selling back volumes.
Now, however, like the Disney
corporation, publishers see an opportunity to make money on their old material
using new technology. They want to sell their journals twice, once as a current
subscription and a second time as a collection of backfiles. There are many
variations on this scheme, some merely sell the backfiles with the current
subscription, pointing out that it makes the subscription more valuable (and
hence more expensive). But the central point is that publishers carefully
control access to the backfiles.
Of course, publishers who
digitize their back volumes want to recover their costs. But rather than find a
way to pay the one-time cost of digitization, and then make the material freely
available, they want to continue making money next year, and the year after
that, and after that, and on and on into the future. This includes publishers
of every kind, not just the commercial ones.
This doesn’t make sense for Mickey
Mouse, but it makes even less sense for scholarship. By “owning” scholarship
and restricting access indefinitely, publishers make it impossible to realize
the dream of connecting the large body of the past scholarly literature to the
present. This makes our present journals less valuable, not more, and
ultimately hurts the publishers themselves.
Copyright was invented to make
publishing profitable. But no one— no publisher, no author, no one—needs to hold
copyright for more than two or three decades. We ought to make a pact that
everything goes into the public domain after 28 years.[4]
4 Mindless Accountants
Using flawed statistics to make
(equally flawed) decisions is not new. But it is so, so much easier to do in the
digital age. Many people have written about the “impact factor,” which is more
and more frequently misused, but I want to talk about another troublesome
statistic—journal usage, which is even more dangerous than the impact factor.
Librarians all over the world
are insisting on usage statistics for journals, which roughly translates into
the number of downloads of various articles over a given period of time. They
claim this is necessary in order to measure the value of journals and to make
decisions about subscriptions. Publishers in general seem happy to
oblige—almost eager in many cases.
This is a hopelessly naive and
dangerous game. What is the meaning of such usage statistics? What does it mean
that some article has been downloaded 100 times? Have people read it 100 times?
Surely not— you don’t read every item on which you click while browsing the
web, so why would scholars read every article they download? And which is more
valuable, an article downloaded once a week for ten years, or one downloaded
520 times in its first month? What about caching and the many flaws in browser
software that give rise to faulty counts? There are many questions, but almost
no answers—just the demand for usage statistics in order to measure value.
Making decisions using ignorant
accounting has always been a bad idea, but in this case it may have some
disastrous consequences. If librarians are really going to measure value by
clicks, surely publishers will force users to click more often. It would be
foolish to give away abstracts or references or even bibliographic data, for
example, if this leads to fewer clicks and hence less value. And if value
equals clicks, then why on earth would publishers let authors post copies of
papers anywhere except on the publisher’s website. The more liberal a publisher’s
policy in this regard, the more the publisher risks losing value. Making
decisions by using flawed usage statistics will inevitably shift publishers’
practices, all in the wrong direction. We need to explain this to those who
dogmatically claim that value can be measured by a few flawed numbers.
5 Fads and Fashions
A corrupted literature, a
literature controlled by a handful of giant publishers, a literature hidden
away forever, a literature shaped by nutty accountants using flawed
statistics—all these are potential crises caused by the advent of electronic
publishing. None is insurmountable, but each is worrisome. And so with these
worries pressing upon us, what do we advance as our most pressing issue in the
new electronic age? Access—open access to the literature.
On the face of it, this is
bizarre. In the digital age, scholars have more access to the literature than
ever before. When an institution subscribes to a journal, the articles are now
delivered straight to a user’s desktop. Finding articles is far easier than
ever before using any number of search tools. Articles can be downloaded,
printed, and (dare we admit?) sent to others via email. Even when a user’s
institution does not subscribe to a journal, the user can see the abstract and
(often) the list of references. This allows scholars to decide whether the
article is useful and then to send email to the author to ask for a copy (or
simply to find it elsewhere on the web—recent changes in publisher policies make
this easy). And many publishers provide access to older articles without any
subscription at all. None of this was possible in the print-only world—none of
it! In the print world, good access to the scholarly literature was restricted
to a few institutions, and near-universal access was unheard of. This has all
changed.
Nonetheless, instead of focusing
on the four potential crises mentioned above, the scholarly community has
decided to focus on access, the one aspect of the scholarly literature that has
already been greatly improved in the digital age.
I have spent a lot of time
trying to understand why people seem obsessed with access, and I have come to
realize that there is no simple answer. In part, it is human nature: when
things improve, we want to improve them still more. Having a taste of increased
access, people want completely unfettered access. In part, this is because the
call to “open access” is simple to understand. Scholars are not willing to
invest time in wrestling with the tougher issues of scholarly publishing
mentioned above, which are messy and sometimes hard to unravel. But there is a
more subtle, and more insidious, reason for the obsession with access: whenever
technology changes the world around us, we become more susceptible to fads and
fashions. New technology opens up new opportunities, and new opportunities
bring forth opportunists— zealous people who promote their own special causes.
On the face of it, increased
access is surely not a bad thing: it is hard to argue against having more
access to scholarship. On the other hand, it can be bad if it causes us to
ignore the real problems we face, and it can be tragic if new enticing
technology combines with an irresistible fad to mislead us into acting against
our own interests.
Open access has had both effects
on mathematics. When planning for our digital future, we spend most of our
time talking about access (already greatly improved), and almost no time
talking about the integrity of scholarship, copyright issues, foolish
bureaucrats who use faulty statistics, or (worst of all!) avaricious publishers
who have created a crisis in scholarly publishing. Instead, we talk about access.
And, of course, those avaricious publishers are delighted by the distraction.
We also formulate ideas that are
clearly bad for mathematics. The author-pay model for journals simply does not
work for mathematicians. Our funding levels do not support it and they never
will, at least at the levels of medical sciences. We will always be at a
competitive disadvantage to other scientists in an author-pay world.
The self-archiving model of open
access is clearly bad for mathematics, which more than any other discipline
depends on the long-term survival of a reliable web of scholarship—into the
distant future many decades from now. And preprint servers, without any obvious
source of long-term funding, are not much more attractive.
The government-funded model of
open access is also clearly bad for mathematics, which has never competed well
with the other sciences for government largess. Besides, the budget for the
government-funded model seems to assume a stable publishing environment for the
long term, without the need to invest in ever changing technology. Surely this
is short-sighted. We will have to invest even more in the coming decade than we
have in the past in order to keep up with changing technology. Will the
government really do that investing?
Indeed, every model of open
access that has been proposed is clearly detrimental to the broad interests of
mathematicians. But open access has become an obsession for many that has
blinded otherwise thoughtful people into acting against their own interests.
That is a real downside to new technology that may do the most damage in the
long term. This is a downside that already affects us.
Don’t believe me? Just check out
those large commercial publishers who are all beginning to embrace open access.
They are creating separate corporate units, just to promote and implement open
access. They can do that—they have the resources. They know that no matter how
the business model changes, they will be able to take advantage of it to make
money—lots of it. Surely publishers who have raised subscription prices for
years will feel equally free to raise author charges in the future. Change is
good for large corporations, who have the resources to invest in change; it is
a lot harder for the little guys who operate on a tight budget and make a tiny
profit. This is especially bad for mathematics, which has traditionally relied
on more small and independent journals than any other discipline. If open
access is so great for us—if open access is about to solve all our problems—why
are the commercial publishers jumping on the bandwagon?
6 Summing Up
Are there disadvantages to
electronic journals? Of course there are. Should we advocate abandoning the
digital age because of those disadvantages? Of course not. And in any case,
the digital age is here to stay, no matter what we advocate. But as we move
forward into the new age, we need to make clear the principles that should
underlie our scholarly literature.
I believe in formulating clear
policies about the integrity of scholarship. I believe in fighting to keep
decision making in the hands of scholars. I believe that no one should own
ideas for too long—scholarship belongs to all of us and moving walls should be
universal. And I believe that scholars, and not accountants, should measure
the value of scholarship.
But I believe most of all that
we must stay focused on these real problems as the world changes around us, and
not be distracted by fads—especially fads that will hurt mathematics (and
scholarship more generally) in the long run.
The digital age will
dramatically change the way in which we disseminate scholarship in the future
. . . but we have to guide that change so that it makes things better and not
worse.
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