Open Access

OA 01

Written evidence submitted by Dr Martin Paul Eve

Executive Summary

1. The recommendations of the Finch Report are broadly sound, but certain vocal groups are scaremongering against aspects that make sense in an ill-conceived attempt to preserve an already broken status quo.

2. It is not right that taxpayer-funded, or UK HEI supported, research should remain inaccessible to the general public. Gold Open Access is a sound way of redistributing the existing financial inequalities within the system.

3. It is not right that taxpayer-funded, or UK HEI supported, research should remain unusable by the general public. It is important that the Creative Commons Attribution License remains at the core of the Open Access policy.

4. The Finch Report, however, failed to consider some of the statements in the Budapest Open Access Initiative Statement that could have provided alternative funding models for the transition.

Introduction to the submitter

5. I (Dr. Martin Paul Eve) am a lecturer in English at the University of Lincoln, the founder of a new initiative to establish the Open Library of the Humanities (an Open Access humanities mega-journal) and a researcher into Open Access. I have given the keynote address at the UKSG scholarly publishing conference and I edit two small Gold Open Access academic journals. I am on the steering committee for the JISC OAPEN-UK project that investigates the impact of Open Access on scholarly monographs. I am broadly in favour of the recommendations of the Finch Report, for ethical reasons, and would like to submit statements based on my expertise that support many of the proposed changes, with some minor criticisms that I believe the inquiry should consider.

Submission of Factual Evidence

6. The Open Access model introduces changes across three interrelated axes: access, permissibility and finance. I have statements supported by factual evidence that I wish to submit that concern each of these elements in turn.

7. In terms of access, Open Access publishing is a necessary shift. At present, especially in the humanities where research is more frequently locked behind paywalls, only an extremely small number of individuals have access to work that has been funded by the research councils or supported by UK based HEIs (Higher Education Institutions). Those outside of Higher Education have little ability to access this expensive material, which represents a poor return on tax-payer investment (as well as damaging the economic case for the importance of Higher Education). Furthermore, even many institutions are struggling to cope with the increase in journal subscription expenditure by 300% above inflation since 1986 (Eve). We simply cannot afford to buy the research, which we wrote in the first place, for our students and continuing research success.

8. Moving on to notions of permissibility, this "return on investment" is a fundamental principle of taxation in a liberal society. The Creative Commons Attribution license (CC-BY) that has been mandated by the acceptance of the Finch Report is a clear step towards ensuring that society receives the maximum benefit from this, not only in terms of access, but in the ability to re-use material. There have been, however, several vocal, but misplaced, criticisms of this put forward by both the Institute of Historical Research (Institute of Historical Research) and by several academics in the London Review of Books (Jones et al.). I would like to pre-empt these criticisms which I anticipate will form part of the inquiry.

9. Without wishing to overly criticise the authors of these position statements, their institutions represent an extremely well-funded minority and it may be the case that they do not struggle to persuade their institutions to purchase the journals necessary for their research and for their students’ continuing success. This is not a situation replicated across the spectrum.

10. Furthermore, one of the criticisms of CC-BY, that it will enable "plagiarism" is wholly untrue and betrays a fundamental misunderstanding of various terms. Plagiarism is something that can still be enforced because this is an academic, not a legal, term. If an academic’s work is falsely appropriated without credit, institutional sanctions will still be applied, even if re-use is permitted by the license. We know how to "attribute" in the academy; it’s called citation and we do it already.

11. The authors’ concerns about commercial re-use are also misplaced. If publicly funded academic work is commercially re-used, with credit given, the academics themselves have lost nothing; it’s not as though the publishers paid for the work in the first place. Instead, society has gained by the use of RCUK-funded (or institutionally supported) material. We could also have good faith that people will cite properly, even in the commercial field, or that the CC license will be upheld in law to a satisfactory degree. After all, this has worked for CopyLeft licenses in various jurisdictions, such as the GPL (‘Gpl-violations.org Project Prevails in Court Case on GPL Violation by D-Link’).

12. It is also worth saying that the bounds of CC-BY-NC (Non-Commercial) licenses that could form an alternative are unclear (Möller). Universities are considered commercial entities. Publishers likewise. This will mean that, were this proposed as an alternative to the more permissive license, these entities cannot fully reuse this material. The boundary of "commercial" use is not delineated as clearly as might be thought and is extremely problematic for the modern university.

13. Thinking now about issues of finance, it is clear that financial structural problems already exist in the scholarly publication system; many cannot pay for access and the Serials Crisis has been driven by quantified metrics and evaluation such as the Research Excellence Framework. Journals are expensive because they have reputational currency in such evaluation procedures, rather than because one journal enhances scholarly communication more than another (Eve). The proposed shift to an Article Processing Charge model has caused alarm in some quarters merely because new, previously privileged, parties are being exposed to the existing financial problems and inequality.

14. I would like to express concern, however, at the insistence placed within the Finch recommendations upon preserving the status quo of powerful academic publishers with vast profit margins when there are severe problems affecting the production and consumption of academic knowledge; crucial to the knowledge economy. Elsevier's takings of $2bn profits in 2009 – when institutions are struggling to pay for material – show another side of the financial problem (Morrison).

15. Indeed, the Finch Report did not consider many alternative funding models proposed by the Budapest Open Access Initiative Statement; the founding document of the movement (Chan et al.). This may be because of the heavy representation of commercial publisher interests on the panel. One of these was that Gold Open Access routes could be subsidised by HEIs themselves and this is the approach that we will attempt with the Open Library of the Humanities.

Recommendations for Action

16. I recommend the mandate of Gold Open Access for all RC-UK-funded research (indeed, I would go further and say all UK HEI output, given the financial problems with the current system), with some caveats (see paragraphs 14, 15 and 19).

17. I recommend the use of a Creative Commons Attribution License (CC-BY) to ensure maximum return and benefit to the UK taxpayer.

18. I recommend that the Creative Commons Non-Commercial or Derivative licenses are ruled out of consideration.

19. I recommend exploration of the neglected funding routes for Gold Open Access (institutional subsidy) and the introduction of measures to ensure that commercial publisher interests do not dominate the debate.

20. I recommend that the government seriously consider ways in which future iterations of the Research Excellence Framework can downplay the importance of journal brand, as these measures contribute massively to the cost of scholarly publishing when publishers thrive off notions of "reputation" that are then assessed under REF.

21 January 2013

Chan, Leslie et al. ‘Budapest Open Access Initiative’. 14 Feb. 2002. Web. 18 Feb. 2011.

Eve, Martin Paul. ‘Tear It down, Build It up: The Research Output Team, or the Library-as-publisher’. Insights: the UKSG journal 25.2 (2012): 158–162. Web. 6 July 2012.

‘Gpl-violations.org Project Prevails in Court Case on GPL Violation by D-Link’. GPL Violations. Web. 21 Jan. 2013.

Institute of Historical Research. ‘Statement on Position in Relation to Open Access’. Web. 21 Jan. 2013.

Jones, Colin et al. ‘Universities Under Attack’. London Review of Books 35.2 (2013): n. pag. Web. 21 Jan. 2013.

Möller, Erik. ‘Creative Commons -NC Licenses Considered Harmful’. kuro5hin.org. 2005. Web. 21 Jan. 2013.

Morrison, Heather. ‘Elsevier 2009 $2 Billion Profits Could Fund Worldwide OA at $1,383 Per Article’. The Imaginary Journal of Poetic Economics. Web. 21 Jan. 2013.