Business, Innovation and Skills CommitteeWritten evidence submitted by the Agricultural Economics Society

1. The Agricultural Economics Society 1 (AES) welcomes this opportunity to provide evidence to the Committee in the form of the following memorandum.

2. The AES has survived and developed successfully as a mutual association of professionals in the academic, commercial and public sectors since 1926, largely on account of the subscriptions to its Journal.

3. The Journal of Agricultural Economics (JAE) is published in three issues per year, and is currently one of the leading Agricultural Economics and Policy journals in the ISI Journal Citation Lists,2 being the second most highly cited journal amongst a peer group of 15 leading international journals in the subject area.

4. In addition to the JAE, the Society in conjunction with the European Association of Agricultural Economists, also publishes an outreach journal, EuroChoices,3 in three issues per year, which aims to disseminate important research results and ideas to a wider policy audience than the typical readership of academic journals.

5. Without this extremely valuable subscription income, the sustainability of the Society in anything like its present form is extremely questionable. Without such a society, the profession of practicing and training applied (agricultural) economists would lack an organised forum for mutual support, discussion, collaboration, professional skills development, knowledge advancement, innovation and dissemination.

6. This danger is especially worrying at the present time, with the world facing the major challenges of resource depletion, climate change and sustainable economic growth for a still rapidly growing global population, with food supply capacities being severely stretched. The AES, in particular through its Journal, has been in the forefront of contributing to the analysis of these key public interest issues from an economics perspective. As the Finch report 4 (Executive summary) notes: “there are risks to the intricate ecology of research and communication, and the support that is provided to researchers, enabling them to perform to best standards, under established publishing regimes. Concern about these risks may restrain the development of wider access if it is not managed in a measured way.”

7. We certainly subscribe to the principle that knowledge should be freely available to all, and support the principle of the Finch recommendations and the clear policy direction towards support for “Gold” open access publishing, where publishers receive their revenues from authors rather than readers, and so research articles become freely accessible to everyone immediately upon publication (Gold OA).

8. However, we urge the Government, through your committee, to address three key issues arising from the Finch report and we await the Government’s response with interest:

(a)More attention must be given to a viable green OA option since there will be insufficient funding for article processing charges (APCs); if embargo periods are too short, the subscription journals are at risk, as are the societies that heavily rely on the revenue they generate.

(b)A review of a Creative Commons based licensing policy is required to ensure licenses provide enough flexibility; this should include considering other licensing options. In addition, we question the right to impose licensing policy on green OA articles.

(c)More resources need to be committed to implementation in order to cover not just the cost of APCs but also of organising payment of APCs.

9. There is a clear need for full and proper consultation with learned and professional societies, and other associated stakeholders, to manage the efficient and effective transition towards more open access, while minimising the risks to the intricate ecology of research, development and communication.

10. There may be wider implications for learned societies that are heavily dependent on journal subscription income from the differential (in time and in method) adoption of OA across countries in terms of the incentives and disincentives to authors in publishing their research. This is an aspect which the Committee might also consider.

7 February 2013