Business, Innovation and Skills CommitteeWritten evidence submitted by Royal Anthropological Institute
Executive Summary: It is feared that an unintended consequence of the implementation of Open Access will be to impact adversely on UK learned societies such as the Royal Anthropological Institute and their charitable activities. Suggestions are made as to how this may be ameliorated.
1. The Royal Anthropological Institute is a medium-sized charity which serves the subject of anthropology in this country and abroad. It has a world-wide reputation. In total, there are approximately 1700 individual subscribers across different categories of membership.
2. It employs some fourteen staff (many of whom are part-time), who administer its fellows, specialist committees, publications, and public programme of lectures and conferences.
3. The RAI is open to all: there is no restriction on any person who might wish to join.
4. Annual dues are modest. The full Fellows rate is £79 (plus VAT) per annum, in return for which a Fellow receives some eleven publications (six issues of Anthropology Today; five issues of the Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute). They also have complete access to the electronic back-catalogue.
The student rate is subsidised, therefore even lower. A subscription costs £30 per annum, for which the Student Fellow receives Anthropology Today, and electronic access to the Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute and its complete back catalogue.
5. The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute editor and reviewers receive no stipend.
6. The Fellows likewise receive no payment for serving on the Institute’s committees. This means that the RAI, and the public more generally who are interested in anthropology, gain many thousands of hours pro bono advice from the leading persons in the field.
7. The RAI has, over the course of its existence, had a profound impact in increasing the capacity of anthropology in this country and abroad, serving to encourage major initiatives, support younger scholars, encourage anthropology in schools, support ethnographic film making, and frequently acts in an advisory capacity as requested by research councils or government.
8. The small infrastructure which supports this much wider activity is reliant upon the income from institutional subscriptions to the Institute’s publications.
9. Institutional subscriptions are sold as part of a package by Wiley Blackwells on behalf of the RAI. Through these, the Journal has a global reach. There are approximately 90,000 article downloads a year.
10. These institutional subscriptions to the Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute and Anthropology Today are not expensive compared to many of the figures which have been quoted during the debate on open access. Freestanding access costs approximately £500. However, when it is part of the wider Wiley’s package, it costs a fraction of this (individual arrangements may vary, but perhaps no more than a third or a half). These packages go to many thousands of institutions. To poorer countries the package as a whole is free.
11. At present, then, a successful British institution has a global reach for a product which is both wanted and reasonably priced. The money is entirely reinvested for charitable purposes. The venture as a whole is a net contributor to the UK trade balance.
Open Access
12. We understand that the purpose of the enquiry is to comment on the implementation of Open Access.
13. The implementation of Open Access in cases such as ours, when our material is already very widely and cheaply available internationally, and the money gained used to support pro bono activities, may be unintentionally destructive. There is a very real danger that the move from a subscription model to Open Access may reduce rather than enhance the capacity of the field. We fear that our income will drain away, the RAI’s infrastructure reduced to a level when it can no longer support its committees, and the journal cease to exist.
It is our understanding that other learned societies, especially in the humanities and social sciences, similarly fear the effect that Open Access will have on their financial and operational viability.
14. We would propose that learned society journals below a certain threshold cost-wise (say £500 a year headline fee) be permitted to remain subscription based. This would enable efficient operations such as ours, which are already very open, to continue to provide vital services to scholarship whilst preventing profiteering.
We should emphasise afresh that any individual, and particularly students, can already subscribe to us direct extremely cheaply. We are, already, to a great degree “open”. This existing openness has not been recognised in the debate so far.
15. If an exception cannot be made for small operations such as ours, we would suggest that a three-year green embargo period be permissible.
16. We would like to propose that the above may be combined with a requirement for the principal publication from any RCUK funded grant to be gold, this to be assessed through the grant reporting procedures.
17. For RCUK to distribute gold access on the basis of research grants awarded would be quantifiable and transparent. We do not feel that the present proposal to distribute gold access payments through the universities is likely to be fair or equitable to all scholars: on the contrary it is likely to cause great disagreement and be potentially open to accusations of abuse.
18. It is not yet clear to what extent all publications from UK academics will be disbarred from all subscription outlets, for which we feel there remains an important place provided that they are modestly priced.
19. If however, the above clarification is made, and gold access administered through the research grant system, we believe that it may be possible to achieve a dual model where all RCUK research is published gold, but modestly-priced subscriptions remain an outlet for those with a special interest in that area.
Should this dual model be achievable, the move to Open Access is conceivably possible without jeopardising the well-being of the many learned societies in this country which contribute crucially to the intellectual life of the nation, and are responsible for the learned journals upon which the high international reputation of the country rests.
20. On the related issue of creative commons licensing, we feel that the issue is not yet fully understood by UK authors. We believe that there will be an overwhelming weight of opinion against creative commons licensing that permits reproduction without consent. In areas such as the social sciences, for example, authors often choose their outlets very carefully, and would be totally against their writings being taken by others, even with attribution. This means that we advocate “Non-commercial with no derivatives”.
However, our suggestion would be that there is need for a separate and careful enquiry into this issue alone, because licensing has profound implications, both for scholarship and intellectual property rights.
6 February 2013