Value and Values in Academic Publishing

This week, Alexander K. Brown, of Springer, published an op-ed in The Guardian pushing back against the open access movement by arguing that traditional academic publishers still add value. I want to respond to this, because in his piece he sets up a straw-man argument that misrepresents the arguments in the open access community as much as he claims that community has misrepresented the value of traditional publishing.

Brown paraphrases the whole of the open access argument thus: “the ill-conceived notion frequently advanced by commercial publishing's detractors is that all we do is polish a manuscript, put it online and then sit back and wait for the next sucker to submit an article.” Brown suggests that open access is about taking advantage of the cost savings associated with the move to online journal distribution.

He goes on to list the different ways that traditional publishers add value in the publication process. These include editing, recognizing emerging fields and creating new journals, managing editorial boards and peer review, developing new platforms, helping customers, facilitating access through description and metadata, among other things.

Brown lays out the time and labor that goes into journal publishing, and I don’t want to gloss over the fact that publishers do add value through their work and products. However, the premise of Brown’s argument is flawed. Open access proponents know and freely acknowledge that publishing online takes time and effort. So though open access arose partially in response to exorbitant journal prices, isn’t just about money.

Open access is about the values of academia and who controls the scholarly production of knowledge. Scholars do research in order to create new knowledge and benefit society through advances in science, technology, culture, and theory. Scholarly publishing has its roots in the Republic of Letters, where ideas were freely exchanged in order to further our understanding of the world, and those values are still central to the academy today. There is a fundamental and irreconcilable difference between the values of the scholarly community and those of the for-profit publishing industry. The crisis of journal pricing was merely a wake-up call about the degree to which we had let publishers take control over our scholarship. Open access is about the academic community taking back the ability to decide how we will share and build knowledge.

On Brown’s implicit argument that open access cannot financially sustain a comparable system of publishing, I say: we don’t have to. As Peter Suber discusses in his book Open Access, many of the costs of traditional publishing are eliminated when you are no longer selling subscriptions. The costs of marketing, branding, and customer service evaporate when you no longer have customers.