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. 

Open Access across the Disciplines

I’m currently organizing a series of events at my university for Open Access Week (Oct 22-28), so my head is full of open access right now. It is my sense that there isn’t a very high level of awareness about open access or the many related issues in scholarly publishing at my institution, so I’m creating a workshop for faculty that will be, I hope, both informative and persuasive.

Luckily, fellow Bookaneer Althea, alerted me to a piece by Marisa Ramírez in the most recent issue of the Journal of Librarianship and Scholarly Communication. Ramírez relates a true story about a doctor who wanted to distribute to other doctors an emergency room checklist developed by researchers at another institution, but because the original authors had signed away their copyrights when publishing the checklist it took months and many emails and phone calls to receive permission to distribute it. The doctor, when he finally received permission, was glad, but wondered how many lives could’ve been saved if he had been able to distribute the checklist sooner.

It is a great and obviously compelling story about the real-life impact of “locked” content, and the potential value of open access. How can you argue with this? Open access saves lives! However, these stories always leave me feeling bad for the other disciplines. The impact of open access is not always (actually, rarely) about life and death. In most cases, the effects of access to scholarship are less immediate, but I believe still essential and life-changing (if not always life-saving).

The promise of open access is the same as the promise of education. Research and scholarship are transformative because they expose us to new ideas and change the way we think about the world. I still remember certain transformative readings when I was in college: reading Tocqueville and Rousseau changed the way I thought about citizenship and democracy; Amartya Sen haunted my study of Political Science; and two radical feminists bookended my undergraduate career, first an essay by Andrea Dworkin and finally a commencement address by Angela Davis. These are just a few scholars, critics, and theorists that have transformed or impacted the way I see the world, how I interact with it, and really, who I am today. Now I have no idea how I accessed these readers, through books or articles, in print or online. But, does it matter? The point is, access to scholarship is transformative. Knowledge shared and circulated is powerful. Knowledge kept under lock and key isn’t knowledge, it is a secret. This is what open access is about, it is about sharing ideas freely and the belief that more thought, more information, more knowledge make the world better.

I bring this up, because while open access is much more prevalent and less controversial in the sciences, there are still many misunderstandings and reservations in other disciplines. Earlier this week, the American Historical Association issued a statement acknowledging the inequities of the current scholarly publishing system, but also expressing concern over their perceptions of the open access model. Others have addressed the AHA’s statement (here, and here), but it points to a real need for open access advocates to address the value of OA in the social sciences and the humanities as well in the sciences.

As I write this I am very aware of the many elements of and obstacles to changing the systems of scholarly publishing. The AHA is concerned chiefly about the mechanics of open access publishing, and less about the potential value. I have further thoughts about the diffusion of publishing in the open access model, and the return of publishing to the purview of universities and scholarly societies, but these are for a different blog post. For now, I would like to reiterate that sharing scholarship freely and widely can have a profound and lasting impact on our society, be it in the sciences or other fields. I second Ramírez’s call:

As the 6th annual Open Access Week approaches, think about how you can tell your story so others understand “why OA?”.

I personally am thinking of stories in library science, in women’s studies, in history, in political science, and in the many fields where knowledge and scholarship have transformed my life.