The Ithaka report, on open access
By Peter SuberThere’s a lot to like about the Ithaka report. I especially appreciate its call on university presses to devote themselves more to online publication, to share publishing infrastructure to reduce costs, and to “provide a robust alternative to commercial competitors” (p. 30).
But I’m disappointed that it has so little to say about open access, and that its understanding of OA is so uneven. You don’t have to agree with me that OA is the most promising development for scholarly publishing since the birth of the internet to wish that the authors had given OA a fairer shake. So let me pick a few nits.
- On p. 6, the authors write, “Open access efforts may be a solution to some of these problems, but we will argue that there is no one-size-fits-all solution across disciplines and types of content.” In its context, this assertion leaves the impression that OA advocates would disagree. But all OA advocates I know acknowledge that the challenges and models differ from discipline to discipline (even if OA itself is desirable and feasible in each), and acknowledge that OA suits some types of content, like journal articles, better than other types, like books.
- On p. 10, they write, “The academic community seems to be looking to open access models as a solution to these challenges. But while open access may well be a sustainable solution in STM disciplines, where federal and private research grants can conceivably be extended to support publication fees, one model will not serve as a panacea.” Here they are assuming that all OA journals charge publication fees, and are unaware that in fact most OA journals charge no publication fees at all.
- In their questionnaire to university press directors (Appendix D, p. 46), they ask, “Is your university prepared to provide more subsidy to your press to make up for revenues lost to open access? How much more money would you be willing to budget for your press?” These are fair questions, but the authors ask no complementary questions along these lines: “Are you aware of the evidence that some OA journals make a profit or surplus? Are you aware of the evidence that some OA monographs stimulate a net increase in the sales of the print editions?”
October 19th, 2007 at 7:45 am
Peter has done us all a great service with his monthly newsletter on open access. I found it hugely helpful in preparing to draft the AAUP Statement on Open Access, which participants in this discussion might want to read: http://aaupnet.org/aboutup/issues/oa/index.html.
Peter is right that the Ithaka Report does not engage the debate about open access in a major way, but it is not totally absent either. The Report does refer to a number of “open access” experiments that university presses are engaged in, such as the one we are doing at Penn State in Romance Studies through our Office of Digital Scholarly Publishing: http://www.romancestudies.psu.edu.
What is unfortunate about the debate at present is that it is very narrowly focused on just journal publishing in the STM (science, technical, medical) fields. What the Ithaka Report usefully does–and our AAUP Statement tries to do also–is to widen that debate beyond STM to the humanities and social sciences, not just in journal publishing but in book publishing, too. It makes no sense, for the future of scholarly communication, to allow a “digital divide” to grow between journal and book content, which is already happening in the humanities and social sciences with the wide availability of such content through Project Muse and other journal content aggregators while book content remains largely accessible only in print form in a few hundred copies in major research libraries. So I hope this symposium will address the issues confronting book publishing and not just focus on journal publishing.