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Opportunity Knocks: Is the Open Access
Movement Meeting its Full Potential? |
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17 January 2005 |
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As the enthusiasm for open access publishing in academic
and scientific circles is starting to reach a fever pitch,
publishers such as the Public Library of Science (PLoS) are
adding new journals and getting more support to subsidize
authors' contributions. This heady atmosphere is not
without clouds on the horizon, though. The headlong rush to
embrace open access publishing as a business model has
created an anti-profit zeal that may limit its
commercial success - a limitation that will give commercial
publishers plenty of time to think about how they want to
adopt their own business models to this new environment.
Nobody has the corner on the market for publishing wisdom
these days. Thank goodness. |
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The movement
towards open access scientific, technical and medical journals
got a big boost last week. As noted in the
Library Journal and our earlier
weblog, the open access publisher
Public Library
of Science (PLoS) is receiving support from the British
Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) and is readying
three new titles for its scientific journal stable focusing on
computational biology, genetics and pathogens. With U.K.
council funding, new products to crow about and a surging buzz
surrounding the open access movement there's a lot of positive
spin for PLoS to leverage these days. Open access is not going
away, as much as many established publishers would like it to.
The question is, though, where is it going? The
good news for schools and professionals is that the broadening
supply of free-to-users content makes for wide access to
leading-edge ideas, increasing knowledge and accelerating
discoveries. As noted in
Janice McCallum's
earlier news analysis on open access, exposing journals
content to a wider array of search technologies allows it to
flow into many more useful contexts, creating many new
opportunities for creating content value.
More problematic, though, are the
business models that are - and aren't - being developed to
underpin the open access movement. The theory is that
governmental largesse to support open access journals will
result in accelerated discoveries that pay back into the
overall economy in a way that will make the government's
underwriting a small and reasonable investment to promote lower
health costs and higher technology paybacks. The use of fees
charged to authors for vetting and distribution services helps
to defray costs not underwritten by governments and other
organizations such as pharmaceutical companies, recognizing that publication generally has a
high professional payback for authors. Membership fees for
individuals and institutions help to absorb funds that would be
otherwise spent on traditional journals and create a sense of
community ownership in the success of the endeavour. All
well and good to get a healthy open archive started and a good
flow of content to the public established.
But what happens when it comes time to
enhance an open access product? How far will this business
model carry open access content as technologies modify and
migrate over time? What happens when new platforms demand new
kinds of integration? What happens when some see new
opportunities for providing value from open access content that
others in the community don't see? A not-for-profit ".org"
attitude is key for many basic content initiatives these days
to gain wide community support and minimize the exploitation of
overpriced content services. But equating openness with
lack of profitability is likely to create a drag on the open
access movement in time, a drag that's not going to go
unchallenged by established publishers. Here are a few thoughts
for all involved in or confronting open access to consider:
- Established publishers aren't going
away and are still well-funded. As
noted in The Sunday Times Springer Science & Business
Media is investigating the floatation of a EUR 2 billion
initial public offer to inject new capital into its array of
70 companies and 1,500 academic and professional journals.
Now, short of bilking investors before the bottom fell out of
the journals marketplace, why would a major publishing
concern so closely tied to the success of commercial journals
take such an aggressive stance in the marketplace? To make
some more money, one assumes. While the fundamental
underpinnings of the journals industry are challenged as
never before, there are a wealth of people in that industry
that are investigating ways to adapt to the challenge -
wealth of wealthy people, at that. Many are rooting for David
right now, but there's more than one Goliath to take into
consideration.
- Commercial journals can go open,
too. Will 90 percent of academic and professional
journals be open access to at least some degree in the
foreseeable future? Probably. Will that mean that all
journals will be not-for-profit community collaborations?
Probably not. Just as open access has created a commercial
heresy of sorts, new heresies can be invented by commercial
interests looking to create their own open access content
with additional monetization opportunities that will be
perceived as high value enhancements by their audiences.
Google Scholar has not been shy about the idea of getting
advertising to support its own open access efforts, and
there's no reason that commercial journals should shirk at
new commercial opportunities in open access content either.
- There's more to content than text
and figures. Getting text and illustrations into the
hands of the masses is "step one" in publishing these days,
but it's hardly the last step in creating value out of
academic and professional content. Sophisticated services
such as
Thomson's ISI Web of Knowledge may have much to gain as
they look at absorbing and indexing open access content into
their sophisticated tools for mining and monitoring this
content. Revenues from such high-end products may be fed back
to develop more effective approaches to open access with more
flexibility and responsiveness to market needs than
underwriting from institutions and governments that may have
a bevy of political interests to assuage before moving ahead
on important new developments.
There's no doubt that the open access
movement has changed the landscape of academic and professional
publishing irrevocably, largely for the better. Publishers
lagging in innovations were due for a challenge, so hats off to
PLoS and other open access publishers for stirring things up at
the right time. But that's not to say that their time will not
pass if they do not think more soberly as to how to survive in
a world of commercial interests that have the wherewithal to
rethink how they respond to a changing marketplace's needs.
There's no one organization or institution that has cornered
the market for publishing wisdom, something that should assure
all those concerned with the future of academic and
professional publishing. Open access is a business model, not a
religion, something open to amendment and reconsideration at
the market's behest at any time that it sees fit. May the best
models win - for our own sakes.
-
John Blossom
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