RE: NIH Public Access Mandate Passes Senate

["Armbruster, Chris" <Chris.Armbruster@EUI.eu>]

Intervention on cost of open access:

arXiv, SSRN and RePEc estimate their 'first copy costs' at $1-5. 
They provide services that are free to authors and readers, 
including sophisticated literature awareness tools and 
statistics. They do not organise peer review, editing and 
copy-editing. But consider the difference to the average first 
copy costs estimated by stm/ALPSP of $3500 or charged by Springer 
Open Choice ($3000) or PLoS and BioMed Central (from $515 to 
$2750). Surely several hundred dollars per article will on 
average be enough to provide sophisticated certification and 
editing services currently not available from repositories. On 
that basis, it would be possible to save libraries millions of 
dollars if open access publishing reform were done right. I have 
argued as much in a recent article in Learned Publishing: 
<http://dx.doi.org/10.1087/095315107X239627> (OA embargo 12 
months, pre-print as *Society Publishing, the Internet and Open 
Access: Shifting Mission-Orientation from Content Holding to 
Certification and Navigation Services?* available at 
<http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3D997819>

Intervention on open access strategy:

Many proponents of the green and the gold road have lost sight of 
what open access was meant to strategically accomplish: enhance 
access, inclusion and impact. The big disciplinary repositories 
like arXiv, SSRN and RePEc, but also Citeseer and others are 
models of enhancing access, inclusion and impact in ways that:

- Green OA by means of institutional repositories (expensive 
digital doubling of research articles that aren't even originals 
but only 'dirty' copies); and

- Gold OA by means of hybrid publishing (interspersion of OA in 
otherwise closed journals for which publishers continue to hoard 
content) will never be.

Intervention on mandating:

Mandates may be legitimate as collective action if they secure 
the further progress of science (and this includes establishing a 
more efficient publishing system). Mandates may also be in the 
best interest of the author (consider as analogy mandatory 
car/driver insurance). Moreover, in the present circumstances, 
transfer of copyright agreements for research articles are not 
'negotiated' individually between the author and the publisher 
but simply sent out as default by publishers in the reasonnable 
expectation that they may thus lock away the content and maximise 
their rents.

In these circumstances, research funding councils, universities 
and research libraries have an understandable and justified 
collective interest in altering the standard copyright contract 
to ensure that the research literature becomes available more 
cheaply and with extensive use and re-use permissions (e.g. for 
text and data mining). I have argued as much in a piece that won 
the Yale A2K2 writing competition in 2007. The article will 
shortly be forthcoming in the International Journal of 
Communication Law and Policy, but in the meantime the pre-print 
*Cyberscience and the Knowledge-Based Economy, Open Access and 
Trade Publishing: from Contradiction to Compatibility with 
Nonexclusive Copyright Licensing* may be found here: 
<http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3D938119>

Chris Armbruster