Bad Times are Good Times for Open Access?

["Joseph J. Esposito" <espositoj@gmail.com>]

In a long and polemical post, Leslie Chan stated that "OA is the 
only sustainable way to build local research capacity in the long 
term."  I don't wish to argue the broad open access issue yet 
again, but I would like to know in what sense OA is more 
sustainable than toll-access publications, assuming OA is 
sustainable at all.

The fact is that neither OA nor toll-access publishing is 
"sustainable." How could they be?  They are both subject to the 
same vagaries of the marketplace, the economy, and the changing 
interests of funding agencies and the research community, not to 
mention the technological transformation known as "Cloud 
computing," which, through streaming, will pretty much put an end 
to unauthorized copying.

One would have thought that the recent meltdown on Wall Street 
would have rid us of the term "sustainable" once and for all.  A 
toll-access publiction is not "sustainable" if customers cannot 
pay their bills.  An OA service (of whatever kind) that is 
supported by an institutional sponsor or philanthropy may find 
funding cut back when the size of an endowment plummets.  Surely 
many members of this list are facing such cutbacks now.  An 
author-pays service (e.g., PLOS or BMC) may be challenged when 
authors have difficulty coming up with the cash. In a connected 
world, when Wall St. loses, libraries starve.

The sustainability idea is the Miss Havisham of scholarly 
communications. We all want to stop the world at a particular 
momentous time.  Sooner or later, however, someone pulls down the 
drapes and we see Havisham's wedding banquet and the sustainable 
models of publishing for the nostalgic illusions that they are.

Better, I think, to imagine what is likely to survive the bad 
times we are now living through.  Provided one is not too 
particular about all the trappings of legacy publishing, I 
believe bad times will be good times for OA for the simple reason 
that one form of OA--the simple posting of content on the 
Internet without benefit of any editorial review--is very 
inexpensive and potentially almost entirely automated.  This is 
not "greeen" OA or "gold" OA but "unwashed" OA.  In good times 
DSpace is simply an annoyance to an Elsevier or a Wiley; in bad 
times DSpace may become the preferred, indeed the only, venue for 
some researchers and some disciplines.  This assumes that DSpace 
and other OA vehicles are run in a bare-bones way, with little 
overhead.  Perhaps that is yet another fantasy.

So, looking out beyond the economic crisis, assuming anyone can 
see that far, we are likely to encounter a great amount of 
unmediated OA material on the Internet, indexed by Google, free 
for anyone to review.  It is likely that commentary will be built 
up around at least some of that material, a form of 
post-publication peer review.  Over time this could lead to a new 
publishing paradigm:  low-cost Internet posting of materials 
directly by authors, with increasingly elaborate community-based 
commentary surrounding it.  We already see this kind of thing in 
the consumer Internet.

I described this scenario in an essay several years ago:  "The 
Devil You Don't Know:  The Unexpected Future of Open Access 
Publishing." It can be found at http://firstmonday.org.  If you 
take the trouble to read this, be sure to also read Stevan 
Harnad's nuclear critique of it, affixed to the target article. 
It is one of his best, and it inadvertently proves my thesis.

Joe Esposito