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Open Access – the Wrong Response to a Complex Question: The Case of the Finch Report

2013; Wiley; Volume: 24; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1111/1467-8551.12016

1467-8551

Yehuda Baruch, Abby Ghobadian, Mustafa F. Özbilgin,

Private Equity and Venture Capital

Finch's report argues that the Internet is a game changer, making universal access possible. The Internet is a disruptive technology: it has changed the face of the music business, and it is changing the face of publishing, witnessed by the growth in sales of e-books, retailing and more. The Internet is also changing the market dynamics of peer-reviewed scholarly journals. Challenges to academic publishing come in the form of a number of questions. First, why should libraries and companies pay subscription fees for bundles of journals, when users are only interested in a particular journal or a specific article? The analogy here is the music album, where demand has fallen dramatically because customers are not willing to pay for 11 tracks when they are only interested in one. It is also worth noting that publishers' sales models are flexible and potential purchasers can acquire individual journals or tailored collections. The Internet has also changed the way in which academics access journals. Not long ago, the only way to read an article was to go to a library and pick up a copy of the journal. Today, an academic can access a journal article anywhere in the world, provided the library through which they are accessing the paper has access rights, which are purchased with the payment of subscription fees. The current business model of the publishing houses operates with discounts for purchasing bundles of journals rather than purchase of single journals, which are priced at premium rates. Although there is the appearance of global access, access to journals is limited by the extent to which the electronic library, through which one connects from anywhere in the world, has paid subscription fees for the bundle that includes the journal in which the article one is seeking to access is published. More importantly, the Internet has reduced the costs of entry, so that many new publishers have entered the market, and many of the new entrants have embraced the OA model: for example, BioMed Central, Hindawi and PeerJ. Moreover, many traditional publishers have launched OA journals: for example, Wiley, Sage and Elsevier. A recent search of the Directory of Open Access Journals showed that there were 8,734 OA journals and 988,364 OA articles. The numbers are on the increase, indicating a high pace of change. It is no exaggeration to state that authors receive invitations on a daily basis to submit papers to these new OA journals. This type of aggressive, possibly desperate marketing is uncommon within the academic community, where scholars usually choose their target journals, rather than journals trying to lure scholars to submit. The second question that we often hear in academic circles concerns about where the profits in publishing go. A significant concern seems to be the high cost of subscription and potentially excessive profit made by publishers. So an important question is whether or not journal publishing should maintain its existing business model. If there is a need for change, what should be the direction and substance of such a change? But then market forces will drive the change, and this begs the question of why a Conservative-led coalition feels the need to intervene, when voluntarism rather than business intervention is the central ideology of Conservatism in the UK? Figure 1 shows the growth in OA publishing between 2007 and 2011. There has been a 127% growth overall in the number of papers published and a 252% growth in the number of OA papers. The rise in the proportion of OA articles from 4% of all articles published in 2007 to 9% of all articles published in 2011 is symptomatic of the pace of change. Yet, a more relevant analysis would be the extent to which OA papers are cited by others, or else it almost parallels self-publication of fiction books for vanity. Growth of OA 2007–2011 Source: Internal Wiley document. The Finch Report stipulates two roads to OA – green and gold. The green road is where authors self-archive the post-print version of the article for free public use in their institutional repository, in a central repository (e.g. PubMed Central) or on some other OA website, after an embargo period. To a degree, this is already happening, and a study published in 2010 found that approximately 20% of the pre-print version of articles (a version of articles prior to final edit and formatting) accepted for publication in the peer-reviewed journals and published in 2008 could be found in OA repositories. The version of their article authors are allowed to post on a repository depends on the copyright agreement. Where the journal operates a Copyright Transfer Agreement there are no restrictions to posting a pre-print version of a peer-reviewed article in university repositories or central repositories and, in fact, many scholars do this to attract attention to their work. Therefore, it is a sure bet that, today, a higher percentage of pre-print versions of peer-reviewed articles are available to all potentially interested users, and the trend is upwards. So why interfere in this process? The gold road refers to a situation where authors publish in an OA journal or a 'hybrid' OA journal, where their articles are made immediately available on publishers' websites. In this case, authors (or their institution/funder) pay an article processing charge (APC). The immediate and unrestricted access to articles is ideal, but it is difficult to see how and why any commercial publishers will adopt this model unless they can generate revenue from APC: a hybrid business model (APC plus subscription), philanthropic giving, subsidy, advertising or such adjunct activities. The Finch Report proposes a hybrid gold road, which is endorsed by Research Councils UK (RCUK), that is, OA only for those individual articles for which their authors (or their authors' institution or founders) pay an OA publishing fee. To comply with the RCUK policy, journals need to offer a gold OA option for papers resulting from the RCUK-funded research. Provided the journals comply with this policy and funds are available for OA publishing, the article will be made available on an OA basis immediately. If APC funds are not available, the policy requires green OA, that is to say, authors are required to deposit the article arising from research supported by RCUK in an OA repository after 12 months' embargo in the case of STEM research and 24 months' in the case of social sciences and arts research. The UK's four funding councils' preliminary response to the Finch Report suggests that they favour the green road. Following their preliminary response, they are consulting with stakeholders, and they plan to publish their final policy in autumn of 2013. They appear to be committed to requiring all outputs to post-2014 REF to be OA, 'where this is reasonably achievable'. The funding councils' proposal requires the final peer-reviewed text of all papers to be deposited upon publication in an institutional repository, even if they are not made OA until an embargo period has passed. The diametrically opposite views of RCUK and the funding councils speak volumes for joined-up thinking. The readers of this journal are aware of how difficult it is to get published in the top journals. The rejection rates are often over 95%, and it is usual to go through three rounds of revisions. The lead time for publishing in a top journal from submission to print can be anything between two and four years. As an academic, you need to plan two or three years ahead. With the current uncertainty, how can the UK's social science academics plan? Should they target the untried, less prestigious and rarely cited OA journals or should they go for the top, established journals. If the past Research Assessment Exercises and REF are anything to go by, they are highly unlikely to score three or four stars, because research shows a high degree of correlation between top journals and REF score (Mingers, Watson and Scaparra, 2012). What if they target top journals and copyright issues prevent them from posting the final version of their articles in their institutional repository? Would they be considered as an exceptional case by the funding councils and accepted for submission or would they fall foul of their policy? But of course they can go down the gold road and pay APC fees to publishers of top journals. There is only one snag with this strategy – affordability – as well as that, it may give journal owners even more income at the expense of public funding. It is also important to point out that responsible publishers are working on ways to prevent 'double-dipping' for institutions subscribing to hybrid journals. This while helpful undoubtably will add to complexity for both suppliers and purchasers. The fees for opening access to a single paper in the field of management is close to the net monthly salary of a new lecturer in the OECD countries, possibly annual salary in many developing countries. As such, it is prohibitively expensive for an individual academic to buy OA rights for single papers. In terms of institutional funding, the situation is not less challenging. Who is going to decide which ideas are worthy of financial sponsorship for OA publishing and, more importantly, who will monitor or hold accountable the academic managers who make such financial decisions? We find it difficult to see how either policy can work in practice for the producer and user communities. University repositories do not make locating articles easier. On the contrary, fragmentation would make locating an article more difficult. The green road, with an embargo period of 12/24 months, is not significantly different from the current situation. Equally, it is difficult to understand the benefit of the mixed economy proposed by RCUK. The public will end up paying twice, and it will be a source of confusion for years, because no one else seems to be rushing to embrace the principle. Open access publishing requires a Creative Commons Attribution Licence (CC-BY). A CC-BY allows anyone to copy, distribute and transmit the work, adapt the work and make commercial use of the work. It is unlikely that a US-based journal will agree to grant CC-BY licences, disadvantaging UK researchers wishing to publish in US-based journals. It is not certain that journals published elsewhere or even in the UK will all agree to this licence, disadvantaging UK academics further. The mixed economy is likely to weaken UK higher education, which is world class, but not necessarily spark off innovation arising from research. There are disciplinary considerations, which are ignored in the current proposals. Government proposals are geared towards meeting the needs of natural science, and there are several arguments in favour of OA when it comes to the natural sciences. First, the short shelf life means that the results will become dated and lose value quickly. Second, the publishing cycle is more rapid. Third, scientific research is costly and almost invariably paid for by the state or charitable trusts. This is not the case in most social sciences. Research does not date at the same rate in social sciences, it attracts lower levels of funding, and it has a much longer publishing cycle. Consequently, a general costing strategy for opening access to individual scholarship can have a devastating effect on social science scholarship, stretching research budgets. Similarly, the length of embargo period before an article is made OA via the green route is discipline sensitive, and a single embargo period is unlikely to meet all disciplines' needs. Social sciences in general need a longer embargo period than natural sciences do. The proposed system also radically changes the business model of publishers. The current model relies on subscriptions paid by users. The open system requires researchers to pay a fee once a paper is accepted. We agree that there is a need for vigorous discussion, and one can argue whether the current costing is fair and sustainable. The proposed system will result in three problems. First, it will reinforce the current journal standings and more prestigious journals can levy high fees. Second, librarians are more likely to cancel subscriptions to niche and mid-ranking journals, or they may not be deemed suitable outlets for funding by institutions. In either case, we believe that the current proposals will result in the demise of a large number of mid-ranking UK journals, often publishing innovative research. This will leave a major hole in the publishing ecosystem and niche fields of scholarship, which are very important for the advancement of academic knowledge. Third, high-quality research not sponsored by research councils is unlikely to see the light of the day. We are neither defending the current publishing business models nor do we think there is no need to examine the current business models or that the current costing is fair and sustainable. However, we think that OA will exacerbate rather than resolve these issues. Under OA, praised by the Finch Report, the cost of publishing will be borne by academics and their universities. This is likely to result in further deterioration and commercialization of the service logic of the process of knowledge creation in social sciences. Journal brands are likely to gain more value than substance. If the journal brand is not recognized, many scholars will shy away from submitting their papers, draining submissions to journals that are willing to take a risk and publish innovative research. The stronger journals are often risk averse and less welcoming of papers that do not follow the journal's trend. We fear that the current proposal will drive out innovation and reinforce orthodoxy of thought and journals. The Finch Report suggests moving to the OA mode of publication. The fundamental assumption is that all knowledge should be available free of charge to everyone after it is published. This assumption ignores the idea that knowledge is a commodity of high worth, and undermines its value at the point of consumption. It also undermines the sophistication of social research, assuming that potentially everyone may be interested in academic knowledge disseminated through learned journals. This assumption is deeply flawed, as academic knowledge is often too sophisticated and, consequently, not terribly interesting, desirable or entertaining for general consumption. The knowledge will be open to all, ignoring the simple fact that the majority of the population is not interested in it. Very few people across the globe are interested in specific academic studies within narrow fields. While there are some 25,000 peer-reviewed journals (Finch Report, 2012), no one, and not even one university, needs all of them. The Finch Report argues that communicating research outcomes is 'too important to leave to chance'. The current system keeps the impact of chance to a minimum. Open access will make chance a major factor, as people will be flooded with knowledge, much of it irrelevant and unworthy, with no tools to identify which is which. We believe that it is important to ensure that the knowledge generated is disseminated to as wide an audience as possible. The popularity of the Harvard Business Review among practising managers supports the argument that reaching a broader range of readers requires a different approach and media other than peer-refereed journals (e.g. see Bartunek, Rynes and Daft, 2001). The alternative forms may include white papers, Chartered Management Institute management articles and digests. We suggest that it may be more beneficial to encourage publishers to offer a more accessible form of the papers they publish rather than the blunt OA instrument. If the government is seriously interested in making research more relevant to the needs of users, it needs to define who the users are, and as for the academic users, to examine the rules and practice of REF. The currency in many, if not all, business schools is publications in three- and four-star journals. Most research leaders turn up their noses at two-star publications. It is salutary to remind ourselves of the definition of a two-star publication: 'quality that is recognized internationally, that has made, or will make, a contribution to knowledge, theory, policy or practice'. And interestingly neither three-star nor four-star definitions makes a reference to policy or practice. A recent article by Pearce and Huang (2012) showed the low and declining incidence of actionable research in two of the top managerial journals. Martin (2012) estimated the cost of producing not-actionable 'A-journal' articles to be in the region of $600m per annum. He made the point that 'customers' for these articles are primarily other academics and not business/industry people. Moreover, he pointed out that it is difficult for a given scholar to speak authoritatively to both fellow academics and business people simultaneously. Journals that aim to be 'bridge' journals (such as Harvard Business Review or HMR) suffer in their impact factor. These all point out that the solution to better transfer of knowledge from academia to practice is not OA, but different REF incentives: for example, requiring submission of actionable articles, as well as articles that are likely to become a major or primary point of reference. An alternative route could be creating a framework for better links between academia and knowledge intermediaries. We do not, however, wish to argue that the current system is ideal. Indeed, publishers, who rule the current system, are mainly private firms that exploit the free labour of academics for their own commercial ends. Publishing academic material became like a 'license to print money' (Harvie et al., 2012). It is also important to point out that publishers do not own all the journal titles that they publish – a number of highly prestigious journals belong to learned societies. The journals published on behalf of these societies are an important source of revenue for them, enabling them to offer services to their members and contribute to the development of subject and capacity. The British Academy of Management uses revenues derived from publishing to support capacity building, doctoral students and subject development. Publishers also add value: for example, provision of robust and sustainable online platforms, content enrichment, production of training material for authors, reviewers and editors, copy-editing, proofreading, xml coding, full production, marketing and publicity, adhering to and developing industry standards. Despite all this, in our view, the current business model is deeply flawed, or at least illogical. Academics conduct studies, mostly funded by universities through a system of time allowances (in the social/behavioural sciences), drawing on the tuition fees paid by students, a small allocation from REF, but increasingly less on taxpayers' contribution, and in a minority of cases through funds provided by external bodies, such as the research councils, charitable trusts or industry. The research outcomes are transformed into codified knowledge in the shape of journal articles and books, where the copyrights are normally given to publishers – free of charge for journal papers. Academic authors receive about 10% in the case of books. The publishers then sell this knowledge back to the universities, often charging them excessively high fees for the fruits of their own work. Universities subscribe to a limited number of journals out of the 25,000 or so that are available. The more affluent the university, the more knowledge it can purchase. So, there are clear winners and losers in this game. Wealthy wins and poor loses in a game where new knowledge should win over all else. On the positive side, academics can gain some small income from downloads of their work via the Authors' Licensing and Collecting Society. More important, the quality of the work is controlled by a self-governed system based on academic integrity and clear rules, where funding bodies have no impact on the evaluation. Peer review is the critical factor (Baruch, Sullivan and Schepmyer, 2006) and editors, chosen mostly for their academic credentials, benefit from the trust of the community (Baruch et al., 2008). Above all, the main advantage of the system is that it works. It enables the publication of new knowledge. It helps develop papers to their full potential (turning lemon into lemonade, coal to diamonds, to use some metaphors: see Starbuck (2003) and Baruch et al. (2008), respectively). It prevents the field from being flooded with less than worthy outputs, and there is a fairly clear status system of reputation of journals, though never perfect (Starbuck, 2005), reflecting on how difficult it is to get published (e.g. via rejection rates) and how many studies published in certain journals are important (e.g. via citations). The system is geared to enhance scholarship of the highest quality, and we fear that OA may have the opposite effect and result in vanity publications. Under the OA concept, journals will be paid for by authors, and thus will have a strong bias towards publication. Money will become a major, significant factor in the ability to publish the results of academic work. A process that is far less rigorous than the current system will decide on what is worthy knowledge. The financial ability of universities and scholars will determine where they will publish. Further, it is arrogant or at least presumptuous to assume that the UK can lead the globe on that. While UK authors tend to publish more than what a simplistic average weighting would suggest, part of it is because many countries with much larger populations are excluded from the publication process by both resources and lack of linguistic competence in English. To have a real chance of changing the system, the main player, the USA, should be part of it. The US policy is still evolving, but the announcement by the White House in late February 2013 provides an indicator of the direction of travel. It requires that all taxpayer-funded research should be made available to read free of charge one year after publication. Similarly, Europe seems to favour delayed access. These policies are simpler, clearer and cheaper than the RCUK's gold road and less directively arbitrary than the UK's funding council edict. The UK Government appears to be increasingly isolated in its preference for immediate OA. Open access is an instance where there is a first mover disadvantage rather than advantage. Lack of a synchronized and broad move towards OA by major countries such as the USA will only disadvantage UK higher education. Higher education is a very competitive space, and well-resourced universities from the developed and developing counties are jostling to enter international tables, where the UK currently occupies second place after the USA. We predict that OA will make it more difficult for UK universities to maintain their strong competitive advantage, and the number of UK universities among the top 200 universities worldwide will decline. In the proposed system, funders become guardians of knowledge, which underplays the importance of academic freedom. Indeed, by suggesting 'a clear preference for publication in open access', the Finch Report poses a significant threat to academic freedom. Its call 'to keep under review the position of learned societies' (such as the British Academy of Management) is sheer arrogance. The same arrogance is reflected in the statement: 'much depends on how quickly the rest of the world moves towards open access'. A more humble proposition would use 'if' rather than 'how'. Other suggestions are parochial, like the idea of reducing VAT for e-journals. Funding bodies will be allowed to control publications generated from money they donated – this diminishes the academic freedom and puts into question the impartial role that should be held by funders. The independence of academic work is one of the measures that combats biases and separates it from political and religious discourses that develop over in-group interests. The current proposal may mean widening the gap between the haves and the have-nots when discussing the games that are played at the university level; the proposal assumes that the one who funds research would have influence on the results of such research. It ignores the need for a well-established and recognized system to manage the process, and to serve as gatekeepers from erroneous knowledge and flawed research. There is an assumption in the OA debate that academic institutions would be appropriate sponsors for paying for open access to research. We contest this naïve assumption. Research assessment exercises were introduced in the UK in order to bring coherence to research quality and institutional funding for research across institutions. The previous system allowed institutions to relocate the government research funds as they saw fit among their faculty members, allowing wide scope for local game playing, without much thought for institutional accountability. The current system of national research assessments, despite its many other failings, brings a level of accountability and transparency in terms of allocation of funds across institutions and in terms of individual contributions. Universities, despite some improvements, continue to be hotbeds of discrimination across many dimensions in the UK (Bebbington and Özbilgin, forthcoming). Disadvantage is manifested in gender, ethnicity, disability status, age, class and religion, among other categories of difference and distinction in the sector. Inequalities among faculty, students and other stakeholders in universities remain unaddressed, partly because of the misguided feeling among academics that, in the liberal context of universities, there is no need for anti-discriminatory action. However, research indicates that inequalities across all these categories are endemic and entrenched within the sector (Özbilgin, 2009). One of the fundamental reasons why the UK university system has remained so sorely lacking in equalities has been the 'local' rather than centralized nature of games that academics were allowed to play in setting professional routes, crafting ideas of merit, and promotion and wage-setting behaviour (Healy, Özbilgin and Aliefendioglu, 2005), all of which culminated in academia's becoming a closed shop in setting its own career systems, which privileges few and disadvantages many talented people. The proposed changes will exacerbate the current inequalities, in general, and age-related inequalities, in particular. While junior scholars may prepare their careers and craft new strategies for addressing the consequences of OA publishing, and senior academics may interpret the new system to benefit their own research preferences, the proposal is more taxing on mid-career scholars, who may find it less easy to manoeuvre and strategically alter their research and scholarship to address the whims of the proposed changes. So, how do these inequalities in the sector relate to the issue of OA? The plans by the government to have the hybrid approach to OA opens a can of worms, returning us to an older and less accountable regime, in which research assessment decisions were localized. The unchecked and autonomous nature of local academic processes is likely to generate gendered, ethicized and class-based outcomes. We need to ask questions in terms of which universities can afford OA for their staff and who will be the winners and losers of this new regime? Women are heavily disadvantaged in the sector in terms of their access to resources, status and positions of authority, and they are receiving lower pay than men for the same work. Gender inequality is but one strand of inequalities in the higher education sector that will be widened if the current proposals go ahead untempered. The OA system in these current plans is set to remove the limited scope for a level playing field in the university sector, exacerbating gender, ethnicity and class, among other disadvantages in the system. The multi-polar and two-track university system that we are set to create is not going to bode well for the long-standing government promise that all university degrees are of equal value in the UK. In this Editorial, we provided a critical reflection on the idea of applying the 'open access' system to replace the current state of global publishing. While we agree that the current state is far from being ideal, the concept of OA suffers from significant deficiencies, making it unfit for management and social sciences. We point out the threats to the quality of future knowledge creation and to the scholarly community. The Finch Report is based, we argue, on a combination of flawed reasoning, naïvety and arrogance. We therefore urge opening a constructive debate on the OA proposals, so that wise regulatory measures can be introduced in order to make the proposal and its consequences more accountable, equitable and truly transparent.