Advertisement
Advertisement
Advertisement
Hidden cost of open access
5 June 2008
Disseminating research via the web is appealing, but it lacks journals' peer-review quality filter, says Philip Altbach
The Harvard Faculty of Arts and Sciences recently joined the "open-access" movement, urging its professors to post their research on a freely accessible website. In so doing, it aligned itself with those critics of the traditional journal publishing system who assert that knowledge should be free to everyone and not the preserve of increasingly monopolistic and predatory multinational journal publishers.
For Harvard University, the decision is relatively cost free. Its institutional prestige and the prominence of many of its faculty will ensure that scholars gravitate to its website. But in most cases, open access simply places material on the internet to join the exponentially expanding universe of information. The problem is one of selection. How does a user of research select the best and most relevant material from the vast array of information available?
The traditional scholarly journal provides a means of selection. The peer-review system, however imperfect, does a reasonably good job of vetting research and scholarship. Journal editors to some extent control the flow of manuscripts, experts anonymously evaluate them, and the most deserving articles are published. The journals are ranked, customarily by the informal subcultures of the disciplines and, more recently, by "impact factors" and other bibliometric measures. The key advantage of this system is that it provides a reasonably effective means of peer review and selection.
Unfortunately, journals have come under increasing attack as they have become more commercial. Major publishers have sharply raised subscription prices and are increasingly resorting to "bundling", the practice of insisting that libraries purchase large numbers of journals together. And of course the more titles, the higher the price. Add to this the growing competitiveness of academe and the need for academics to publish more, as well as the proliferation of new journals, and it becomes clear why the costs to academic libraries are insupportable.
Simultaneously, as journals have become more expensive, they have become more indispensable, as citation analyses and impact factors gain in importance and are widely used to determine academic promotions, university and departmental rankings. Unsurprisingly, citation analyses are now in the hands of for-profit companies.
Profit, competition and excess have spawned the open-access movement. Academics, librarians and administrators think it is the answer to monopolistic journals. But there are several problems with it. Chief among them is that peer review is eliminated - all knowledge becomes equal. There is no quality control on the internet, and a Wikipedia article has the same value as an essay by a distinguished researcher. Open access may also offer greater benefit to those already at the top of the knowledge tree. A less well-known institution in a developing country would likely gain less attention than Harvard. While traditional journals also tend to privilege scholars working at top institutions, at least the peer-review system allows some opportunity for publication in recognised journals.
Essentially, open access means there is no objective way of measuring research quality. If the traditional journals and their peer-review systems are no longer operating, anarchy rules. Researchers will have no accurate way of assessing quality in a scholarly publication.
The old practice, although flawed, may well be the best way of communicating research. Scholarly journals owned by academic societies or universities or other non-profit publishers provide a filter and peer review. Innovative non-profit publishers, such as the Johns Hopkins University Press and its Project MUSE, creatively use the internet for distribution. Prices are not exorbitant.
Without question, the proliferation of knowledge and the increasing complexity of dissemination through the internet have put great strains on the knowledge-communication system. Open access may seem like a panacea, but it has problems that deserve careful consideration.
Philip G. Altbach is Monan professor of higher education and director of the Center for International Higher Education at Boston College. He served as editor of the Comparative Education Review and The Review of Higher Education.
Readers' comments
Professor Altbach's essay is based on a breath-takingly fundamental misunderstanding of both Open Access (OA) and OA mandates like Harvard's: The content that is the target of the OA movement is peer-reviewed journal articles, not unrefereed manuscripts. <p>It is the author's peer-reviewed final drafts of their journal articles that Harvard and 43 other institutions and research funders worldwide have required to be deposited in their institutional repositories. This is a natural online-era extension of institutions' publish or perish policy, adopted in order to maximise the usage and impact of their peer-reviewed research output. <p>The journal's (and author's) name and track record continue to be the indicators of quality, as they always were. The peers (researchers themselves) continue to review journal submissions (for free) as they always did. <p>The only thing that changes with OA is that all would-be users webwide -- rather than only those whose institutions can afford to subscribe to the journal in which it was published -- can access, use, apply, build upon and cite each published, peer-reviewed research finding, thereby maximising its "impact factor." (This also makes usage and citation metrics OA, putting impact analysis into the hands of the research community itself rather than just for-profit companies.) <p>And if and when mandated OA should ever make subscriptions unsustainable as the means of covering the costs of peer review, journals will simply charge institutions directly for the peer-reviewing of their research output, by the articles, instead of charging them indirectly for access to the research output of other institutions, by the journal, as most do now. The institutional windfall subscription savings will be more than enough to pay the peer review costs several times over. <p>What is needed is more careful thought and understanding of what OA actually is, what it is for, and how it works, rather than uninformed non sequiturs such as those in the essay in question.
This is a complete misrepresentation of Open Access as it relates to scholarly communication. <p>In my experience no advocates of Open Access advocate publication without peer review. There is no doubt that an Open Access model raises questions about how the peer review process can be resources if the traditional publication model disappear, but a number of initiatives are looking at precisely this question and a number of possible approaches are being tried. Perhaps the most well established is the 'author pays' model, but I would also point at the SCOAP3 initiative that seeks to divert money from existing subscriptions and rather pay publishers explicitly to carry out the peer review process but not the publication or distribution costs. <p>The question for us and publishers is where they add value to the scholarly communication process - increasingly this is not in the distribution of content in pre-packaged units
Increasingly people expect content for free and open access is only part of the dilemma. In this day and age, to not freely share content is to risk irrelevence. Business models around information need to change fast if brick and mortor print journals are going to weather the next five or ten years.
Philip Altbach's article is stunningly wrong-headed. Of course, anyone can publish anything on the internet, but this has absolutely nothing to do with the Harvard Open Access mandate or any other institutional OA mandate, of which there are many. <p>These mandates, and the push for broader Open Access, refer to access to the peer-reviewed and published articles that appear in scholarly journals. Peer review is not lost. A cursory examination of the experience in physics, which has had an open access archive for many years would show that there is no loss of quality, little impact on scholarly journals, but a great and welcome increase in access to their scholarly literature. <p>It is surprising to read an attack on open access in THE that gets its basic facts so badly wrong.
Ah, sweet irony. If this article had undergone "peer review", or some other accuracy or quality checking critera, then it would never had seen the light of day...
OA journals certainly do have peer review. However, most also charges authors for publishing. These charges are not trivial. Most universities have found that they can no longer subsidize the cost of faculty publishing fees for OA journals. While funded investigators can perhaps add these charges to research budgets (which, by the way, are increasingly shrinking and more difficult to obtain), unfunded investigators have a much more difficult time to find funding to pay for publishing. Not to mention that OA/internet journals are proliferating like rabbits...I get probably 6 emails a month asking me to contribute to a new one.
Ouch, that hurt. Did Mr. Altbach just switch on a computer for the first time? This is 2008 and there are still people around who don't know what OA is? I'm speechless. <p>Rule of thumb: research, think, and then publish.
This post is to thank Philip Albach for his article. Due to his article and all the above comments, I found out about ‘Open Access’ and tried it right away. I was amazed how neatly it works, and the number of peer-reviewed journals that I got access to. I had submitted two pieces for publication in January 2008. After sitting for 6 months on a Journal website waiting to be peer reviewed, one was published and the other was rejected because my name could not appear twice in the same issue. Due to Open Access, I found another journal, and I submitted the second piece again. My submission was acknowledged within 24 hours and now my piece is under a new review. I hope that my post will encourage other scholars to use Open Access to find avenues for publication of their work.
Whilst open access (OA) publications are of the same quality and are at least as valuable a form of scholarly communication as subscribed publications, OA pubilshing is subject to numerous threats. <p>The real cost of open access resources comes from the preservation and maintenance of access to published materials over time, including disaster planning and migration to new software formats and platforms. Early open access (OA) author-pays models reportedly underestimated these costs. <p>Most open access scholarly materials at present are peer-reviewed pre-print or post-print copies of articles that have been submitted for publication in scholarly journals. Publishers are only likely to allow authors to archive post peer-review copies of submitted journal articles, for which the publisher often owns the copyright, for as long as they do not reduce publishers’ profits as a result of institutions terminating journal subscriptions in favour of seeking open access versions of articles. <p>As Stevan Harnad pointed out (above), moving to a publishing model of publishing in peer-reviewed open access publications would rely heavily on researcher’s individual reputations determining the visibility of their research in the relatively new OA journals. In the UK, the shift to citation-based research assessment means that if research published in open access journals is for any reason less visible and therefore less heavily cited it will potentially threaten its authors’ future research funding. This could potentially deter academics, particularly those who are still building their research reputations, from publishing only in open access journals, although the absence of a price barrier to access articles might work against this. <p>A final threat to OA publications might be that it is free at point of access. This might sound strange but it has been remarked by marketing researchers that people often perceive that something is worth what they pay for it. It has been observed that if a product, such as a scholarly journal subscription, is inexpensive or, which is worse, free, doubt often develops in the mind of the consumer as to the quality of that product, whilst the very fact that another product is expensive can inflate the product’s perceived value. I am unaware of any research examining the extent to which journal price affects journal esteem in academia has not been tested but it concerns me that it might comprise an overlooked psychological barrier to the uptake of open access publishing.