Abstract
All academics are, by now, aware of the ongoing discussions and key policy directives concerning ‘Open Access’. Philosophically, Open Access (OA) publishing has the potential to circulate scholarship more broadly and democratically, to more diverse audiences, allowing for potentially greater engagement with research. Logistically, thinking about how to achieve open access provokes us to rethink how we evaluate the labour that goes into academic publishing, who should be entitled to profit from academic research, and who research is really for. Many important questions are currently being raised about the allocation of resources for the dissemination of research and the sustainability of academic publishing. This editorial outlines our current concerns from our standpoint as academic editors with a responsibility to maintain the intellectual integrity of the journal and ensure its ethical and efficient circulation.
In the UK, where the editorial board of this journal is based, the Seven national Research Councils (RCUK), the primary organs of British academic funding, have stipulated that in future their audits will only accept OA publications, which will make research funded by taxpayer money available to all readers without subscription. The UK Government commissioned a working group, chaired by the sociologist Professor Dame Janet Finch, to evaluate the best methods to achieve OA. Its report, Accessibility, Sustainability, Excellence: How to Expand Access to Research Publications (2012), identifies two principal routes to Open Access. The Gold route involves direct payments by the author (who may be subsidised their research grant or university) to publishers to cover the costs of publication and distribution. The Green route, supported by most publishers, permits authors to make available the final accepted, but unbranded or copy-edited, version of the article through their institutional repository, usually after a specified period of embargo. Details such as fees or periods of embargo vary considerably from press to press.
Members of the editorial board of Journal of Material Culture (JMC) have been discussing these issues for some time. One of our founding editors, Daniel Miller, was recently part of a broader debate in the new online journal Hau (www.haujournal.org). Miller (2012) argued that anthropologists have an obligation to ensure that the people they work with should have access to their finding and that we have a moral responsibility to make our work as accessible as possible. Since then, we have been discussing with great seriousness the future of the journal, entering into conversation with SAGE, and with UCL’s Library and Repository services. Our discussions have highlighted that the issues are, in fact, more complex than those presented in the Finch report. The wider picture include the ethics of accessibility; the shift from print to digital publishing (with potential for additional visual and other materials); and the shift from print to online consumption. It also raises hard questions about how ‘profits’ are defined and who should benefit from research outputs.
The problem with Gold
The Finch report is generally concerned with the UK situation and is responding to concerns by both national publishers and funding bodies. Since 2007, the share of submissions to JMC from within the UK has fallen nearly year on year, and now stands at roughly 20 per cent. We currently receive about as many submissions from North America and Continental Europe. The Finch report also does not concern itself with unfunded research. In this journal, funded research seems to comprise about one third of published articles in the past 5 years and its share shows a falling trend, accounting for only 10 per cent in 2012, 5 per cent in 2013, and just 20–30 per cent of submissions between 2011 and 2013. Whilst the Gold route makes OA the decision of individual authors, from the perspective of the journal we cannot think of OA solely in the narrow and exclusive terms of work produced by UK-funded researchers.
In turn, publishing houses are notoriously opaque in quantifying the price of journal publication, especially article by article. If the burden of financial support is being passed onto individual authors, do they not have a right to know how the money is spent, what percentage is profit for the shareholders of the company, and what is not included in the business model? Editors and reviewers are perhaps the most essential part of a journal’s ‘value’, yet their work is considered to be ‘time/expertise donated4free’ (@Taylor&FrancisOpen, 2013). In fact, commercial publishers are also concerned about the Gold model, which shifts the burden of paying for future articles onto authors but still maintains a subscription model for back issues and articles not paid for by authors to be OA, a phenomenon that has come to be called ‘double dipping’. JMC currently offers a hybrid model in compliance with the RCUK mandate but we wish to highlight that as editors we do not favour the Gold model. We do not think that shifting the decision to go OA onto individual authors is good for the integrity of journals as a whole, and we challenge the economic rationale behind the pricing of the Gold route.
The problem with Green
Whilst making an important leap towards accessibility, the Green model also raises significant problems from the standpoint of both journals and authors. Like the Gold route, the Green route transforms journals from curated intellectual conversations into a more ad hoc presentation of individual research. Green OA requires the additional support of an institutional repository and an institutional investment into a digital infrastructure that will by no means be consistent from institution to institution, or from country to country. It also potentially compromises our scholarly integrity: putting the accepted but not final version online means that there is the potential for multiple versions of articles to circulate with multiple forms of citation, different paginations and so forth. Fundamentally, the Green route places the burden of archiving and maintenance onto the individual repository and also undermines the intellectual support and framing that a journal itself is supposed to provide. We are exploring the possibilities of creating a parallel Green archive for JMC, which would be a page of links to versions of articles placed by authors in their institutional repositories, but we also wonder how the Green route will ultimately affect the future of journal publication. Both Green and Gold dismantle the structure of journals in favour of the dissemination of individual articles, and it is important to evaluate the impact of this on the editorial policies and intellectual framing of journals.
What do we mean by ‘free’?
Both Gold and Green routes demonstrate that OA may ensure an opening up of research to readers, but that this still incurs significant costs. The recent success of the new online-only, OA anthropology publication Hau, demonstrates that OA journals can work well, but also demonstrates that they depend upon significant financial support from Higher Education (or equivalent) institutions as well as a significant amount of freely donated labour. In the longer term, is this a model that can be applied to the entire realm of academic publishing? This journal certainly requires a robust institutional framework that ensures the income and labour required for its production. It is important to carefully assess what kinds of support journals need to be successful, ethical, and sustainable.
Alongside the supportive environments of some universities and learned societies, organizations such as JSTOR have been established to consolidate and archive scholarly material, made available by subscription, but on a non-profit basis. Whilst it is not without its detractors, as the Aaron Schwartz case made clear, JSTOR makes its content available for free or at low cost to high schools and other institutions in more then 69 countries. The cost of its subscription has not gone up since 1997 (source: http://about.jstor.org/10things). In turn, it does not claim copyright on any of the material it archives, which means that this material may freely (or at cost) circulate elsewhere as well. Perhaps the non-profit model of economic costing and institutional infrastructure instantiated by JSTOR, and some university presses, alongside the critical regime of the creative commons licence, will create a publishing ecology that is both ethical and liberal, allowing authors to make strategic choices within a strong framework of accountability.
We also wonder if the possibilities of electronic publishing have been realized within academic journals as they transition to online. At present online journals generally maintain the form (largely text-based), the structure (set numbers of issues per year, set word limits for articles) and the coherence (themed issues, centralized editorial staff) of print publications. Yet we now have the capacity to present other kinds of data hyperlinked and internally cross-referenced. We can present articles simultaneously in multiple languages, amongst many other possibilities. What are the implications of electronic media for the form of the journal article – a tightly written textual argument, limited to a set number of words or pages? These developments are attractive, especially for a journal such as ours, but they may involve further costs and require skill sets that cannot be taken for granted amongst most academics involved in editing journals.
The climate of OA has therefore provided an opportunity to rethink the intellectual framework, as well as the economy, of scholarly publications. Accessibility means more than electronic circulation – it requires us to think about the politics of language, of inclusion at every level, to understand our current and possible constituencies, and how we may best engage with them. The current shift of publishing practice must make us reflect on the intellectual frameworks and aspirations of academic journals, as well as on their place in the world. Conceptualizing OA as the reduction of each article to a single payment makes what should be a collective and ongoing conversation and responsibility into a one-time individual decision.
We are currently debating all of these issues at JMC so that we can make a considered decision about the future of the journal, in terms of its form, content and its model of distribution. Before any decisions are made, we would very much like to solicit the views of our readers. So please take some time to answer the short survey below by following its link. Our readership is the most important part of our community and we would like to hear from you.
Survey link: http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/WK73QPM
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
Thanks to Daniel Miller, UCL Anthropology, Martin Moyle, UCL Libraries, and Caroline Moors, Sage Publications, for their comments on this editorial.