Schaff: Universities need open access to academic journal articles

Students and faculty at universities like Pitt should all join the movement advocating open access to academic journal articles. Students and faculty at universities like Pitt should all join the movement advocating open access to academic journal articles. Freely disseminating scholarly knowledge is not only consistent with the academic vision of equality of opportunity, but also with the sustainability of institutional budgets and tuition rates. We need to move away from the traditional subscription model. Let’s start with an illustration:

Say you’ve enrolled in a secondary school in a parallel universe. This is not the secondary school we’re used to — your sole responsibility as a student is to write and submit research essays. At this school, essay writing requires two things: an ample supply of pencils that you must provide (these are long essays) and other people’s previous research essays (hence cumulative research progress). There’s something else strange about this school — it does not provide the old essays free to current students. Instead, students like you must purchase them from a private vendor — let’s call him Mr. Elsevier — who exchanges a subscription to the essay compendium for a handful of your pencils, which he then sells to get rich (of course). In recent times, Mr. Elsevier has been charging ever-increasing amounts of pencils, sweeping a wave of pencil shortages and grade blows across campus — no pencils, no subscriptions, no essays, no good grades.

One day the school’s astute headmaster asks, “Is this the best way to organize research essay completion?”

If you answer “yes,” then I’d bet the real-life Mr. Elsevier — journal publishers, the largest of which is actually called Elsevier — would consider your resumé. But if, in your mind, clouds of doubt surround the illustrated system, particularly enveloping the shady Mr. Elsevier character, then you’re well on your way to championing the open access movement.

(Hint: In the example, students are universities; pencils are dollars.)

Profit-making can retard some parts of the academic enterprise. By using price to allocate knowledge, the for-profit publishing companies force institutions to decide between research prestige and a tenable budget; universities with resources pay twice for their faculty’s research (first to pay the professor’s salary and second to buy his article from the publisher), and at other universities, prospective researchers somehow do their work in a limited-subscription environment.

In recent years, according to Pitt’s University Library System Director Rush Miller, the cost of journal subscription and public support for higher education have steadily moved in opposite directions, resulting in decreasing access to private journals (but not for Pitt, which keeps footing the rising bill).

It would be easier to hear the publishers’       case if they contributed any appreciable value that could justify the increasing subscription costs and the exclusionary nature of knowledge today. But aside from name recognition and server maintenance, the value-added argument stands on weak legs. The bread and butter of journal production happens at the universities, where publication authors (funded by grants and salaries, not their journals) do the research and write it up while colleagues in the field (also not funded by the journals) accomplish peer review.

Many idealistic academics have realized the limited need for private publishers and made true on their realization — in the past 10 years, more than 9,000 open-access journals have sprung up, according to Miller. Open-access journals generally disseminate publications exclusively through the Internet, and the money needed to organize peer review seems to be raised by three general means: private or public grants, author fees or institutional support (Pitt sponsors about 20 open-access journals).

Additionally, since 2008 all articles that refer to work paid for by the National Institutes of Health automatically appear in the NIH’s open-access PubMed Central, but private journals have a 12-month “embargo” period in which to sell subscriptions. Some universities, like Pitt and MIT, also encourage faculty to put their publications in institutional open-access “repositories” whenever they submit publications to private journals.

Whatever today’s norms might be, there’s no substantive reason why open-access journals shouldn’t be just as respected as private, subscription-based journals. According to a review composed by a Pitt task force headed by Miller, articles in free journals are receiving at least as many citations as private-journal articles and even more readership.

This open-access snowball is most certainly rolling, but it should roll faster. Here are some obvious next steps:

1. Change the culture. Not all academic scientists seem to know about open access, let alone support it. This could and should be changed through more rigorous awareness efforts. What does a start look like? There’s currently an online declaration for faculty across the globe to announce their refusal to submit or review material for publications under the Elsevier label at www.thecostofknowledge.com. To date, only eight Pitt affiliates have signed that declaration.

2. Don’t stop at embargoes. The PubMed Central open-access model is surely better than nothing, but especially for biomedical researchers, there’s an indubitable value in having real-time access to research progress, as opposed to year-later access.

3. Make this a case about tuition. Miller said the ULS spends $500,000 extra each year just to sustain the current subscription level. It’s hard to believe the recent tuition increases (and similar ones at other universities) have nothing to do with that.

Write Matt Schaff at matthew.schaff@gmail.com.