Open access publishing poses painful conundrums. To get past them, honest and informed debates need to be nurtured, says Stephen Curry.
Plan S is a radical project led by European funders to fast track the shift to open-access publishing of the research they support. In debates about the plan, it has sometimes seemed that academics are as divided on this as the UK is over leaving the European Union. But whereas views on Brexit have become so hardened that constructive exchanges are nigh on impossible, I still hope for better in regard to Plan S.
I was dismayed, therefore, by David Nicholas’s recent article. To me, this seemed to misunderstand the plan’s aims and approach and some of its essential elements.
He failed to mention, for example, the plan’s commitment to funding researchers’ publication costs, and cited the role of the ResearchGate and Sci-Hub websites in making papers increasingly free and open, when both have been sued for copyright infringement. I wish he had dug deeper and more carefully because everyone involved in the long-running debates about open access deserves better.
Open access remains the thorniest of issues, because however you try to grasp hold, it stabs with painful conundrums. It is an ideal that all sides claim to support but one that has proved troublesome to implement.
Like the old joke about the tourist asking for directions being told, “Don’t start from here”, the scholarly community finds itself entangled in an unplanned and problematic status quo. Academics work in a prestige economy driven by metrics; library budgets are under strain; some learned societies have grown heavily dependent on income from journals; governments increasingly demand maximum visible returns on public research spending; and the boundary between academic freedom and public responsibility is under constant negotiation.
Plan S has burst onto this scene like an impatient new kid on the block. It is radical and contentious—no change is without risk—but at least it has the merit of re-focusing attention on the most important issues facing progress towards a functioning open-access ecosystem for scholarly publishing.
None of the questions has an easy answer, and a single solution satisfactory to all sides is unlikely. Nevertheless, from an academic perspective, we should be able to hope for open, honest and informed debates, so that compromises might be brokered in good faith.
It will be difficult—commercial publishers are already lobbying hard—but reasoned and constructive discussions are emerging. These must be nurtured.
Critics of Plan S should acknowledge that its principles address many of the concerns raised by academics, even if detailed solutions are still pending. These include reforms to research evaluation to break the dependency on journal metrics; assurances that funders backing the plan will meet publishing costs; and a determination both to support high-quality open-access outlets and to diversify business models beyond those dependent on article processing charges, along with recognition of the need to prevent predatory practices at the high and low ends of the market.
Equally, there are issues that those behind Plan S have not yet addressed. A clearer appreciation of the differences between science and humanities authors would not go amiss. Because much of their scholarship is critical and interpretive, academics in the humanities are more invested in their published works. They are therefore more fearful of misrepresentation in derivatives, such as bad translations, that might be facilitated by the imposition of creative commons licenses allowing reuse.
Humanities scholars are divided on this issue, but they must be heard and responded to. A public forum to bring together academics from all fields could build greater understanding of different perspectives, and the trust needed to develop solutions.
The financial challenges posed to learned societies by Plan S also need to be dissected in more detail. Publishing operations are often justified as supporting valued activities such as travel and research bursaries, but revenue varies hugely between societies and it is fair to ask whether some are placing undue pressures on library budgets. Resolving this issue will require greater transparency from learned societies, but also imaginative thinking about alternative ways to fund their activities.
Ideally, change would be voluntary, willed by experience of the community benefits of openness. But the negative reactions to Plan S have once again brought the forces resisting change to the fore.
The funders behind Plan S may have the advantage of paying the money and calling the tune, but the central difficulty remains that no single body can speak for the whole academic community. At times like this, we should not forget our communal desire to enrich the world by sharing with it the fruits of our academic labours.
Stephen Curry is a professor of structural biology at Imperial College London.
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This article also appeared in Research Fortnight