The politics of e-access and e-funding in the library environment

The domain of e-journals well exemplifies ‘competition for power and leadership between competing interests or stakeholder groups’. As a stakeholder with multiple perspectives: library manager,academic,author,peer reviewer and researcher and editorial board member, the author considers the conflicting arguments regarding the desirability of the open access model. Recent reports are challenging the received wisdom that the open access model is unsustainable.While allies and opponents are lining up on opposing sides of the battle lines there is hope of reconciliation in the vision of a mixed economy proffered by Delamothe and Smith. The resulting consumer choice is likely to be between the relentless pursuit of everchanging open access publishing fashions or the predictable security offered by a long-term relationship with a traditional publisher.


Introduction
At a time when major Western governments are criticized for failing to observe due process many no doubt agree with the spurious derivation of the term 'politics' from the Greek 'poli' meaning 'many' and 'tics' meaning 'ugly, bloodsucking parasites'!However, this article uses 'politics' in its original meaning -that is 'competition for power and leadership between competing interests or groups'.Even here it is tempting to embrace The Devil's Dictionary definition: 'A strife of interests masquerading as a contest of principles' 1 .
One reason why the topic of e-journals evokes such a strong reaction, and indeed an underlying explanation for the recent interest of a Parliamentary Committee 2 , is that all the cards appear to be held by one player.As a stakeholder with many interests in the topic: a library manager, an academic senior lecturer, a regular author, a committee member of a professional interest group, a research lead and the member of several editorial boards, I feel a compelling need to throw my own two pennyworth into the kitty.In generating further heat I shall leave the more edifying task of generating light to contributors more qualified than I am.
First, I shall present a modern fable of conflict and separation, hopefully ending with a note of reconciliation, keeping the identities of participants as antithetical to real players as possible and thus minimizing embarrassment!

A modern fable
Honest John Poorlywhite, entrepreneur, approaches you with a novel idea: "Why don't YOU use YOUR intellectual capacity to invent a new confectionery?"He suggests that YOU write a business case for it."That is all very well, Honest John, but what will you do?", you ask.He continues: "YOU need to get a funder to support YOU in production.YOU and YOUR colleagues will spend two years developing and improving this new product -let us call it a 'serial bar'".Again you ask: "But Honest John, what will you do?"

ANDREW BOOTH Director of Information Resources and
Senior Lecturer in Evidence-Based Healthcare Information School of Health and Related Research (ScHARR) University of Sheffield "Then YOU send YOUR serial bar to another colleague who will taste it and ensure it is of sufficient quality.YOUR colleague will send it to two more independent colleagues of YOURS who will also taste it and write a brief report about it.They will suggest how it might be improved and, of course, YOU will improve it.Not only will YOU perfect the serial bar but YOU will provide all the ingredients and labour for a marketable batch using YOUR employer's time and YOUR funder's money"."Yes but Honest John, what will you do?" Honest John will put YOUR serial bar in his cake shop window.He will let his customers view YOUR serial bar.They will even be able to 'pay per sniff '.However if they actually want to eat it they will have to buy all the other cakes in the shop.Sometimes they will have to buy a bundle of all the cakes from an arbitrary selection of all Honest John's other shops too!So who can eat your serial bar?
■ Your funder can only eat it if he buys all the other cakes in the shop.
■ Members of your organization can only eat it if they do so in a closed room.
■ Your colleagues are given a small batch to give away one at a time ■ and you can only give one away to someone if they come to your private address and ring your doorbell.And the moral of this fable is: 'Only journal publishers manage to have their cake and eat it too!'

The bottom line
Our modern fable captures, at least in some measure, the considerable frustration that we in the academic community feel at supplying our intellectual property and our voluntary time as peer reviewers and editors of serials only to find that, if our employers want to access our work, they must pay again for the privilege."The author(s) and copyright holder(s) grant(s) to all users a free, irrevocable, worldwide, perpetual (for the lifetime of the applicable copyright) right of access to, and a licence to copy, use, distribute, perform and display the work publicly and to make and distribute derivative works in any digital medium for any reasonable purpose, subject to proper attribution of authorship, as well as the right to make small numbers of printed copies for their personal use." 3 Furthermore it allows that:

What are the resource implications?
In attending a previous event run by the UK Serials Group almost three years ago my arguments, as rehearsed above, were typically headed off by the confident assertion that such a model is 'unworkable'.As an advocate of evidence-based information practice, and no less of evidencebased publishing, I have bided my time in the knowledge that "absence of evidence is not evidence of absence".Now the evidence is beginning to be assembled.A report published last year by BNP Paribas, comparing current annual spending on scientific journals at Cornell, Yale and Princeton Universities with estimated spending under open access, concluded: "… the global scientific research community could save more than 40% in costs by switching entirely to an open access model … Assuming current published article numbers of 3,900, 3,600 and 2,500 respectively, we estimate the corresponding cost savings at 20%, 35% and 40%." 4

A stakeholder analysis
As a Library Manager of a small research collection of journals spending £20,000 per year, a library user represented on my University Library Committee, an author of more than 40 peerreviewed articles, a researcher and referee on NHS research programmes, teacher on two MSc courses and an Editorial Team member for Health Serials -17(3), November 2004  Andrew Booth The politics of e-access and e-funding in the library environment Information & Libraries Journal, I have compiled a rough and ready stakeholder analysis (Table 1).
From a librarian's perspective we shall most likely continue to endure the now familiar challenges of the current situation for some time to come, namely: While it is naïve to expect commercial open access publishers to be less motivated by personal interest than traditional publishers, at least for the moment our objectives in wanting to challenge the status quo seem to coincide.We have more trust of not-for-profit concerns where financial considerations are less powerful a driver.Established partners such as subscription agents may be waiting to see which way the prevailing economic climate blows but have demonstrated sufficient past resilience for us to believe that their future is assured.Whether their role will change again as it did with the move from print to electronic subscriptions remains to be seen."The correlation between impact factors and pricing for a sample of Reed Elsevier's STM journals shows a correlation coefficient of only 0.1 … higher impact factors do not necessarily warrant higher prices." 5wever, we do not know how individual assessment panels will view the credibility of open access journals.Indeed the demographics of panel membership suggest that there is some systemic inertia with established researchers continuing their allegiance to the traditional publishing format.

What does 'author pays' really mean?
The model of open access receiving most attention is the 'author pays' model.This is, in fact, a misnomer as the costs of publishing would typically be borne by funder, sponsor or the author's institution. 6 Similarly we will probably see a migration of journal titles away from publishers that are commonly perceived as being 'profiteering'.Within traditional journals the article, not the journal, will become the unit of purchase.Online reading patterns will see fewer articles being read completely as readers pursue hyperlinked 'themes' running through several associated papers.Nevertheless there is a need for a realistic alternative to serendipity to foster creativity and lateral thinking.We shall also likely observe a change of role for subscription agents.Is there hope for reconciliation?In a key editorial Delamothe and Smith, advocates of improved access, state that in the paper world, each extra copy of an article or a journal comes at a cost -for paper, print, binding, and postage. 8By comparison, on the web the distribution costs are virtually zero (for bmj.com they amount to about 0.3 pence/article).They conclude that: "If the fixed costs of article processing could be recovered on input to the system then the It also explains why many academic authors are gravitating towards an open access model.By 'open access' many of us advocate the definition promoted in the position statement by the Wellcome Trust in support of open access publishing.It means access by which: A loose cannon for the academic community is the Research Assessment Exercise.The first open access journals are starting to acquire impact factors: "Open access journals published by BioMed Central have … impact factors for 2003 that compare well with equivalent subscription titles.The high impact factors, all for journals that are just a few years old, show that by making quality articles much more widely visible, open access to research literature achieves impact fast." 5

Table 1 .
Stakeholder analysisAt the same time the oft-quoted assertion that 'you get what you pay for' is challenged by the BNP Paribas report: