** Cross-Posted: For fully hyperlinked version of this posting, see:
     http://openaccess.eprints.org/index.php?/archives/329-guid.html

             "Open Access Is Research Spam"

         SUMMARY: Joseph Esposito, a management consultant, says Open Access
(OA) is "research spam":
http://www.the-scientist.com/podcast/theweek/audio/2007/11/07/normal.mp3
         But OA's explicit target content is the 2.5 million peer-reviewed
articles published annually in all the world's 25,000 peer-reviewed
research journals. (So either all research is spam or OA is not spam
after all!).
        Esposito says researchers' problem isn't access to journal articles
(they already have that): rather, it's not having the time to read them. This
will come as news to the countless researchers worldwide who are denied access
daily to the articles in the journals their institution cannot afford, and to
the authors of those articles, who are losing all that potential research
impact.
        Search engines find it all, tantalizingly, but access depends on being
able to afford the subscription tolls. Esposito also says OA is just for a
small circle of peers: How big does he imagine the actual usership of most
journal articles is?
        Esposito applauds the American Chemical Society (ACS) executives'
bonuses for publishing profit, even though ACS is supposed to be a Learned
Society devoted to maximizing research access, usage and progress, not a
commercial company devoted to deriving profit from restricting research access
only to those who can afford to pay them for it (and for their bonuses).
        Esposito describes the efforts of researchers to inform their
institutions and funders of the benefits of mandating OA as lobbying, but he
does not attach a name to what anti-OA publishers are doing when they hire
expensive pit-bull consultants to spread disinformation about OA in an effort
to prevent OA self-archiving from being mandated. (Another surcharge for
researchers, in addition to paying for their bonuses?)
        Esposito finds it tautological that surveys report that authors would
comply with OA mandates, but he omits to mention that over 80% of those
researchers report that they would self-archive willingly if mandated. (And
where does Esposito think publishers would be without existing
publish-or-perish mandates?)
        Esposito is right, though, that OA is a matter of time -- but not
reading time, as he suggests. The only thing standing between the research
community and 100% OA to all of its peer-reviewed research output is the time
it takes to do the few keystrokes per article it takes to provide OA. That is
what the mandates (and the metrics that reward them) are meant to accomplish at
long last.

                   --------

Joseph Esposito is an independent management consultant (the "portable CEO")
with a long history in publishing, specializing in "interim management and
strategy work at the intersection of content and digital technology."

In an interview by The Scientist (a follow-up to his article, "The nautilus:
where - and how - OA will actually work"), Esposito says Open Access (OA) is
"research spam" -- making unrefereed or low quality research available to
researchers whose real problem is not insufficient access but insufficient
time.

In arguing for his "model," which he calls the "nautilus model," Esposito
manages to fall into many of the longstanding fallacies that have been
painstakingly exposed and corrected for years in the self-archiving FAQ. (See
especially Peer Review, Sitting Pretty, and Info-Glut.)

Like so many others, with and without conflicting interests, Esposito does the
double conflation (1) of OA publishing (Gold OA) with OA self-archiving (of
non-OA journal articles) (Green OA), and (2) of peer-reviewed postprints of
published articles with unpublished preprints. It would be very difficult to
call OA research "spam" if Esposito were to state forthrightly that Green OA
self-archiving means making all articles published in all peer-reviewed
journals OA. (Hence either all research is spam or OA is not spam after all!).

Instead, Esposito implies that OA is only or mainly for unrefereed or low
quality research, which is simply false: OA's explicit target is the
peer-reviewed, published postprints of all the 2.5 million articles published
annually in all the planet's 25,000 peer-reviewed journals, from the very best
to the very worst, without exception. (The self-archiving of pre-refereeing
preprints is merely an optional supplement, a bonus; it is not what OA is
about, or for.)

Esposito says researchers' problem is not access to journal articles: They
already have that via their institution's journal subscriptions; their real
problem is not having the time to read those articles, and not having the
search engines that pick out the best ones.

Tell that to the countless researchers worldwide who are denied access daily to
the specific articles they need in the journals to which their institution
cannot afford to subscribe. (No institution comes anywhere near being able to
subscribe to all 25,000, and many are closer to 250.)

And tell it also to the authors of all those articles to which all those
would-be users are being denied access; their articles are being denied all
that research impact. Ask users and authors alike whether they are happy with
affordability being the "filter" determining what can and cannot be accessed.
Search engines find it all for them, tantalizingly, but whether they can access
it depends on whether their institutions can afford a subscription.

Esposito says OA is just for a small circle of peers ("6? 60? 600? but not
6000"): How big does he imagine the actual usership of most of the individual
2.5 million annual journal articles to be? Peer-reviewed research is an
esoteric, peer-to-peer process, for the contents of all 25,000 journals:
research is conducted and published, not for royalty income, but so that it can
be used, applied and built upon by all interested peer specialists and
practitioners; the size of the specialties varies, but none are big, because
research itself is not big (compared to trade, and trade publication).

Esposito applauds the American Chemical Society (ACS) executives' bonuses for
publishing profit, oblivious to the fact that the ACS is supposed to be a
Learned Society devoted to maximizing research access, usage and progress, not
a commercial company devoted to deriving profit from restricting research
access to those who can afford to pay them for it.

Esposito also refers (perhaps correctly) to researchers' amateurish efforts to
inform their institutions and funders of the benefits of mandating OA as
lobbying -- passing in silence over the fact that the real pro lobbyists are
the wealthy anti-OA publishers who hire expensive pit-bull consultants to
spread disinformation about OA in an effort to prevent Green OA from being
mandated.

Esposito finds it tautological that surveys report that authors would comply
with OA mandates ("it's not news that people would comply with a requirement"),
but he omits to mention that most researchers surveyed recognised the benefits
of OA, and over 80% reported they would self-archive willingly if it was
mandated, only 15% stating they would do so unwillingly. One wonders whether
Esposito also finds the existing and virtually universal publish-or-perish
mandates of research institutions and funders tautological -- and where he
thinks the publishers for whom he consults would be without those mandates.

Esposito is right, though, that OA is a matter of time -- but not reading time,
as he suggests. The only thing standing between the research community and 100%
OA to all of its peer-reviewed research output is the time it takes to do a few
keystrokes per article. That, and only that, is what the mandates are all
about, for busy, overloaded researchers: Giving those few keystrokes the
priority they deserve, so they can at last start reaping the benefits -- in
terms of research access and impact -- that they desire. The outcome is optimal
and inevitable for the research community; it is only because this was not
immediately obvious that the outcome has been so long overdue.

But the delay has been in no small part also because of the conflicting
interests of the journal publishing industry for which Esposito consults. So it
is perhaps not surprising that he should see it otherwise, and wish to see it
continue at a (nautilus) snail's crawl for as long as possible...

Stevan Harnad
AMERICAN SCIENTIST OPEN ACCESS FORUM:
http://amsci-forum.amsci.org/archives/American-Scientist-Open-Access-Forum.html
     http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/

UNIVERSITIES and RESEARCH FUNDERS:
If you have adopted or plan to adopt an policy of providing Open Access
to your own research article output, please describe your policy at:
     http://www.eprints.org/signup/sign.php
     http://openaccess.eprints.org/index.php?/archives/71-guid.html
     http://openaccess.eprints.org/index.php?/archives/136-guid.html

OPEN-ACCESS-PROVISION POLICY:
     BOAI-1 ("Green"): Publish your article in a suitable toll-access journal
     http://romeo.eprints.org/
OR
     BOAI-2 ("Gold"): Publish your article in an open-access journal if/when
     a suitable one exists.
     http://www.doaj.org/
AND
     in BOTH cases self-archive a supplementary version of your article
     in your own institutional repository.
     http://www.eprints.org/self-faq/
     http://archives.eprints.org/
     http://openaccess.eprints.org/