The golden road to Open Access

Open Access in the scholarly world has a lot of advantages. Steyaert et. al discuss them all in this article. Briefly the advantages are: a more easier access to research publications, a faster publication process and a broader public. On top of that these benefits increase the chance on a higher citation ratio. There are different factions that profit from Open Access; scholars, students and developing countries who normally don’t have the money to buy publications. Some people reason that as it’s the government which subsides university research, it’s no more than normal to open the access for research where taxpayer pays for. In exact sciences the use of Open Access is quiet normal. The humanities needed some more time but by now Open Acces even established in humanities.

Open Access has two roads: a green and a golden one. In the green road an author submits his publications to an electronic depository. It’s possible that at the same time the publication is being published in a journal. In the golden road the article is being published in a peer reviewed journal where readers have free access to. The authors of the articles pay an author fee for submitting an article. This money is being used to produce the journal (they use the money for instance to pay for editors, software and internet space). So normally it’s the subscriber who pays for an article. In the golden road it’s the author himself.

I think the golden road is the most suitable for Open Access publishing. Why do I think that? Well, the most important function of journals is selection. Journals receive a lot more content than they have space to publish it all. As a result only the best articles are selected. In the green road there’s no selection which results in a pool of information wherein not everybody knows how to find the good articles. That’s confusing and it’s therefore that I think the golden road is the most optimal route.

So authors have to pay for having their article published. Thoughts behind this are that it are actually the fund providers who pay for the submitting fee. This works perfectly well for disciplines where research is paid by big businesses. For instance: medical research which is supported by a pharmaceutical company. In humanities however, there aren’t a lot of companies that are willing to pay for research. That’s because of the nature of humanities. Companies don’t get economical advantages from the research we do. Humanities don’t comply the free market theory. So Open Access could provoke that humanities vanish next to exact sciences.

What could be the solution of this problem is that universities are going to pay for the fees. It’s best if all universities cooperate in the big shift to Open Access, so they can all profit from each other. In order to reach that, it has to be made clear which advantages Open Access supplies. Fitzpatrick says it like this:

‘Therefore, universities must ‘recognize,’ in the words of a recent Ithaka report, ‘ that publishing is an integral part of [their] core mission and activities,’ and respond by supporting those engines of generosity on their campuses, knowing that such generosity will be paid forward in increased visibility for the institution and increased goodwill toward its endeavours.’

The most important are costs. It’s plausible that the costs of paying subscription money for all kind of journals are higher than the costs of paying for the submit fee. We’re now in a transition, what makes it very hard to convince universities of the importance of subsidizing Open Access. Universities have to pay for expensive journals and they have to pay the submitting fees. So now they are paying double costs. Government should subsidize universities in order to make it through the start. Once we passed the double costs point Open Access will pay itself back.

Used literature:

Kathleen Fitzpatrick, ‘Giving It Away: Sharing and the Future of Scholarly Communication’, Journal of Scholarly Publishing 43.4 (2012): 347-362.
Gary Hall, ‘Another University is Possible’ and ‘Notes on Creating Critical Computer Media’, in Digitize This Book! The Politics of New Media or Why We Need Open Access Now, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008, pp. 1-36.

Andrew Murphie, ‘Ghosted Publics: The “Unacknowledged Collective” in the Contemporary Transformation of the Circulation of Ideas’, in Alessandro Ludovico and Nate Muller (eds)The Mag.Net Reader 3: Processual Publishing, Actual Gestures, OpenMute, 2008, pp. 98-110.

Manon A. Ress, ‘Open Access Publishing: From Principles to Practice’, in Gaëlle Krikorian and Amy Kapczynski (eds) Access to Knowledge in the Age of Intellectual Property, New York: Zone Books, 2010, pp. 475-498.

Jan Steyaert, Eelco Ferwerda, Marnix van Berchum & Annemiek van der Kuil. ‘Kenniseconomie gebaat bij Open Access’, in: De transformerende kracht van ICT – Jaarboek ICT en samenleving 2012. http://www.surf.nl/nl/themas/openonderzoek/Documents/Kenniseconomie_gebaat_bij_open_access_JaarboekICTenSamenleving2012.pdf

Leo Waaijers. ‘Copyright Angst, Lust for Prestige and Cost Control: What Institutions Can Do to Ease Open Access’, in Ariadne 57. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue57/waaijers-et-al