Open sesame?

The word ‘open’ crops up in so many different publishing/scholarly communication contexts, it’s easy to get confused. Although it sometimes feels that way, ‘open’ doesn’t always mean free! ‘Open software’ (arguably, where it all started) is software which is made freely available to others, on the understanding that any developments based on it will also be made freely available; the Creative Commons initiative adopts a similar approach for authors’ work. The Open Archives Initiative (OAI) promotes the use of standardized metadata – information about information – to enable resources (preprints, published papers, whatever) that are deposited in any archive (to which access may or may not be free) to be cross-searchable; it also produces software to help institutions to create their own OAI-compliant archives. (Stevan Harnad and his colleagues advocate author self-archiving of both preprints and published articles in freely accessible repositories, but that is only one kind of ‘open archive’.) ‘Open URLs’ are URLs which enable libraries to specify that a URL for a particular resource will be resolved to the local version if the library has a licence. And the Open Archiving Information System is a protocol for creating and depositing archival versions of resources – the ‘open’ refers to the protocol and not to the archives, which may or may not be free. ‘Open access’ is different again; here, ‘open’ does mean free, to the reader at least. Under the open access model, online journals (or indeed any other online publications) are freely accessible to everyone, with the costs of publication being covered earlier in the process – typically, by the authors, their funders or their institutions. This model has many attractions to librarians, to readers and to authors – whose work is, in principle, made accessible to the widest possible audience. However, as publishers we all know that the costs to be covered are not negligible, even with electronic-only publication; the real value we all add has nothing to do with physical manufacturing. As ALPSP’s recent research study Authors and Electronic Publishing showed, that value lies in managing the process of peer review, selecting relevant and quality-controlled content, improving the language and presentation of that content through editing, adding and checking links to citations and other material, gathering the content together in convenient collections (i.e. journals), and not least maximizing the content’s visibility through marketing in its broadest sense. All of these are very important to authors and readers – and they have to be paid for. There lies the rub: there are still costs – not inconsiderable costs – and somewhere along the line, someone has at least to cover these costs. And not just to cover the costs, but in most cases to make a bit more; as we all know, not only commercial publishers but also learned societies are dependent on the surpluses from their journal publishing to fund a variety of other activities. The open access model is in many ways a highly attractive one; it maximizes the availability of quality content, and the funding for publication keeps pace with the amount of research seeking publication. However, it presents difficult problems for publishers. The first is financial: how much is the true cost per paper which has to be recovered? What about the cost of processing rejected papers? What about overheads? And the second, perhaps more intractable, has to do with market dynamics: how do we get there from here? It is difficult to envisage authors preferring to publish in a less well-known journal, which is freely accessible to readers, but for which payment has to be made, rather than in a better-known journal for which payment is not required. Unless a significant proportion of the key journals all ‘flip’ their business models at once, the transition may be very Guest Editorial 83