Should we forgive them if they know not what they do?

Don’t worry, I’m not getting all theological on you. Well, not very, anyway. But what better title for stories of unintended consequences? At the last major ALPSP conference there was a session entitled ‘What did the Romans ever do for us?’ – pretty strange, even if you were a Monty Python (Life of Brian) fan and knew the quote. It was intended, I think, for the session to discuss ways in which publishers (the ‘Romans’ of the title) had been, or were still, useful in the publishing system. But one speaker took the opportunity to point out that, although they had introduced lead plumbing, Romans hadn’t known of the dangers of lead. I suppose he could also have said that they hadn’t known that they were playing a part in the genesis of one of the world’s major religions. But when we think of unintended consequences, we often concentrate on ones that we are sure are negative. As it happens, this same speaker made some other remarks which made me think of unintended consequences. He was from a funding agency and laying down the law of what funders had a right to expect – ‘He who pays the piper calls the tune’, he thundered. It’s a phrase I myself have used, for decades, but with a very different intent, to point up the potential dangers of interference by funders in the publishing process. Let me explain – not so long ago, we thought an essential feature of research funding was that it was ‘dual funded’. This meant that university research had a block grant which could be used for academic research according to the interests of departments, and then there were grants from agencies, like the then Science Research Council in the UK, for specific pieces of research, which in effect fell into the agenda of the agency, as partly determined by the academics and others who sat on the Council. One of the supposedly great strengths of this dual system was felt to be that it preserved academic freedom from undue influence. This seemed to be partly undermined by the introduction of the ‘customer–contractor’ principle. At the time, there was much debate about whether this kind of approach might erode academic freedom, and I’m sure there will be mixed views on whether or not this has been the case. Some will feel this only matters if it prevented research into areas where results would have been unpopular with funders, and if so, I hope we can be sure that this would have been an ‘unintended consequence’ of the policy. But, of course, the output of research is essentially a publication, so anything that can affect that can have the same types of danger attached. This was the link I used to make when discussing the ‘page charge’ system which was important in some disciplines, notably physics, in the last century. In fact my point was a subsidiary one, simply pointing out that if a funder pays for the publication, then one unintended (at least unintended, I profoundly hope, by the constructors of the policy) consequence could eventually be that the funder determines not only the place but even the fact of eventual publication. Perhaps not a realistic fear in a democratic society with many potential outlets, but one that should be considered and guarded against. In fact the main funders of the page charge system did do something which tried to interfere with the publishing process, and perhaps had an unintended consequence which is very significant for us today. That is my main point – but please bear with me while we make a diversion to see why. It always surprises me how many of us are not familiar with ‘page charges’, their underlying rationale, or how pertinent that is to today’s discussion of open access. So here goes . . . The rationale was best expressed by the physicist Conyers Herring in the 1960s on behalf of the American Physical Society (which levied page charges, although they were not mandatory). This said that research Editorial 3