For example, I can easily imagine these
publishers soon offering universities
special deals with reduced author fees
in exchange for exclusive rights to the
publications of that university, jeopardizing academic freedom.
the Role of Professional societies
Can we get out of this situation? Can
we escape both the escalating subscription fees of commercial editors and the
dangerous author fees of prominent
Open Access publishers? It is important to understand that the scientific
community is largely at fault: we sit on
the editorial boards of the very journals published at exorbitant prices by
commercial publishers,f and we submit our best articles to these journals.
The problem with the subscription model is not the model but the
fees. Rob Kirby, of the UC Berkeley
Math Department, has compared
the cost-per-page of various mathematics journals, computed as the
subscription price divided by the
number of pages published annually.g In 1997, they ranged from $0.07
to $1.53. The cost per 10,000 characters, which better accounts for
differences among journal formats,
ranged from 30 cents to $3. Consistently, the cheaper journals are
published by universities and societies; the most expensive ones by commercial publishers. In 2003, Donald
Knuth, editor of Journal of Algorithms,
wrote a long letterh to his editorial
board explaining that the price per
page of the journal had more than
doubled since it had been acquired
by Elsevier, while it had stayed stable
over the previous period, when it was
published by Academic Press. This
led to a mass resignation of the board
and the rebirth of the journal as ACM
Transactions on Algorithms. Another
well-known example is the Journal of
Machine Learning Research, which became its own Open Access publisher
for similar reasons. A number of
journals have joined this trend,i but
f I am an associate editor of an Elsevier-pub-lished journal.
open Access is a
valuable goal, but the
scientific community
is overly naive about
the whole business of
scientific publishing.
few have turned to Open Access.
So, am I against Open Access? No. I
think it is a noble goal, an achievable
goal. But this goal should not blind us
to the point of making a bad system
even worse, of hurting research in the
name of making its results freely available to everyone.
First, scientific publications can
be affordable. The pricing of the
ACM Digital Library is extremely low,
even compared to other societies and
nonprofit organizations. This is still
not enough. The pricing model is adequate for the academic and industry
audience but not for dissemination
toward the public at large. As shown
by the success of online stores such
as iTunes, low-pricing can translate
into large volumes. Commercial publishers charge non-subscribers up to
$30 to download a single paper; ACM
charges $15. What if it were 99 cents?
While I am not saying that scientific
publishing is a mass market like
music, I do believe this would dramatically reduce the barrier to non-subscribers, in particular the general
public, without significantly affecting
the revenues from subscriptions.
Second, much of this debate has
focused on cost. But free access is, to
paraphrase the Free Software Move-
ment, as much about free beer as it is
about free speech. Many publishers,
including ACM, allow their authors to
publish copies of their articles on their
personal Web page or on their institu-
tional repository.j But the transfer of
j See section 2. 5 of the ACM copyright policy,
http://www.acm.org/publications/policies/
copyright_policy, and the SHERPA/ROMEO
list of publishers’ copyright and self-archiving
policies, http://www.sherpa.ac.uk/romeo/
copyright is seen by some as a serious
hindrance to open access, as it deprives
authors from distribution rights. While
copyright transfer offers authors pro-
tection (such as against plagiarism)
and services (such as authorization to
reprint), I believe switching to a licens-
ing model such as Creative Commons
could be beneficial.
conclusion
Open Access is a valuable goal, but the
scientific community is overly naive
about the whole business of scientific
publishing. Societies and nonprofit
organizations need to continue to lead
the way to improve the dissemination
of research results, but the scientific
community at large must support them
against the business-centric views of
commercial publishers. Author fees are
not a solution. Worse, they jeopardize
the ecological balance of the research
incentive structure. Finally, nonprofit
publishers should take advantage of
their unique position to experiment
with sustainable evolutions of their
publishing models.
Michel Beaudouin-Lafon ( mbl@lri.fr) is a professor of
computer science at Université Paris-Sud (France) and
head of the Laboratory for computer Science (Lri).
he is also a former member of the acM council and the
acM Publications board.
the author thanks Wendy Mackay and bernard rous for
comments on earlier versions of this column.