Be openly accessible or be obscure

I read, with considerable interest, Peter Suber’s Predictions for 2007 in the SPARC Open Access Newsletter, issue #104 (December 2, 2006).

One of his predictions was: “More publishers will adopt the hybrid OA model for more journals” … “The question in 2007 will not be whether the hybrid model will spread among publishers (it will) but whether it will appeal to authors” … “The big question for publishers is whether they want author uptake badly enough to make it attractive”.

(Please note that I’ve omitted from this excerpt Peter’s summary of several features of an attractive hybrid model, such as keeping fees low and permitting self-archiving without embargo or fee).

Another of Peter’s predictions is that spontaneous author education about OA will continue to grow. A relevant excerpt: “OA literature is the best advertisement for OA and we’re starting to see a critical mass of it exert its effect. It doesn’t take academic readers of OA articles very long to figure out that this is what they want for themselves as authors. Since the volume of OA literature is growing in every field, it’s easy to predict that this kind of spontaneous author education will also continue to grow. We’ve only started to see what this kind of viral self-advertising can do to spread the word about OA and create a tipping point”.

Both predictions involve “appeal to authors”. Authors continue to be, in the well-chosen words of Dorothea Salo, the “slumbering behemoth”. See, for example, these excerpts from her blog entry, “How are we doing?” (Caveat Lector, 12 May 2006): “We have the (largely US- and Europe-based) for-profit publishers, who hate and fear open access to the point of telling flat-out lies about it. We have librarians and a few visionary researchers, who want it desperately. And we have the slumbering behemoth, the vast quantity of researchers who don’t understand the system and don’t care, but will do what they are told and act in what they perceive to be their self-interest”. …“But the slumbering behemoth slumbers on, letting us change its sleeping-space behind the scenes. The publishers daren’t disturb it—for example, by aggressively hunting down e-reserves programs or institutional repositories – for fear that it will turn on them when it wakes. Sure, the behemoth isn’t using its current power (and it has quite a lot, in the form of unremunerated labor) to force change, nor is it actively changing. It won’t use its power to resist change, either, and I do think that may just be good enough, the way the world is moving”.

Another, more recent, excerpt is from “The behemoth stirs” (Caveat Lector, 28 July 2006): “I have referred to university faculty and academic administrators, none too kindly, as the slumbering behemoth as regards the march of open access”. … “The behemoth is starting to yawn, stretch, and bestir itself”. She then goes on to mention the support of a large number of academic leaders in the USA for FRPAA (Federal Research Public Access Act of 2006, S. 2695). As of November 27, 2006, this number had reached 131, according to a SPARC Advocacy webpage about FRPAA.

One reason why the behemoth is starting to bestir itself here in Canada is the Draft policy on Access to CIHR-funded Research Outputs of the Canadian Institutes of Health (CIHR). A public consultation about this draft policy ended on November 24, 2006, and the responses are currently being analyzed. The results of this analysis, when they become available, should provide some initial clues about ways in which the behemoth is beginning to react to the kind of prodding that’s outlined in CIHR’s draft policy. Stay tuned.