[LIS-Forum] Access2research

[Subbiah Arunachalam]

Friends:

Here is the full text of a conversation between Richard Poynder, the UK-based technology journalist and chronicler of developments in open access, and John Willinsky, a senior fellow in entrepreneurship at the Ewing Kauffman Foundation and a former head of Science Commons. Willinsky is one of the small group that traveled recently to Washington to meet with the folks at the Office of Science and Technology Policy to win their support for open access.
The Wethepeople petition this group floated a few days ago to persuade the Obama administration has already been signed by more than 16,500 people. I request all members of LIS-Forum, OADL, IASLIC, ILA, IATLIS, and DELNET to sign the petition well before the deadline of 19 June. They may also publicize the petition among patrons of their libraries. After all this is a petition by the public from around the world. 

Subbiah Arunachalam



Q&A with John Wilbanks.


RP: There have been a number of petitions in support of Open Access in the past few years. What is new and different about the one you started on May 20th?

JW: First, it wasn't just me — it wasMichael Carroll, Heather Joseph, Mike Rossner, too.

Second, I think what's new is that we realised the debate had hit a ceiling. We can argue for the NIH policy, we can argue against RWA. But we have to fundamentally change the dynamic of the debate, and you can do that by going straight to the people in an organised way. I'm not sure that's been done before in OA. Most of our declarations are inside baseball.

Third, we used the wethepeople platform. Carl Malamud was the first one that I know of who used it in the open space, and his petition showed how hard it is to get 25,000 signatures. But it has the potential to really open the debate up that we needed. We don't know what it will do, but it can't hurt to have a strong public vote in favour of OA.

RP:  This is very much a call for the public (rather than the research community) to support Open Access.  Why should the public care? What is in it for them? What, in a nutshell, is your message to ordinary citizens?

JW: I think we get at that in the petition itself. It's taxpayer funded research, taxpayers should all have the right to access it. Public funds should create public goods.

RP:  You need to get 25,000 signatures within 30 days. What does that win if you succeed: a response from the White House, a debate in Congress, new legislation, or something else?

JW: We don't know. At the least we get a response. Hopefully we get a policy change, a conversation about implementing the request in the petition. Once we hit our number we need to turn up the pressure on the Administration to make a meaningful response.

It’s just tough

RP:  I read that you came up with the idea of the petition after meeting the Science Advisor to President Obama John Holdren. What was that meeting, and what happened in it that led you to conclude that a petition was needed?

JW: Four of us — Mike Carroll, Heather Joseph, Mike Rossner, and me — met with the OSTP staff earlier in May. It was a very nice meeting. They listened to us, they clearly had studied the issues. But they can't make any promises. And it's tough, because you know the publishers have fulltime staff devoted to these meetings and we can pull off one every now and then. It's just tough.

RP:  The petition is for "free access over the Internet to scientific journal articles arising from taxpayer-funded research". Producing scientific journal articles is not a cost-free process is it? Are you asking the public to find additional money to meet the costs of providing free access, or is the money already in the system somewhere but needing to be re-allocated?

JW: This petition asks for a policy implementation of public access across the US Government — focused on access more than mechanisms. But in the NIH case and elsewhere, one method is to include the cost of publication in the funding itself. When you're looking at grants in science research they're tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars. A line item of $2,000 for an article fee isn't a significant hurdle.

RP:  In 2001 a group of Open Access advocates called for the “free and unrestricted online availability" of journal articles. Why, eleven years later, are you having to make the same call? If what you are asking for were logical, feasible and cost-effective surely it would have happened by now?

JW: Because change takes a long time. And academic publishing is protected from some of the winds that have buffeted other content industries — the costs are hidden to the scientists at elite universities, and the desire to publish in the top journals is strong. But scientists are getting used to having the content they want in their personal life, and the gulf with how their professional content is managed is only growing.

On top of that, citizens are getting more and more likely to bump into paywalls and get frustrated. Entrepreneurs are unable to try and disrupt scholarly search and publishing. And we're all more densely networked than we were ten years ago. The screwed-upness of the system is getting harder and harder to hide. And the success of PLoS, BioMed Central, Hindawi, and other open publishers is showing that there's money to be made in different access models.

It takes time to change a hidebound industry. There's a lot of money to be made in selling scholarly journals, and a long history of resistance to change. I think the movement's gone pretty quickly actually viewed in that light.

RP:  What would be the best outcome of the petition in your view?

JW: The extension of the NIH policy across all US federal agencies. Even better would be a shorter embargo period.

RP: Thank you for your time.

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