** Cross-Posted: For fully hyperlinked version of this posting, see:
     http://openaccess.eprints.org/index.php?/archives/329-guid.html

             "Open Access Is Research Spam"

         SUMMARY: Richard Esposito, a management consultant, says Open 
Access (OA) is "research spam":
http://www.the-scientist.com/podcast/theweek/audio/2007/11/07/normal.mp3
         But OA's explicit target content is the 2.5 million peer-reviewed
articles published annually in all the world's 25,000 peer-reviewed
research journals. (So either all research is spam or OA is not spam
after all!).
        Esposito says researchers' problem isn't access to journal 
articles (they already have that): rather, it's not having the time to 
read them. This will come as news to the countless researchers 
worldwide who are denied access daily to the articles in the journals 
their institution cannot afford, and to the authors of those articles, 
who are losing all that potential research impact.
        Search engines find it all, tantalizingly, but access depends 
on being able to afford the subscription tolls. Esposito also says OA 
is just for a small circle of peers: How big does he imagine the 
actual usership of most journal articles is?
        Esposito applauds the American Chemical Society (ACS) 
executives' bonuses for publishing profit, even though ACS is supposed 
to be a Learned Society devoted to maximizing research access, usage 
and progress, not a commercial company devoted to deriving profit from 
restricting research access only to those who can afford to pay them 
for it (and for their bonuses).
        Esposito describes the efforts of researchers to inform their 
institutions and funders of the benefits of mandating OA as lobbying, 
but he does not attach a name to what anti-OA publishers are doing 
when they hire expensive pit-bull consultants to spread disinformation 
about OA in an effort to prevent OA self-archiving from being 
mandated. (Another surcharge for researchers, in addition to paying 
for their bonuses?)
        Esposito finds it tautological that surveys report that authors 
would comply with OA mandates, but he omits to mention that over 80% 
of those researchers report that they would self-archive willingly if 
mandated. (And where does Esposito think publishers would be without 
existing publish-or-perish mandates?)
        Esposito is right, though, that OA is a matter of time -- but 
not reading time, as he suggests. The only thing standing between the 
research community and 100% OA to all of its peer-reviewed research 
output is the time it takes to do the few keystrokes per article it 
takes to provide OA. That is what the mandates (and the metrics that 
reward them) are meant to accomplish at long last.

                   --------

Richard Esposito is an independent management consultant (the 
"portable CEO") with a long history in publishing, specializing in 
"interim management and strategy work at the intersection of content 
and digital technology."

In an interview by The Scientist (a follow-up to his article, "The 
nautilus: where - and how - OA will actually work"), Esposito says 
Open Access (OA) is "research spam" -- making unrefereed or low 
quality research available to researchers whose real problem is not 
insufficient access but insufficient time.

In arguing for his "model," which he calls the "nautilus model," 
Esposito manages to fall into many of the longstanding fallacies that 
have been painstakingly exposed and corrected for years in the 
self-archiving FAQ. (See especially Peer Review, Sitting Pretty, and 
Info-Glut.)

Like so many others, with and without conflicting interests, Esposito 
does the double conflation (1) of OA publishing (Gold OA) with OA 
self-archiving (of non-OA journal articles) (Green OA), and (2) of 
peer-reviewed postprints of published articles with unpublished 
preprints. It would be very difficult to call OA research "spam" if 
Esposito were to state forthrightly that Green OA self-archiving means 
making all articles published in all peer-reviewed journals OA. (Hence 
either all research is spam or OA is not spam after all!).

Instead, Esposito implies that OA is only or mainly for unrefereed or 
low quality research, which is simply false: OA's explicit target is 
the peer-reviewed, published postprints of all the 2.5 million 
articles published annually in all the planet's 25,000 peer-reviewed 
journals, from the very best to the very worst, without exception. 
(The self-archiving of pre-refereeing preprints is merely an optional 
supplement, a bonus; it is not what OA is about, or for.)

Esposito says researchers' problem is not access to journal articles: 
They already have that via their institution's journal subscriptions; 
their real problem is not having the time to read those articles, and 
not having the search engines that pick out the best ones.

Tell that to the countless researchers worldwide who are denied access 
daily to the specific articles they need in the journals to which 
their institution cannot afford to subscribe. (No institution comes 
anywhere near being able to subscribe to all 25,000, and many are 
closer to 250.)

And tell it also to the authors of all those articles to which all 
those would-be users are being denied access; their articles are being 
denied all that research impact. Ask users and authors alike whether 
they are happy with affordability being the "filter" determining what 
can and cannot be accessed. Search engines find it all for them, 
tantalizingly, but whether they can access it depends on whether their 
institutions can afford a subscription.

Esposito says OA is just for a small circle of peers ("6? 60? 600? but 
not 6000"): How big does he imagine the actual usership of most of the 
individual 2.5 million annual journal articles to be? Peer-reviewed 
research is an esoteric, peer-to-peer process, for the contents of all 
25,000 journals: research is conducted and published, not for royalty 
income, but so that it can be used, applied and built upon by all 
interested peer specialists and practitioners; the size of the 
specialties varies, but none are big, because research itself is not 
big (compared to trade, and trade publication).

Esposito applauds the American Chemical Society (ACS) executives' 
bonuses for publishing profit, oblivious to the fact that the ACS is 
supposed to be a Learned Society devoted to maximizing research 
access, usage and progress, not a commercial company devoted to 
deriving profit from restricting research access to those who can 
afford to pay them for it.

Esposito also refers (perhaps correctly) to researchers' amateurish 
efforts to inform their institutions and funders of the benefits of 
mandating OA as lobbying -- passing in silence over the fact that the 
real pro lobbyists are the wealthy anti-OA publishers who hire 
expensive pit-bull consultants to spread disinformation about OA in an 
effort to prevent Green OA from being mandated.

Esposito finds it tautological that surveys report that authors would 
comply with OA mandates ("it's not news that people would comply with 
a requirement"), but he omits to mention that most researchers 
surveyed recognised the benefits of OA, and over 80% reported they 
would self-archive willingly if it was mandated, only 15% stating they 
would do so unwillingly. One wonders whether Esposito also finds the 
existing and virtually universal publish-or-perish mandates of 
research institutions and funders tautological -- and where he thinks 
the publishers for whom he consults would be without those mandates.

Esposito is right, though, that OA is a matter of time -- but not 
reading time, as he suggests. The only thing standing between the 
research community and 100% OA to all of its peer-reviewed research 
output is the time it takes to do a few keystrokes per article. That, 
and only that, is what the mandates are all about, for busy, 
overloaded researchers: Giving those few keystrokes the priority they 
deserve, so they can at last start reaping the benefits -- in terms of 
research access and impact -- that they desire. The outcome is optimal 
and inevitable for the research community; it is only because this was 
not immediately obvious that the outcome has been so long overdue.

But the delay has been in no small part also because of the 
conflicting interests of the journal publishing industry for which 
Esposito consults. So it is perhaps not surprising that he should see 
it otherwise, and wish to see it continue at a (nautilus) snail's 
crawl for as long as possible...

Stevan Harnad
AMERICAN SCIENTIST OPEN ACCESS FORUM:
http://amsci-forum.amsci.org/archives/American-Scientist-Open-Access-Forum.html
     http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/

UNIVERSITIES and RESEARCH FUNDERS:
If you have adopted or plan to adopt an policy of providing Open Access
to your own research article output, please describe your policy at:
     http://www.eprints.org/signup/sign.php
     http://openaccess.eprints.org/index.php?/archives/71-guid.html
     http://openaccess.eprints.org/index.php?/archives/136-guid.html

OPEN-ACCESS-PROVISION POLICY:
     BOAI-1 ("Green"): Publish your article in a suitable toll-access journal
     http://romeo.eprints.org/
OR
     BOAI-2 ("Gold"): Publish your article in an open-access journal if/when
     a suitable one exists.
     http://www.doaj.org/
AND
     in BOTH cases self-archive a supplementary version of your article
     in your own institutional repository.
     http://www.eprints.org/self-faq/
     http://archives.eprints.org/
     http://openaccess.eprints.org/