Open Access Publishing

Open Access (OA) literature is digital, online, free of charge, and free of most copyright and licensing restrictions. In an Academic context, it refers to the practice of providing unrestricted access via the Internet to peer-reviewed scholarly journal articles. It is a worldwide movement that is gaining a serious groundswell of support. It has direct and widespread implications for academia, medicine, science, industry, and for society as a whole, as well as (and this is the more worrying part) serious implications for the publishing and bookselling industries, as yet another of their revenue streams comes under threat.

The business model of academic journals is unique in that academic publishers have always been blessed with a constant market, as every university needs to subscribe to a multitude of journals to keep up to date with their research. Additionally, the academics writing the articles aren’t paid by the publishers – after all, the university already pays them to do research. Other scientists who are asked to review and edit the article also provide their services for free. Overly simplified; academics write and edit the material for the publishers, who then sell it back to them at a steep price. But that is all changing, writes Julie Blusse on the Radio Netherlands website. “Last year (2012) witnessed governments – perhaps the largest funders of scientific research – joining the ranks. The UK and the European Commission now force government-funded researchers to publish in open access journals, which are freely accessible to all or, at least, to self-archive research in open access university repositories.”

In Africa, classified as a developing country, open access to research is even more important as the financial barriers to many of the best international journals are extreme, going into the tens of thousands of dollars, which is basically the full budget of an African university library. When one thinks of how it could influence local research and effectively level the playing ground, it is a movement that makes a lot of sense. But how will it affect academic publishing?

Firstly, it is important to understand some key concepts of Open Access.

Key concepts in Open Access

Conventional non-OA journals cover publishing costs through access tolls such as subscriptions, site licenses, pay-per-view or only provide OA after a 6-12 month embargo period. Active debate over the economics and reliability of various ways of providing OA continues among researchers, academics, librarians, university administrators, funding agencies, government officials, commercial publishers, editorial staff and society publishers.

According to the OA Discussion Document prepared by the PASA Legal Affairs committee, “In the last few months Open Access (OA), in various manifestations, has been gaining ground and exposure. It is commonly held that exponential growth in research output and toll-access (TA) journal prices, amid diminishing university library budgets, necessitate OA. Calls are increasingly made for removing price barriers as well as relaxing licensing and copyright restrictions on scholarly journal articles and for further OA experimentation with scholarly monographs and edited works. OA activism is not limited to scholarly material but extends to OA teaching and learning materials (‘open education resources’ and ‘open courseware’).”

The Registry of Open Access Mandatory Archiving Policies (ROARMAP) lists four South African universities that have documented their OA archiving policies: University of Johannesburg, University of Pretoria, Unisa and University of Stellenbosch. The University of Kwazulu-Natal gives their policy on the website for UKZN Research Space. All require, to varying degrees, all publications or research papers or theses to be self-archived on the institution’s repository.

Open Access Textbooks and Open Education Resources (OER)
Open access textbooks are created using free content and (usually) free software. They are being created as part of the broader OER movement, which includes open courses, course material, modules, textbooks, videos, tests, software, etc (see www.arl.org/spare/oer). There is a view that hard copy textbooks should shrink and be supported by more resources online. The Cape Town Open Education Declaration (Shuttle worth Foundation and Open Society Foundation) calls for educators and learners to create resources and to release their learning resources for open and free use. The DHET Green Paper (www.dhet.gov.za/portals/0/Documents/GreenPaper.pdf) indicates in sections 8.1 and 8.3 that the DHET would like to support the development and co-ordination of a network of online providers to develop ’well researched, high-quality, national learning resources’ to be made available as OER. The reasons for the resistance by teaching institutions to using open textbooks include that they are not as comprehensive, reliable or authoritative as traditional textbooks, for which publishers do the screening, and that they are not necessarily course- or curriculum-appropriate for particular educators or lecturers.

New business model options
Open access needs to be funded, somehow. Below is a list of a variety of business models that represent some of the options being followed by other publishers or suggested by writers on the subject.
1. The author, the author’s institution or the research funder pays a publishing fee. This would help particularly if the publisher published only open access material.
2. The website or portal on which the OA material is archived charges a site licence or subscription or pay-per-view fee to the institution using it (but the user working or studying at the institution gets free access).
3. The publisher is subsidised by the institution whose research it publishes.
4. The publisher sells the product first, before it is made OA. And there is an embargo period before it is released.
5. Advertising revenue, on the website from which the product is accessed.
6. The digital book is made free online and a print copy can be purchased POD from the publisher at cost plus a mark-up.
7. The print textbook is free but users pay for the dynamic e-textbook with resources embedded in it.
8. Time-restricted access to e-textbooks from a single computer.
9. Authors of open access textbooks are paid a grant by the institution using them so that there is no copyright or royalty; or the author gets a percentage of the sale of print copies and study aids.

Some of these models imply restricted open access. It would be interesting to know what PASA as an organisation believes would be workable in the industry, but it seems that time, and specific circumstances surrounding each publisher and author will determine exactly what the implications of the Open Access movement will be.