Academics running OA journals - a new variety of academic self-exploitation?

An interesting phenomenon can currently be observed in the humanities - academics engaging in new forms of self-exploitation. It's linked to the OA hype gripping the academy. How does it work?

Well, in the old days for-profit publishers essentially took over the production and distribution of our peer reviewed content for us. We managed the academic side of the process (peer review etc), they managed the rest. They made (well, still make) a killing on our labour by virtue of being able to force university libraries to pay often exorbitant subscription fees so that we can access research that we produced in the first place.

Came OA, the idea that research paid for mostly by taxpayers should be made available free of charge to anyone anywhere. I call this the having-your-cake-and-eating-it model. Academics typically loves these sorts of models. Thing is, you can't actually have your cake and eat it. OA turned out to be - by and large - a model whereby costs were switched to the producers of the research. Academics suddenly had to pay huge amounts (typically these days about 3000  $ per pop) to be able to play (hence I coined these publishing models 'pay-to-play'). So, while in the not so great old days our libraries were bled dry by greedy publishers, under the new model the only academics capable of publishing their research outputs would be those with research funds able to cover those fees.

That can probably work for folks in the STEM subjects, but this can't work for humanities scholars. Most of us typically produce our research during term breaks, most of us don't sit on large quantities of research funding. In fact, most of us don't have research funding at all.

Here kicks the self-exploitation model in that I started of with. Some well-intentioned humanities scholars have since decided to set up their own OA journals, where neither readers pay, nor those who submit their content for review. Given that barriers to entry are fairly low these days (you need a webserver and publishing software), that is prima facie not a terrible idea. And yet, it does sound like yet another having-your-cake-and-eating-it model, doesn't it? It kind of is. Essentially, those who run those journals have embarked on a never-ending journey of self-exploitation. Nobody pays for anything, you volunteer your time (in return for your name on a journal website masthead), you rely probably to some extent on grad students and postdocs to keep your enterprise afloat, you divert research funding to keep the administrative side of your publishing operation ticking, universities provide the web-server, etc.

The reality here is that academics so volunteer to undertake the tasks publishers (be they OA or subscription based) typically undertake. Will these academics see a benefit from the institutions whose libraries would save large amounts of money if this model took hold (there would be no costs involved in subscribing to journals or in submitting content to them)? The long and short of it is that that is not the case. That funding will disappear elsewhere (a new soccer stadium anyone? new Principal's residence? ) So, really we see a case of academics exploiting themselves, no more, no less. They volunteer their time to undertake administrative (ie journal publishing) tasks that other professionals should undertake, and that these professionals should be paid to undertake, and that these professionals have been undertaken for a very long time.

Now, I'm the last to think that an argument from tradition is a good argument, but it is worth noting that the model whereby those who produce journals are paid for their labour has worked pretty well for us in the academy. You can have a legitimate argument about the cost side of things, about publishers' ever diminishing support services to academic journals, all of that, but fundamentally things work.  We get our content out in reputable academic journals, and the content is available ever more easily and at ever greater speed to other academics. On the other hand, the publishing landscape is littered with the corpses of journals that relied on volunteers to keep all aspects of their operations alive because they insisted on being 'free'. The truth is though, well-paid academics spend their time undertaking administrative tasks involved in producing these journals when they could be doing actual research, teach, or provide other services to their employers, ie the universities where they work.

There was a time when I was worried about what would happen to the published peer reviewed content after the failure of these kinds of publications. Would they also disappear into the rubbish bins of the internet? Thankfully that doesn't have to be the case. We have today numerous repositories where such outlets can store their articles after their demise. So, as long as that occurs, at least the content can survive the demise of the journals themselves.

Still, if I was a budding academic thinking about where to place my first or second peer reviewed journal article, would these kinds of journals be my first choice? Probably not.

Well-intentioned OA journal bites the dust

There seem to be broadly three types of Open Access (OA) journals (and I won't bore you with green, gold and other fancy colours here). In my world, there are journals that are owned by dodgy OA publishers, they likely make the bulk of existing (pardon me, non-existing) OA journals, then there are commercially successful behemoths like PLoS and biomed central, and last but not least there are well-intentioned efforts by academics aiming to break the stranglehold of subscription based journals on their discipline.

There no need to say much about the dodgy publishers, there's a reasonably comprehensible list maintained for that purpose. There is also little to say about PLoS and biomed central. They have managed to get their hands on the pots of cold funders typically empty over STEM subject research grant holders. Typically they charge an article processing fee sometimes approaching thousands of dollars to maintain their infrastructure, and, if they're for-profit, to keep their shareholders happy. There's no equivalent to these sorts of pots of gold in the arts and humanities, yet academic and policy debates about OA are typically driven by STEM folks who are ignorant of the different circumstances faced by academics in the arts and humanities disciplines. Pay-for-play would render many academics unable to publish peer reviewed content in those disciplines.

So, the pay-for-play (aka OA) campaigns quietly forget to tell us who'd give us the money to play under the new OA regimes proposed generously everywhere. Unsurprisingly, research funding councils haven't made up for the in-the-future unnecessary expenditures on journal subscriptions by handing over pots of gold to libraries so that they can fund OA publications. Really what is being shifted here is the responsibility for the financing of research publishing to academic researchers, across disciplines, regardless of the funding situation in those disciplines.

The last group of OA initiatives tries to address this. It relies on academics exploiting themselves in order to maintain the publishing infrastructure that commercial publishers typically maintain (for a steep price). As one would expect of well-intentioned academics they initially offer the having-your-cake-and-eating-it option whereby they maintain the journal infrastructure free of charge, until they eventually fold up or begin charging. The having-your-cake-and-eating-it thingie never tends to work that well in the real world.

A case in point here is the demise of Canada's Open Medicine journal. It was set up as an OA alternative to the Canadian Medical Association Journal after the latter experienced a major scandal involving the publisher interfering with its editor's and editorial board's editorial independence. The journal initially tried to be both OA as well as free of charge, but decided (too late) to begin charging article processing fees. After 8 years and undoubtedly many volunteer hours by its excellent editors, it closed reportedly its door today. The editors note with gratitude the thousands of volunteer hours given to the journals by its supporters. At the risk of coming across as an ungrateful brat gloating over the well-intentioned journal editors' failure, it isn't clear to me at all why academics would want to get into the operational side of the journal publishing enterprise in the first place. As an editor of the equivalent of a monthly journal I can assure you that it takes a lot of time to just deal with the content aspects of journal production.

As far as I can see, this tale is telling. Either you end up with a commercially sustainable business model (PLoS or biomedcentral like), where costs eventually are still incurred at very significant scale, just not by libraries but by authors (in fact, the greater your research output the bigger the financial hit you take!), or you accept that subscription fees will remain a necessity to maintain professional academic journal publishing output.

Open Access a threat to academic freedom?

It is no secret to people following my academic writings or this blog for that matter: I am no great fan of Open Access. Its low barriers to market entry have led to a proliferation of dodgy OA outfits that by now easily outnumber the decent OA publishers, and there is no end in sight.  Beall's List of Predatory Publishers flags the magnitude of the problem at hand. Budding academics and those not quite competitive enough to actually get published in decent journals fall prey to their money making schemes in breathtaking numbers. There's more to be said about the business as well as academic flaws of current OA business models, but that isn't the topic of this blog entry.

Recently humanities scholars have woken up to the threat that OA causes to their academic freedom to publish, or so they claim. At the heart of their complaint is this: A whole bunch of research funders insist that the research they fund must be published in an OA journal. Several problems with this: It is probably fair to say that there are only a handful - if that many - decent OA humanities journals out there, and they likely are not in medieval history. If scholars in those disciplines whose work is publicly funded were forced to publish in whatever OA 'journal' (aka webserver) exists in their discipline they would effectively be forced to publish in a location where - really - they would not want to be seen dead. Subscription based journals - often needed to fund academic society activities, something conveniently forgotten in the rush to the economic bottom pit that is OA - would see their submission base diminished as funded academics would no longer be able to choose them as their preferred outlets.

Truth be told, most humanities published research these days isn't funded research to begin with. This is the reason why OA hasn't taken off in our neck of the woods. However, many of us are working in public universities, our salaries are fully or partially funded by taxpayer $$. Forcing us to submit to OA outlets the moment we get our hands on the meagre research funds that are out there for us, would have detrimental consequences for our ability to communicate our findings to colleagues, because they would have to look for our work in the dodgiest of places. It would likely have a deleterious effect on the places (specialist journals with often low circulation) where we discuss and advance our research. It would also likely destroy the viability of some academic societies. Subscription based journal publisher now frequently offer OA options, proposing fairly high fees (>3000$ isn't unusual) to those with spare cash. I must say that I like this idea a lot, because it keeps established loci of academic conversations alive and kicking. I am not so sure what this means in the long-term for the viability of their subscription business model though. Say, if you would make 50% of content in a given volume OA, why should any librarian continue paying the full subscription fee for a journal that's available half-way to anyone who isn't a subscriber. There are undoubtedly challenges ahead, suffice it to say though that I like these latter developments both as an author as an editor.

Some universities have begun to offer funding to humanities researchers who have no external research funding but want to submit to OA publications. Obviously this is only sustainable if dramatic cut-backs at the subscription journals front happen, or if you work for a bank (Harvard, Princeton, Oxbride, etc). Humanities scholars are well-advised to monitor carefully what's happening in their research publishing domains as governments and research funders have decided to revolutionise the way we communicate our research fundings to each other, whether we like it or not. I do think there's a potential threat to our academic freedom to publish in a location of our choosing, but it doesn't seem to be as dramatic as some academics make it to be. After all, there ARE other ways to communicate your work to the world and your colleagues, for instance via social networking, blogging, repositories such as SSRN, academia.edu, university based OA repositories and so on and so forth. Of course, should you need an actual academic job, you'll find that these sorts of outlets are not going to get you one... Incidentally, at least for the humanities this is true also for pretty much any OA (online only) publication you chose to go for.

Post scriptum: As an aside, it seems university libraries have been at the forefront of pushing for OA. Makes one wonder, in time of diminishing library funds, whether that's a classic example of having your cake and eating it. Be that as it may, it turns out, the same libraries have also been busy robbing students of their copyright to their own research theses stored on library servers. Remakable times!