 Good evening everybody So glad that you could all come out tonight for the exciting exciting launch of Peter Suber's book on open access before I turned over to David Weinberger and Peter for Q&A David's gonna introduce Peter very shortly. I just had a few quick logistical items One is that please just note that we often record Berkman Center events and we'll post them online. So during the Q&A your Comments will be recorded and posted for posterity on our website The second is that we have Peter's book for sale By the Harvard Coupe over there. It is for sale for what I'm told is cheaper than Amazon.com So we can make those copies fly off the shelf Peter will be around later for book signing And the third is that we hope that you'll stick around afterwards. We'll have Food and drink for you to hang out with so I'd like to introduce David Weinberger Who's gonna be interviewing Peter Suber on his book? David is a long-time community member of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society and is also at the Harvard Law School library at the Innovation Lab And is most recently the author of too big to know and so welcome to you So I am I still am a huge fan He is as you know the I think it's safe to say I'm gonna give the definite article here the leading advocate and Researcher and scholar in the area of open access that has done tremendous Work in building the community that has been pushing open access forward or maybe you should change metaphors and say let it has been letting Open access emerge as a more natural And a productive way of sharing and producing knowledge so I'm have the the privilege of talking with Peter first So we're gonna have a conversation and then we have three Wonderful guests who are going to have the right of first comment and question Stuart Schieber and June Casey and Robert Norton And then it will be open discussion and then followed by Some food and drink which all sounds pretty good to me. So Can we start just by Learning what what path brought you to this particular cause Yes, you can start there, but if you don't mind, let me just do what politician doesn't change the question for 10 seconds I want to thank MIT Press Lots of people are giving me good feedback on the book and I just count half of them because they're standing right in front of me But they say one thing that they don't have to say out of courtesy, which is it's a handsome book It's got a good half David just said it 10 seconds ago. We've talked about the book before It's true and they don't have to say it out of courtesy. I think so myself. I also want to thank you because I know I'm not easy to work with Okay, I was a Publishing scholar when the web came along and I had a back file of publications And I was also a little geeky like or I wanted to play with HTML and I didn't have anything serious to put into HTML So I why not just put some of my old publications at the HTML So I did that and you've got to appreciate my initial motivation was to play with HTML to be a geek I really didn't think this was going to help me as a scholar and then I put them on my website and I'll say for broadcast that I didn't ask anybody's permission and this was before I was really aware of all the issues and I didn't I had previously signed away my copyrights. I Just put them online because what's the point of making an HTML file if you can't put it on the web some of these publications were 10 years old at that point and I had gotten barely any serious correspondence from serious philosophers and Almost immediately I started to get serious scholars. This is a serious correspondence from serious scholars about these publications And that's when I began to think Maybe the web is a serious medium for serious scholarship and not just a geeky toy And I don't know how many of you were playing with HTML when the web was young But it sure looked like a geeky toy and we didn't all appreciate how useful it could be for serious In fact, one of the early obstacles to open access was that people thought of the web as a place for pornography and advertising and crap It's a serious online Invited a comparison with those things. Why are you associating your hard work that stuff? Which to me is like asking why do you want your book in a library next to a book that you strongly disapprove of? Nobody has to see the stuff next door if they're going to find your stuff. Anyway, I put my Publications online and I started to get serious feedback useful feedback the kind that I always wanted as an author Look around the landscape to see if anybody else was taking the web seriously as a medium for scholarship and research And at that time very few people were doing that But when I saw that somebody was I would fire off an excited email to one or two people I knew who also took it seriously and Six months later. It was five or six people and then a couple months later It was 10 or 12 people and I was still sending these emails By manually addressing them and I thought this is a nuisance I should make a little email group in my email app and just send these excited Messages to the group and I did that for six months and then I thought if I'm going to send an impersonal email to a list I may as well make the list public and let anybody sign up for it That decided I was just sending messages to friends, but I was actually writing a newsletter. There were no blogs at the time So I called it a newsletter and then after I called it newsletter I decided I better to live up to the name and I was just starting a sabbatical And I was planning to write some articles and read some books But I pushed all that to one side and threw myself into writing a real newsletter one that deserve the name If you go back into the archives, which I don't encourage you to do the first one or two issues in the newsletter Look like blog entries But after that they started to grow into periodicals Because that's what I was trying to live up to so I spent that whole sabbatical working almost 24 hours a day on Open access instead of what seek the news of somebody doing something exciting that I could then broadcast I Hunted down news. I tried to find people who something interesting. I tried to learn about Developments that I only half understood and I wrote them up for other people who might care not really Understanding how many people might care and at the beginning they were not many I Was on sabbatical as I say and at Earlham College where I was at the time the rule was you could take a full year Sabbatical at half pay or a half year at full pay. I was taking the full year at half pay. So I decided to live frugally I did not have a grant But in the middle of this I thought I should get a grant To pay the other half of my salary and I looked around and I found the open society Institute Whose mission looked like it converged with what I was doing with this newsletter and I wrote them and I said I'm working on this Topic above and excess who didn't have a name at the time free online scholarship and I would like to the missing half of myself And I thought I was going to get a reply that said Go to this web page look at our funding program Fought on that what you're doing and send us an application, but instead I got an email back that said we know What you're doing? How much do you want? So that was the beginning and I spent the rest of that sabbatical year funded fully funded Working all full-time on open access and then I had to go back to teach full-time that was the deal, but I had been at all in 21 years I'm not saying I was tired of my field because I'm not and didn't I share the same field and he knows I'm not but I was very excited by Open access it was the beginning of something that was terribly important, and I knew that it was just going to get bigger and I Wanted to keep broadcasting the exciting news about it So my wife who had been at Erlum for 25 years He had similar feelings for from a different direction We decided to spend that you're wrapping things up quitting our jobs and moving to Maine where my next chapter Would be working full-time on open access So that's what I did That's how I couldn't committed myself to it, but the initial impulse was playful geekiness Putting this stuff online, but then realizing that I was communicating with scholars in a way that I never did in print I was succeeding in reaching scholars in a way that I never did in print and Gradually almost every scholar who uses the web began to see the same thing and by the way today You never hear the objection. Oh if you put yourself online, you're just associating with pornography Narcissism and crap even though all that stuff is still online in abundance So we've won that one So I find it both fascinating and heartening in a way that your first step into this was not on the basis of principle it was on very practical grounds you posted some stuff and Those two strands one of things is really Refreshing and useful about the book is that it's really pragmatic There's it feels like there's some principle running behind it as well, but this is So let me ask a practical question The short answer is not every author is willing to do that the subset of authors who are willing to do that are Scholars who write peer-reviewed journal articles because they're not paid for them and even though my story didn't Reflect on a principle the fact is up to that point before I started putting this stuff online I was very conscious of the fact that I was signing contracts with publishers giving away my intellectual property rights and not being paid for them It didn't bother me a lot, but it bothered me a little and I was thinking about why this custom you Such that we do all this hard work and not only give away the product But give away the rights to the product for no payment at all So that fact was just lies in the back of my mind and I didn't really know what to think about it then the web came along and Even though I knew I was giving away copyrighted works and it should have asked somebody else's permission I also knew that I could retain rights in the future to authorize what I was doing and Why would I do that? Why would an author authorize? open access The answer is if you're not being paid then you're not sacrificing a revenue stream to do so The only risk created by open access for authors is that you might lose revenue if you're selling your work So novelists would be taking a risk journalists would be taking a risk Musicians and movie makers would be taking a risk scholars who write Monographs and textbooks would be taking a risk, but scholars who write journal articles are taking no risk at all their interest in writing journal articles is to Change the field to make a contribution to scholarship they write for impact not for money and again. I was aware of that So I was eager to authorize open access I just couldn't do it for the articles that I had already published because I Didn't think of this in time and I signed away all my rights But starting then I began to retain rights and I began to look for policies that advocated that authors should retain rights and I'm still advocating that today, but the interest of scholars in giving away their work Is that it maximizes their visibility and impact without Adding a sacrifice that they weren't already making if you want to say it's a sacrifice to give away work without payment That's okay with me provided you acknowledge it's a 350 year old tradition So I'm not going to royalty producing authors and saying starting today. I'd like you to stop accepting royalties I'd like you to relinquish that we're talking to scholars who have never accepted royalties since the birth of the scholarly journal in the mid 17th century That custom allows us Us authors of journal articles to give away our work without Losing revenue without making sacrifice that we're not already making and in exchange for it We get a larger audience greater impact exactly what we were ready for in the first place. So it's a no-brainer for journal articles It's a very tough proposition for any royalty producing literature So I want to start by saying the low-hanging fruit is royalty free literature, but I also want to say I'm also recommending advocating Pushing for open access to royalty producing literature as well including my book My book will be open access a year from now MIT press knows I wanted it to be open access centered in that I'm willing to take that risk from my royalty producing book MIT isn't we had a compromise I'm happy with the compromise, but I want open access to books that would open access to Novels when the authors consent I want to open access to music and movies when the producers consent to me It's a consent issue consent. It's easy to get for authors who aren't making money I mean do you have a hope or Expectation that as open access grows among those authors who are not making money off of their works unless it's these low-hanging fruit That authors and creators who are making me some money will look at the other benefits that the author gets and we'll start to make that trade Yes, to me the pitch to make to a book author who hopes to earn royalties from the book is to point out Realistically, you're not going to make much in the way of royalties from your book if you're writing a scholarly monograph And if you've already written one or two you already know that but if it's your first one You think it's going to be for sale in the rack and every airport That's the author is going to be hard to persuade But if you've already written a monograph, you know the royalties range between meager and zero In that case the benefits of open access easily outweigh the benefits of your royalties And you can afford to put them at risk And I think authors who are likely to make good royalties could also decide that the benefits exceed the risks Moreover the complementary argument is that there is good evidence that Open access to full-text books stimulates the net sales of the print editions and that the open access editions are used primarily for sampling They don't replace sales and if they do cannibalize some sales they stimulate more sales than they cannibalize The problem with this proposition is that it's hard to prove with a good control group because you can't make the same book open access and non-open access But insofar as we can get at it indirectly there is good evidence For different kinds of books that this works It seems to work for monographs. It seems to work for novels It seems to work for books that readers want to read from cover to cover Because at least when the evidence was coming in nobody wanted to read a whole book on a gadget So if they were sampling in the book because they had three exits in the text then they would go buy it This might be changing now that people are willing to read books on gadgets Nevertheless the evidence is there the evidence might be changing as the technology changes So what does this look like from the publisher's point of view? So so there's no risk to the author who's not getting paid That's right on the other side of it. They made you a little risk, right? This is the end of publishing industry. No, it's not the end of the publishing industry But academic publishers are afraid of open access. I Don't want to generalize The primary opponents of open access Publishers but academic publishers are not monolithic Some academic publishers are born open access if they're relatively new Some have completely converted to open access Almost every publisher is experimenting with open access There are different ways that publishers can do that Some of them experimented early because they thought this is not going to catch on We may as well throw this bone and very hard for them to retract the permissions that they gave early Some didn't jump in until late when they saw that the support from authors was growing and they didn't want to antagonize Authors by refusing even to experiment. So there's a lot of experimental open access from publishers including the Very wealthy large publishers, but also from small nonprofit society publishers Some of them are enthusiastically experimenting hoping it works better because some of them are being squeezed by the current system of scholarly publishing that is not everyone is Making 36% profits like Elsevier some of them are actually in the red There are good reasons for them to hope that this is a better alternative They're good reasons for some to think this is a survival strategy because they're not included in the big deals that are soaking up library budgets But there are also reasons why the ones that are making good money are experimenting because they See that the world might be changing Springer which at the time was the second largest journal publisher bought Biomancetral which at the time was the largest open access journal publisher Springer became the world's largest open access publisher overnight and The reason is pretty clear the CEO Wanted to buy by the way The other missing factor here is that Biomancetral had been struggling or moving from the red to the black over a period of About five or six years and I just crossed the line into the black Springer bought it and said open access isn't a Crusade it's a sustainable business model for academic publishing now We have not just a sustainable open access journal subsidiary We have a profitable one and the profit margin may be much smaller than what we get from our other journals But who cares if the whole world changes and we have to survive on our open access subsidiary We're better off than all those other publishers. That's really what I started to write about too I said to the other publishers. What are you doing to compete with free five years from now? We have to compete with free Springer is ready. Are you ready and I'm not saying I caused this But publishers began to look around for the other Biomancetral so that they could buy up and the other profitable Journal publishers open access journal publishers at the time have since been bought up and Others are becoming profitable so When Non-open access publishers buy open access publishers. They're doing it to hedge their bets They're doing it to compete in a changing world. I think that's self-interested. I think there's no problem with that And as I say some of them are worried about the big deal Maybe I should explain that Over the past couple of decades Journal publishers the biggest journal publishers have told libraries instead of selling you journals a la carte We'll sell you a big bundle like maybe 1,500 or 2,000 journals in a big package For a certain price and the advantage to the library is that you get more journals than you had before and the Journals come at a lower average price or a low-age price lower price per journal than you used to get the disadvantage Is that you get a lot of second-rate journals and journals that your patrons on your own campus don't care about If your campus has no nursing school. Now. These are nursing journals. They're not really something you would normally pay for if The faculty in a certain department says we want three of these that come in our field But not all 15 that come in our field. You can't Reel them out, but you're paying for them all and if you choose to cancel some because they're not In local high demand or because they're low in quality then the publisher raises the price on the remainder of the bundle so journals universities can't Save money with targeted cancellations and they must cancel the whole thing or continue to pay out Huge amounts for the bundle which increases at a rate faster than inflation I don't but the Harvard Faculty Advisory Council to the libraries recently published a note saying three of our Journal publishers cost us what three and a half million dollars a year? and That the memo went on to explain that this is unsustainable And the prices have been going up faster than inflation Not only are they going up faster than inflation they're going up faster than library budgets Which as you can imagine are not themselves going up faster than inflation So it would not matter much library budgets. We're also going at the same rate is journal prices, but neither Is going up as fast as journal prices, so the buying power of libraries has been declining since the mid 70s Prices have been going up faster than inflation and library budgets for decades and so we reached the point of real damage a long time ago and We're suffering and even the wealthiest academic library in the world is suffering and is saying so in public and By the way, it's not the first time Harvard said that and it's not the only library to say that But when Harvard did say it recently it got a lot of attention because a lot of people were more sensitive to the issue than they had been But one more just to get back to the main point This the big deals Deliberately absorb library budgets. That's what they're designed to do. They're designed to be hard to cancel painful to cancel So in so far as they're hard to cancel it tends to squeeze everything else out of the budget So jerks that are not in the bubble are the ones that libraries cancel books that are optional tend to not be bought so one other incentive for journal publishers to Try open access as a survival strategy is that they see there's a finite amount of money in library budgets It's in decline because of the economy and it's absorbed by these big deals And if you're not part of the big deal then your own survival is at risk you may as well try this other model And some publishers have made it profitable. Let's give it a try ourselves. So I think that's very rational for them to do I was talking about journal publishers who weren't previously open access why they might consider open access themselves But it's also true for book publishers One side effect of big deals squeezing library budgets is that libraries buy fewer books They've been rating their book budgets to pay for journals and not just journals in general But science journals even humanity journals have been squeezed to pay for science journals As a result of libraries buying fewer monographs academic book publishers are accepting fewer manuscripts. So Humanities authors who need to publish a book for tenure are finding it much much harder than they did a decade ago to get a book accepted And it's not because they've grown in numbers It's because the publishers are accepting fewer and fewer This is a reason for book publishers to consider open access as a strategy and a growing number are doing so Publishers bring And is it sufficient for them to Talk about journal publishers and not book publishers Okay journals and we're talking about open access journals Toll access, okay Toll access is the jargon subscription journals is what we mean just charging for access Publishers do add value. They like to say they add value. They're right about that The question is how much value they add and whether they add value that's worth the price that we end up paying for it That's right and the value they add is being added by open access journals, too So it's not as if the only way to add this value is by charging for access You can add the value and not charge for access and still like a profit But the chief Organizing peer review when publishers make statements about this to legislators or journalists they tend to say they provide peer review Which is a little misleading because they don't peer review is provided by scholars on a volunteer basis They don't charge for their services. They donate their labor the same way the authors donate their labor as researchers and authors referees donate their labor as referees journals or publishers organize that labor and that is a contribution and the Contribution of organizing it costs money. It's non-trivial I think scholars think it's trivial because if you're at the other end of it You just set up your comments and somebody incorporates them and makes a decision, but you have to find referees you have to Done late referees and most of them are late most of the time as you know if you've done this And then you have to incorporate the comments you have to date stamp them You have to get back to the authors. You have to send the right person to the right people at the right time Without Denigrating the work. I would call this clerical the Expertise in peer review is provided by volunteers The referees and the editors generally donate their time It's the organization of peer review the clerical side of peer review which costs money but the clerical side of peer review can be automated more or less by software and Journal management software is getting a lot better at organizing peer review So the cost of facilitating peer review are themselves coming down As the software gets better and better and some of the software by the way is open source. So The key infrastructure for providing this kind of added value is not only getting cheaper But it's perfectly accessible to open access journals if you are inclined to referee for journals in your field You don't care what their business model is if you're asked to referee a paper by an open access journal or by a Total access journal now your answer will depend on how much time you have and whether the paper looks promising You don't ask about the bottom line of the journal So open access journals have the same chance of getting good people to referee articles as toll access journals so the peer review can be just as good and sometimes we know it's exactly as good because a Subscription journal with a reputation and a corral of Regular reviewers converts to open access and takes all of its reputation and customers with it In that case the editors the standards the readers the referees are all the same So the rigor the integrity of peer review can be exactly the same at both the willingness of referees to donate their time Can be the same as both So there is some added value in organizing peer review, but it's not unavailable to open access journals. It's exactly as available Since I've heard you say many times Is say primarily Yeah, let me just say a few words about that One of the early harmful misunderstandings about open access is that its purpose was to bypass peer review And again, why it the same reason I think that everybody thought it was crap or Pornography because everything else on the web was not subject to peer review. So if you're putting it online, it's just like all that other stuff, right? Very uninformed especially when Peer review journals were saying that they were peer reviewed Anyway The purpose of an open access journal is to provide open access to peer reviewed articles not to bypass peer review The purpose of open access repositories or the primary purpose is to host peer reviewed articles not to bypass peer review But after having clarified that I also want to say Another front on which people are making progress in open access is providing open access to unreferred preprints So preprint exchanges where people swap papers that have not yet been peer reviewed is very useful to research It's just not the only focus of open access and I wouldn't even say it's the primary focus But before the web came along there were peer review exchange I'm sorry a preprint exchanges in many fields mostly the sciences. It was very rare in the humanities Those continued when the web came along and the archive in physics is not only the best Known example, but it's the largest and it actually helped physicists become leaders in open access because they're already used to Swapping preprints without the intervention or mediation of publishers and when the archive became open access and digital and online Physicists just went along with it and now in some fields of physics a hundred percent of new research is open access from Birth that is even before its peer reviewed because physicists have been Customs to trading their preprints. In fact most physicists now I think in some fields like particle physics think of journal publication as An afterthought a kind of archiving of the article which has already made whatever impact it will have by circulating as a preprint You were referring to archive.org. Yeah, they are exciting. Yeah, Greek. Hi, I'd be so Let's talk about the current state and Stuart Schieber who you will be hearing from soon a couple months ago Posted a blog post that got a fair bit of attention that said pardon my paraphrase but It's looking like at this point. It looks like open access is turning the corner and it's inevitable. Is that close enough don't get Yes, okay So what what what's left holding holding it back two things there were still some publisher opposition But I think that's secondary to the next thing which is author misunderstanding author unfamiliarity if you want the brutal term author ignorance The rate at which we progress in open access depends on author decisions and if authors aren't aware of it If authors are confused about it if authors fear it then we're not going to make progress very quickly Authors control the speed of open access because they decide whether to submit their work to an open access journal They decide whether to deposit it in an open access repository and they decide whether to transfer rights to a publisher or retain The rights they need to authorize open access all these dependent authors and the influential policy policies that help Promote open access are influential because they influence author decisions so university policies and funder policies are influential because Universities and funders have control over authors and if a funder says if you take our money You must make the resulting work open access the grantee pays attention because the grantee wants the money and Some of the earliest university policies said if you work here You have to make your work open access and of course that gets the attention of faculty But almost all university policies since 2008 when the faculty of arts and sciences here at Harvard adopted a policy has turned that around Instead of a policy from administrators saying to faculty you must make your work open access faculty are saying we Choose to make our work open access. We are creating a policy imposing it on ourselves and The Harvard FAS policy was adopted by a unanimous faculty vote and it was the first of At least 35 unanimous faculty votes by faculty around the world including several at different schools at Harvard to do this Faculty don't have to be have their arms twisted to adopt policies like this. They Know that their interest is in making their work more widely available. They know they're not being paid for their articles They know they're not losing anything and they know they're not even excluding themselves from The odds of being published by a certain prestigious publisher the Harvard policy For example allows authors to opt out if they want to publish with an author with a journal that just otherwise wouldn't be able to abide it The waiver rate is very low. Most publishers don't feel they have to take that step But authors retain the freedom to decide for or against open access for every one of their publications So they're not being coerced in the slightest and as a result. They say we want this we want to change the default Under the old system the default was you don't make your work open access And you have to take some affirmative step to make it open access Harvard policy supported unanimously faculty say We give standing permission to the university to make our work open access And if we don't want that to happen for one of our articles We have to take an affirmative step to say no not for that one. So So there's one more factor that I'd like you to talk about in particular because I think it raises the question of to what extent is is and should Is open access mirroring the structure of toll access? And so it's one of the reasons why authors resist like I believe in some cases resist open access is it doesn't have the impact back they can get the impact factor that traditional publishing and told small exclusive told based publications provide going up for tenure at least it has traditionally looked better to have published One of the paper get paper journals. So this is a type of exclusivity that the fact of paper provides That traditional has been a value for traditional publishers And it's being mirrored in some of the open access journals as well precisely to provide Authors with a sense of exclusivity which they can then use or impact they can then you to get In Reinstituting an artificial in some ways an artificial scarcity in open access journals are we There were several things in there that I'd like to respond to First it's in the digital age gets total access publishing which creates artificial scarcity Once you have a digital article and once you have a worldwide web then not making it available to everybody with an internet connection is artificial scarcity And putting it online behind a paywall Is artificial scarcity open access does not create artificial scarcity However, open access journals are selective like any other journal, but as they reject some submissions That's not our official scarcity Quality fill open access removes price filters or price barriers. It does not remove quality filters They're highly selective. They're as selective as the most selective Why not? That's about quality now there's prestige and One problem with the academic world today is that we confuse quality with prestige and We use prestige as a surrogate for quality when it's not a good surrogate at all more over I think one reason we do that is that quality is impossible to measure and prestige is just difficult to measure so it's a little bit a little bit better, but The traditional journals are prestigious and I would qualify something you said because they used to paper Because they're old and they've had a long time to develop a reputation for quality and when a journal is Then over time it could be reputation for being high in quality Journal which is brand so high and it doesn't yet have a reputation for being high in quality It takes time to earn a reputation proportional to your quality As I say in the book open access journals have all the advantages of being open access, but all the disadvantages are being new If you're new you don't have a reputation to match your quality at least not And so you're competing for prestige with journals that have it You might disturb it because your quality is the same, but you don't have the same prestige So I got which is how we often do it. Have I heard of this journal to be published there myself Then open access journals often lose because if they're new you haven't heard of them yet prestige by impact factor open access journals Win very often because there's good evidence that open access increases the citation of articles and There's also it increases the journal impact factor of journals that have become open access This gets the attention of publishers because they want to increase their own This gets complicated because while I want open access journals to compete on a more level playing field with traditional journals I don't want them to compete for the journal. I think it's a bogus metric So it's a game at which open access journals could win I just don't want them to play the game and That's a hard one because you'd like them to win at every game Public Library of Science, which is one of the best open access journal publishers has developed journal level article I'm sorry article level metrics for Each of its journals one problem among many other problems with journal impact factors is that it doesn't measure the impact of individual articles It measures the average impact of a whole journal and you're supposed to bask in the reflected glory of all the other good articles That I've ever appeared there when you might be the one who's bringing it on the average for the journal and So what we really want at least if you want to sharpen the metric and make it more precise is Article level metrics not journal metrics and Public Library of Science to its credit It has the power to play the journal impact factor game and win, but it's not it's choosing to Develop article level metrics and I think other open access journal Publishers are doing the same and ought to do the same The other thing about imitating tall axis It's true that some journals some open access journals some all digital journals Look a lot like print journals online That's no accident. Some of them do it on purpose One reason they do it on purpose is to be as little alarming as possible You're going to switch from tall access to open access people wonder. Are you low in quality? Are you bypassing peer review? Are you skimping on peer review? Business model is to charge an up-front. Are you corrupt? Are you taking fees to? Are you great? Are you lowering standards in order to rake in fees? If a journal changes nothing but the access variable and keeps peer review Conservative or customary conventional then it can satisfy skeptics who think that everything is changing at once Controlled experiment journals do a hundred different things. We're going to change just one and watch us everything else is going to stay the same That's deliberate Other things if we wanted to and do we want to well in many cases we do so many open access journals are deliberately pushing the evolution of Journals as a category. I think that's also the right thing to do So we've got a mix we've got some traditional journals that happen to be open access We've got some very innovative things that might not even desert to be called journals anymore Have decided to push the And behind this apart from the policy decisions about how many variables to tweak at the same time you've got call it Lack imagination It's kind of a cliche that when television came along TV shows look like broadcast radio shows or they look like broadcast stage plays That wasn't because people thought that would be smart. It's because it took a long time to Decide or to discover how to take full advantage of the new medium for telling stories Likewise, it's taking a long time for us to figure out how to take advantage of the medium for this emitting scholarship We're still doing it And it's because we haven't yet thought hard enough But we haven't had enough time to continue our experiments So this is going to keep going and by the way the same time this is happening for open access journals It's happening for toll access journals. So both kinds of journals are learning how to use the web I think it took a couple of years for Journals to integrate search engines, you know, they could have done it immediately They integrated Active links fairly early, but they didn't Link from every citation in every end node right away that took time that by the way took standard setting as well That was really complicated Not every journal right away incorporated occurred awareness alerts by email and RSS Which is a no-brainer you think today But it took a while for our imagination to realize that could be part of a journal Now these are all fairly commonplace, but what are we overlooking? That's going to be commonplace five years from now ten years from now We don't know the answer, but that's our fault. It's not because we're deliberately deciding to hold back progress to look like the old thing And avoid scaring people. So let me ask one more question Which is So imagine some point doesn't matter 20 years in the future and open access is as it is inevitable in its turn So this is another question about period The my issue with peer review for the tort is it doesn't scale very well It serves a lot of purposes, but you don't get it Trots there just aren't enough people To engage in this difficult process of peer review, especially for free. So in let's say 20 years Why wouldn't it be the case as a natural evolution that we have our vast Preprint repositories basically anybody can publish and your view happens In all the different ways in which quality is assessed by various sorts of crowds some of them expert Some of them not very expert and that those evaluations which are very the type of peer review after the process after publication Those processes become in effect They do the thing that we want journals to do they draw our attention to the work in the massive work that is relevant and Who journals have a future Journals probably have a future But so do the alternatives that don't look much like journals the whole category will evolve and they will always be conservative looking specimens inside Boundaries and then innovative things but peer review will also evolve In all my writings about peer review I've been careful not to say much because I don't want to feed the misunderstanding that open access presupposes a certain kind of peer review When in fact it's compatible with every kind of peer review Very conservative peer review very innovative peer review I have opinions about what peer review what kinds of peer review are better than others But I've been reluctant to say them since everybody thinks of me as the open access guy But I I'll make a two-sided claim then first. We are seeing more post publication review what I call retroactive peer review And second, I think that's good. I hope it works My judgment is that it hasn't worked very well so far and the pioneers in retroactive peer review Failed generally Retractive peer view is desirable because you make the pre-print open access From the first minute as soon as the author is ready to submit it. It's open access So there's no delay. You say it's a bottleneck. It's true. It slows things down in Fields where you have rapid turnaround. You still are looking at two three four months in fields with slow turnaround like economics It's two or three years It's a terrible bottleneck that slows down research. So you want to make this stuff open access as soon as possible One way is to put it up Make it open access right away and then subjected to peer review later Now if you subject it to a kind of conventional peer review later By farming it out to people that you handpick to do the work And you decide to accept the article you probably accept the revised version of the article You put up the revised version alongside the original version. You still It says this was by review That would work except that's not what most people mean by retroactive or open review What they mean by that is let's take the discussion triggered by a paper and with nudging or channeling let's Make it higher in quality than it has been and let's call that peer review and let authors let readers decide what's worth reading What's valuable? What's worthy by monitoring that discussion? And maybe let's help them monitor the discussion by bringing it to one place or by harvesting it and reducing it to stars One of the problems How do you make it easy for people to digest this discussion? Well, if you say don't discuss the paper just rate it One to five. Well, then you're not really doing the curve you used to do you're you're skimping on that job That's one kind of failure if you substitute Ranking if you substitute discussion for ranking and say let's have a real substantive discussion. That sounds like it's Going to be helpful. At least it won't oversimplify the evaluation process But then you're failing to help the reader who simply wants to know what's most worth reading about what's new Journalists that tried that have that problem It's hard to give readers or would be readers to digest of what's going on But they have another problem too, which is put off this preprint and they say please come comment If you happen to be in the right field and if you monitor those discussion sites, you see cool, dude this sucks Whether it's positive or negative it tends to be superficial It's hard to get people to engage deeply with the paper The way peer reviewers engage deeply with a paper That's the problem now. I think we can solve that problem one thing that I don't think has been sufficiently tried is to Assign peer review to a paper that's already open access and say you're an expert in the field You might even be discussed in this paper at least your work has implications for this We're commissioning a review from you the way we would in the old days except the papers already out there in one version and In letting your comments will decide whether to publish it and give it the metadata that says that we approve it That has not been Especially tried it could be that when it is tried it'll fail too, but if you're asking about what we'll see in 20 years I think we'll see a lot more retroactive. We will see the results of many experiments which made it work better than it has worked up until now and If we succeeded that then papers will be open access earlier in the process It'll be less of a bottleneck and we'll still have quality filters attached to every new publication Wonderful like why don't we turn to our special guests and starting with June are you okay with that so do you casey you come I don't Have But yet your faculty aren't submitting to the What You Yes But before I pass over that stick, let me just say that's my favorite idea for instead of housing deposit It was started at the University of Nottingham It's spread to Leish which is now famous for doing it more than a handful of universities have adopted the policy policy Simply says if you're coming up for promotion or tenure and you want us to review journal articles as opposed to books or artworks Then they must be on deposit in our open access repository. Those are the only journal articles We will consider in the evaluation The nice thing about it is that it gets everybody's attention because everybody wants to be promoted or tenure And it doesn't change the standard for promotion or tenure if you take her with promotion and tenure Everybody's afraid that you're lowering standards or changing standards that you're trying to do some social engineering Other than open access, but in this case, you're not changing the standard at all. The work is already published And the committee will be looking for whatever it was looking for before it simply saying we're only gonna look for evidence of that In the articles that are on the public. It's a great idea And there are some schools that don't make it quite so stick-alike And they don't say you must or they don't say our committee will only evaluate articles that are on deposit They simply give faculty a form when they come up for promotion and tenure. It says fill out this form Probably we've been at the school with your department. How many articles did you publish last year? And name the articles and give us the URLs That's it. It doesn't Direct the faculty member to do anything in particular, but faculty start to think Well, I better have a URL to go with this article and Sometimes you can't say is there a URL in an access repository and if so put it in here in the blank And nobody wants to hand in a form of blank to their promotion and tenure committee. A couple schools have done this without adopting a policy just changing the form Okay, back to First let me recognize Emily Kilser who has done work for the Harvard Open Access project The ideas in the literature for Giving faculty an incentive for depositing their work. It turns out there are dozens or hundreds of ideas That have been recommended and some that have actually been tried some of the most successful. I think are Feedback about traffic and downloads And by the way, Harvard is now doing this and I'm a depositor in the Harvard repository and I can tell you when I get that Weekly email telling me how many people downloaded my articles from the Harvard repository. I'm actually kind of thrilled And I was telling see the other day I'm especially thrilled because before I got here all my works were open access in a different place And all Google Jews points people to that place very little of it points people to Harvard because the URLs are much newer But I'm getting a huge amount of traffic at Harvard from these and I love to see that And if I love to see that when I have this competing set of URLs competing Google nudge then other faculty must too Other schools report that when they tell back their traffic numbers faculty suddenly have an incentive they get feedback Oh, I did the right thing. I wasn't just complying with the bureaucratic Regulation moreover, I want to know whether the person down the hall for me in my department is getting higher or lower traffic And some schools make this semi-public some don't Yeah, Harvard these emails are private That is your own traffic numbers are private to you But there are general numbers about the university general I think schools in general Departments in general and so you can compare your numbers to the average for your department And so there's some competition here. There's also some author pride Again, we write for impact not for money We'd like to know whether we're having impact and it's hard to measure impact precisely the general impact factors a bad metric Downloads are not a very good metric, but it's a metric. It's something and it's authentic You know that they could somebody could be gaming the metric, but you're not gaming the metric and if you're not nobody else's so It's a pretty reliable Let's do it quite different It's a reason not to call policy mandate and a reason not to have a mandate Not to expect that a mandate will work with tenured faculty, but we're not talking about Mandating more we're talking about incentives and I think tenured faculty are susceptible to author pride just like anybody else They would like to know that they're having an impact like anybody else They write for impact just like everybody else and they'd like to see that feedback Some schools go a step further than giving you your private traffic numbers and they publish a box in the school Newspaper on the front page every week that says the most visited paper this week was by so-and-so And it's such-and-such and here's the URL. Well, that's great. It's nice celebration of that person and that paper and you may not Consciously compete in that box, but you know that people are being recognized for their work and that's a nice thing They did do work. They were Achieving impact and we are ready for impact so good for them and it's a way of telling people We're not asking you to deposit this as Just one more Bureaucratic rule that has lost its rationale that we're doing it because we really want The work we support is the nonprofit University to have the impact that it's supposed to have since we're not selling it We can't measure our impact through sales revenue I just want to mention that That this idea of listing the top articles by download we've picked up on in our own repository dash We used the top 10 articles and for whatever reason I'm open to theories perennially More than one of the top articles is about Kant You can explain this to me. Kant is a really favorite download from that repository But that wasn't my main point Which is from the ultimate chapter by the future So I'll do a little reading and then make a comment The or raise a question Based on reading so here's what Peter says. He says the basic idea of OE is simple But it has acquired crucial refinements over the years to answer objections and make implementation fast easy and expensive and lawful This creates a tension because the basic idea is simple. It's continually being rediscovered However, people fresh to the concept haven't yet absorbed the refinements that answer objections and make implementation fast easy Expensive and lawful remember Peter writes all these likes to repeat phrases in this wonderful way Emphasizes The dramatic reading could have made that clear by itself Hence One transition complexity is the fresh convert who supports OE in theory doesn't understand how to pay for a support peer review How to avoid copyright infringement how to avoid violating active peer or how to insert many other long-answered objections in this understanding So this is really an important that this tension Is is holding things back and the tension is the simple idea seduces us into thinking that everything about open access is simple Because the point is simple All the other issues now there's a simple solution to this problem and that solution is Peter's book available for sale Everyone should simply read this book and then they will be aware of these subtleties I'm so convinced that that's true That we're going to be giving copies of the book while we're in the faculty in FAS As I meet with them each year to talk to them about open access Fortunately, I'm not that new Break the bank Okay As you point out to be almost 20 years since you started working on this issue here 12 Oh, okay. You can't put it my own work. Yeah. Yes, okay People started putting You realize early on other people Something good about making this work available to be supplemented your venues Uh, none the less open access isn't Is it the central way of doing it? even scholarly journal publishing I'm gonna say it's a longer fringe method, but it's not the central structure that we use for that kind of dissemination and So Gee after all that it's an easy question. I Think university should do what seven schools in Harvard have done they should adopt the Harvard style of an excess policy and I Prove it by advocating that policy. I recommend it. I endorsed it before I got here. So there's no conflict University should adopt policies funders should adopt policies I know you asked about universities, but I'm deliberately bringing in both of them because funded policies only influence the grantees They're very effective for the grantees, but not Universities can influence essentially all researchers now There are a lot of researchers, but if we can actually reach all university employed researchers We've reached the critical mass by a long shot. So if universities adopt open access policies, we're there if 20% of universities adopt open access policies were there and there are only about a hundred Good university policies today and there are at least three thousand universities in the United States alone So we're a long way from spreading these policies as far as they need to be spread You know, but maybe not everybody in the room knows that a lot of schools that don't have policies are already Deliberating about policies and one thing we're doing here is helping those schools deliberate about policies I'm not saying that Next month 50 new schools will announce policies, but I can predict that some very big and important schools will announce policies fairly soon That the hundred we've got if you can chart them show momentum It's not slow growth That's petering out. It's starting slow and Seeing the curve rise sharply more and more schools will do this more and more schools have done what Harvard did Not just by a document policy, but by persuading the faculty that it's worth voting up unanimous There were unanimous votes at more and more schools since Faculty are being persuaded to do this one reason progress was slow in the early days is that faculty didn't understand this Librarians understood this Librarians as a class still understand the issues better than faculty as a class But because the authors of the Q decision makers a key variable in progress is how many faculty About these issues We're winning that and you see it every time faculty policy you still worked at the right thing by Persuading the Harvard faculty to vote at this policy and not persuading the administration to impose it on the faculty That was hard to do and it was one of the first times that had ever been done But now we know it can be done and we also know that faculty ready to hear the message There are always some who misunderstand and they take a lot of patient discussion and hand-holding There'll always be some of those but I think they are fewer and fewer a number and there is a dance of a growing rebellion from faculty the chief is the fresh hybrid problem from a Count for the best practices that make open access fast easy Nevertheless, they're susceptible to the message. They are warm to it and they're ready to vote for a good policy One problem that we see at Harvard here when we consult with other schools that are considering policies is that the first draft Hasn't learned from the experience of other schools So one thing we're doing is trying to digest the experience of other schools including our own experience and make that available to other schools And sometime this fall I hope we'll have a public document that we can share with other schools But that's what I think schools should do. They should adopt policies but they should adopt policies that benefit from the experience of the schools that went before them Including us but not limited to us and then adopt a policy that has faculty support If it has faculty support, then we're continuing in the right direction. Just one more way to put this We don't have to have policies that literally bind all scholars It's roughly speaking the case that 80% of papers are published by 20% of authors If you can get that 20% of the authors then you've got it made It's not clear whether we're there yet, but who clear who those 20% are even though there's probably going to figure that out And you don't want to get just the schools that have some critical mass of those Offers although we're getting there too. So there's a point far short of 100% Well, we do cross a tipping point and I'm trying to be careful with tipping point language because it's I think overused in this area But when you see this sharply rising curve, you know they're getting there fast Today only 30% of peer-reviewed Journals are open access, but 30% is a lot compared to 10 years ago when it was about 1% There are 100 open access policies universities around the world. There are about 300 funding agencies around the world There are 8,000 peer-reviewed journals in all languages in all fields In each case these numbers reflect sharply rising curves So there's no doubt that the momentum is with us and it's only about our time before we cross that barrier Where the magic 20% of the authors have either internalized the message or been civic to a cause Do you think that administrations are to found new open access journals? Do you think they should subsidize Processing fees and do you think they should try to have new platforms that could be used economically? What is the best policy on the point of view of let's say Very good question First of all this idea that I left a lot of having promotion tenure committees limit their review of journal articles to those on the Is a provost level decision, so I'd like to see them consider that And if we're ever going to reverse it it has to be done at the provost level and we have to Make sure they Are sensitive to the problems that need to be solved University presses are declining and disappearing and One reason is that universities expect them to be profit centers But in fact scarly it's always been subsidized. It has never almost never met Universities have to acknowledge that if they're going to have a press That will take some of the load back from commercial public. It has to be subsidized It can't be a profit center can't be expected to be a process. That's a matter of university expectations So that's a Massachusetts Hall decision. It's not a press decision If you're going to fund the press if you have a press let Good works of scholarship that won't make a lot good works of scholarship If we're going to continue the process of reclaiming academic scholarship academics and not outsourcing it We're outsourcing it less and less to commercial publishers. Then I think we should Observe the movement to merge publishing of libraries Many of the press this and many major academic libraries have merged over the past five years It's a good idea not just because there's a lot of common knowledge shared by those two but because the role of the library is changing In the digital age and one part of the library It's to share the collection now that used to mean sharing the print collection with walking patrons but now Everybody who has a computer and that's publishing Insofar as libraries to adapt their vision to the digital age That's a problem It won't go anywhere very fast unless the provost decides this is something worth doing and To decide whether it's worth doing you can't really look at journal prices Licensing issues Mistakely made a couple generations ago and letting academic publishing be taken over by corporations who's Are given to shareholders rather than to academics Scholarly publishing when it was done by university presses fed the university Scholarly publishing when it's done by societies and learned societies feeds learned societies But scholarly publishing done by big corporations feeds shareholders and the money is not Recycled by the academy We have to recycle the revenue that pays for scholarship so that it supports the academy Instead of letting it hemorrhage out of the academy the way it has to do. Okay. That's a provost level decision and there can be visionaries Big picture problem, not just individual author decisions. Thank you Thank you See talked about uh getting other large universities to my end of this Right across the river Is probably something that would be equivalent to one of the largest universities in terms of its publishing Power and that's the Harvard medical school, which has not Why didn't the policy? How do you think what would be the best approach for us to use? Uh to try and win them over to an open access policy that we could The Harvard medical school was not opposed to an open access policy. No, it supports one and it's a developing one It just faces complexities that the other department don't face Among them that you have 10,000 faculty members So there was some real problems to work at more over most of the faculty of medical school Are already funded by the NIH which already has an open access mandate And you don't want to subject researchers to two different mandates and the compliance measures required for each So you've got to develop the Harvard medical school policy so that it doesn't add an extra burden on faculty members But I think there is support. It's just that all these little or big problems have to be worked out In a way that they didn't have to be worked out from the other schools So i'm not worried about it. It's just taking a while So the Harvard medical school publishes over 300 papers a week and only about 30% of the network is actually NIH funded So it's okay We're missing out a lot. Okay. Well, that's an argument for supplementing the NIH Mandate with a local hns mandate or policy and it is coming. It really is But it has to work With these problems and they are hard even the problems at fas and the law school The ones that came earliest in the process were hard Actually that I think illustrates Stewart's point about one of the virtues of the book is that it is necessary to aware of just those sorts of complexities Somebody else another question So one of the things that I really Upset me I would say A year or so ago is when with some colleagues we try to Give a seminar and we'd like to give to the attendees copies of our papers And we're told us we have to pay for our own papers two thousand dollars in order to be Have the privilege to copy our papers I gave up of course and I never said I wondered could I have done something else at that time? Yeah Uh to you know You're talking about sharing papers with students in a seminar. Yeah To me that's a student with with all the hints that the university was bringing Okay, that is a little harder Let me finish my first thought if it's students in a seminar, that's fair use Educational use is listed as one of the kinds of fair use in the statute It's not one of the ambiguous borderline cases of fair use I think universities tend to be Tended about pushing the boundaries of fair use. That's a per most decision or a Massachusetts all level decision I understand why you don't want to create unnecessary risks but Universities have given up the fight on what counts as fair use and they've accepted publisher propaganda Which has shrunk the scope of fair use to something very tiny Now whether it's really fair use to give out full text articles to everybody who attends a conference He is a harder question than giving out papers to students So I don't want to pretend that that's easy. It's it's not clear fair use The best advice is to make it open Under an open license that permits reuse before you publish And so there may not be a good retroactive remedy for this case But if we appreciate the problem caused by our neglect To retain rights in the past then we will know why we should retain rights in the future I can't hear you Well, it's a question It's working It records not me Ah Okay So I can work more on open innovation When I wonder if you think Is there a relationship with open access Will accelerate perhaps open innovation in the sense that this could really influence the distribution of r&p or innocent discovery because the barriers to entry let's say When universities used to have less access to this knowledge Is now removed or partially removed I'm convinced the answer is yes, but I'm not sure I have a lot of detail that I can offer When you make Research open access you make it open access to every conceivable user And academics themselves are only a subset of them. You make it open access to manufacturers You make it open to medical practitioners. You make it open to Medical patients and their families you make it open to people that we don't usually think about when we talk about the audience for scholarship We started have started as a country to think about the audience of manufacturers because We want open access to help solve the jobs problem not just to help solve the cereals crisis That's fine because it helps on both but We've all had to pay attention to the economic impact arguments for open access and a lot of those depend on Making research easier to exploit For manufacturers now they can't lock it up. I don't mean exploit that way, but they can benefit from it So none of us should be surprised if open access research helps consumer technology helps Pharmaceuticals helps metallurgy helps every research intensive industry in the world. Why shouldn't it? Now the companies that use the research may make products for profit But there's a level of what some people call pre-competitive sharing Where before we compete in the market to sell our goods which might even be patented There's a level of shared knowledge about The laws of nature and basic facts that We can't lock up or at least shouldn't lock up Even some medical some pharmaceutical companies have discovered this on their own without a note from the government and have decided that they will benefit even as a seller of patented medicines if they share raw data from Their biochemical research and so some large drug companies have given away their raw data about biochemical research in the spirit of pre-competitive sharing They weren't benefiting by locking it up and they would like to create a milieu in which This is part of the pre-competitive sharing of all the manufacturers in the industry I don't know how widespread that will be but I think most Industries understand the rationale for pre-competitive sharing if the basic laws of nature were proprietary if they were locked up We wouldn't have innovation or practically any kind It's a fine line to decide when you stop sharing and when you start competing But open access to period research Solves a big piece of that problem at least that will be widely shared for anybody who can make use of it Whether for other research or for manufacturing another innovation As far as I know No secret I wanted immediate open access the press didn't it was a congenial discussion. I understood why they didn't they understood why I did We Talked back and forth and agreed on this I'm willing to compromise I would be less willing to compromise if I were saying something utterly new in the book But as I say on the preface and not hiding from anybody this book consists of arguments and analysis that I published in open access forums In the past often more than once I'm Little tireless and a little repetitive on the subject of open access So the book doesn't have anything very new except the unification of all these arguments and analysis And maybe that's worth paying for but even if not you can wait a year. I'm not going to mind if you wait a year That's when it becomes open access But I do understand why a book publisher wouldn't want a book to become open access on day one Some are open access on day one and some of those do well, but we're not really sure what all the variables are So it was a friendly discussion and it resulted to come up with us Time for one last question And by the way, there's no question that the book is worth the price How would you incentivize faculty to gain ability from the important first step of um depositing their work in institutional repositories which I guess in the grand scheme is a relatively passive step of merely following the university policy that's already in place to taking the proactive step of choosing an open access journal for their work particularly in the humanities where the argument for distribution isn't necessarily strong I Can answer the question but first I'd just like to change a few words I don't think it's passive to deposit in repository. Even if your school has a policy Burging you or requiring you to do so because you don't have to deposit because the school said so you might deposit because it's a good idea Many school policies have some good idea behind them I have to think publisher parish is a pretty good idea Even if it's sometimes implemented badly that is we researchers ought to publish our research Not just do it and put it in a drawer. So when we publish we're not just following the rule We're also Fulfilling our mission as researchers to share our results with other people. So I think when you deposit in repository That's what you're doing too. There's nothing passive about it And if there are no good open access journals in your field, that's a perfectly good way to make your work open access Now there might not be good open access journals in your field There are some first rate open access journals, but some fields don't have them yet And if you need high prestige for the sake of promotion and tenure, there may be no high prestige journals Even if there are high quality journals And there's no harm in taking all the variables into account when you're calculating where to submit your work So if you look at the directing of open access journals and browse by discipline, you can see what's available in your field And you may not like what you see. That's fine In that case deposit your work in repository and make it open access that way But if there is a journal which is high in quality, maybe high in prestige And you can get your work accepted go for it I don't want to over promise and say there are journals like that in every field for every topic Of every research paper. There are yet. There are only 8,000 peer reviewed journals There are at least 25,000 peer reviewed journals in all fields and some estimates go as high as 60,000 So it's either 30% or it's something even smaller Maybe 15% So we're still growing and there are a lot of gaps not yet covered by high quality open access journals All I can say is if you look today and don't find them that you like look again when you publish your next paper because things are changing Also