The Viewpoint: Open Access
OPEN ACCESS
The academic publishing business is like the old saw about the definition of a consultant; ‘They’ll take your watch, and then charge you for telling you the time.’
For those that haven’t been following the story, New Zealand universities and research institutions have let their employees give their work away to publishers, and then happily paid subscriptions to those publishers in return for access to it. The first cracks in this system came when we could no longer afford to buy access to the journals filled with the information we gave them. Next came indignation when we discovered that academic publishing became one of the most profitable legal enterprises in the world. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/mar/04/the-guardian-view-on-academic-publishingdisastrous-capitalism
For a long time some librarians have argued that this situation is unsustainable, for the libraries, as well as for the businesses that run the subscription journals. A few recent developments have put fresh impetus under the idea that publicly funded knowledge should be freely available to the community: Plan S and preprint servers.
Plan S is an initiative led by major European Research funders who demand that research they fund should be Open Access: free to read, and free to reuse. That includes the European Commission, lots of national research funding bodies, the World Health Organisation and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. It has an ambitious deadline, and has really reinvigorated thinking about OA. New Zealand is developing a local engagement plan.
Preprint servers have been popular in some areas for a long time. Physics and Maths have Arxiv (‘archive’) for putting up articles that are mostly finished, to get the approval and comments of the peers. It’s why you’ll often hear that new advances in physics ‘are yet to be reviewed’ when the story breaks. There are servers like this for social sciences (socxiv), Engineering (engrxiv), but most popular is the biology (biorxiv) which has has as many submissions this year, as the previous four years combined. https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-00199-6
All this points to major shifts in how academic publishing is changing, and changing quickly. Tohatoha is a society that has grown out of the Creative Commons movement to advocate for openness, sharing and equity in New Zealand and the internet. It sees access to information created by New Zealanders as being an important part of that - research on homes, health, and innovation that gets locked in expensive international
subscription journals, after it has been paid for by us as taxpayers creates barriers for marginalised scholars by reinforcing existing inequities.
They have released a report (https://www.tohatoha.org.nz/ October 3) and a series of videos that take the changes in scholarly publishing into account, and proposes a national strategy to take Aotearoa New Zealand into a practical, workable, Open Access future. One that includes the sustainability of NZ research in academia and CRIS, that listens and takes heed of the particular needs in Māori research. It is calling for a librarian-led process, suggesting that the National Library, CONZUL, and LIANZA should work together collaboratively to lead the development of a national level strategy, and help with its implementation.
We live in interesting times as scholarly publishing, the area of knowledge dissemination at the very forefront of our understanding of the world, that can help us understand things like climate change, controversial technologies like 5G mobile data exchange, and improve health outcomes for us all, is facing a massive and fast change. Unless we have access to research cheaply and easily and the talented people who create it are cared for and heard, we get stuck in ill-informed debate, potentially manipulated by vested interests. Fortunately it looks like things could be changing for the better.