| Story Views | |
| Now: | |
| Last Hour: | |
| Last 24 Hours: | |
| Total: | |
Moral dimensions of Open, part 2: “the public paid for it, so the public should have access”
This is the third part of a series on the Moral Dimensions of Open, in preparation for the forthcoming OSI2016 meeting, where I’ll be in the Moral Dimensions group. [Part 0 laid the foundation by asking why this matters; and part 1 discussed the argument that price should be zero when marginal cost is zero.] As usual, I will be concentrating on open access.
It’s now very well established that many, many kinds of people can and do make use of published scholarly literature when they can get hold of it: teachers, nurses, small business founders, developing-world entrepreneurs, rights campaigners, patient advocates … the list goes on.
The elitist and paternalistic idea that research papers are only of use to scholars at accredited universities is dead in the water. We know that all these non-researchers can and do make use of research, but does that mean they have a right to it?
One of the most frequent arguments for open access is this: research is funded primarily by the public — through taxes and charitable donations. Therefore the public should have access to the resulting research.
On the face of it, this argument is unassailable. I can’t think of any other area of government funded work that is handed over to corporations for them to profit from. and unavailable to citizens without paying a second time. The very idea sounds ridiculous.
But there are two objections that often crop up.
Objection 1: “the public can’t understand the research so they have no right to access”.
We can and should dismiss this argument immediately. The first have (“the public can’t understand”) is demonstrably false in many cases — see above — and the second half (“so they have no right to access”) wouldn’t follow from it ever if it was true. This argument is nonsense from start to end and I mention it only for completeness.
Objection 2: yes, the public pays for research to be done, and it has a right to the results of the research; but the papers describing the research are separate from the research itself, and the public has no right to them.
This argument is more substantial, and deserves to be addressed in some detail.
The first thing to say is that, in many areas of research, the paper is the research. For me, as a palaeontologist, for example, when I recognise and characterise a new dinosaur, the output is a paper containing the description and illustrations. So in many cases, the distinction between research and paper does not apply.
Second, even in fields where the paper is a secondary output — for example, you discover a new cancer drug and write a paper about it — the writing of the paper is also part of the work that you do as a researcher. The hard work (and it is hard work) of writing up the research, documenting the methods, running the analysis, describing the results, justifying the conclusions, creating the illustrations and so on, is all part of the work of a researcher — and is usually funded (like the rest of her work) with public money.
So the creation of an author’s manuscript is the result of public money. At that point it should be public property. It then gets submitted to a publisher and things happen that result in a nicely typeset copy with metadata lodged with various services. The publisher has made a contribution at this point, which should be compensated. One way to pay them for their work is with an article processing charge. This of course is Gold open access.
But in the traditional model, the publisher takes its compensation by placing the formatted paper behind a paywall.
Is this reasonable?
The first thing to note here is that while the publisher has added value to the formatted paper, they made no contribution whatsoever to the manuscript, so it’s wrong for them to impose any embargo on the manuscript’s publication as Green OA. A publisher who seeks to prevent the author from making the manuscript available is essentially admitted that the value they add is not worth what they charge for it.
That leaves the question of whether it’s justifiable for the formatted paper to go behind a paywall. I think that is open to debate. It’s far from obvious that the traditional approach is justifiable: while the publisher has at this point made a contribution, it’s a tiny portion of the total value that has gone into the paper — the work of the research itself greatly dominates, of course, and without that there would be no paper.
But I do think there may be a case to be made that publishers can legitimately seek revenue by paywalling formatted papers provided that no limitation is placed on the unformatted manuscript. I think it’s a stupid way to make money, but perhaps not an inherently immoral one, so long as the content of the paper is freely available elsewhere.
[Next time, part 3: “publishers’ profit margins are too high”]
Source: http://svpow.com/2016/04/07/moral-dimensions-of-open-part-2-the-public-paid-for-it-so-the-public-should-have-access/
