Will research that the U.S. Federal Government pays for have to be open access? Betteridge’s Law of Headlines says the answer must be “no” but there’s a rumor—just a rumor—that the White House is about to extend the Obama Administration’s rule that federally funded research must be freely available a year after publication to require that federally funded research be open access immediately.
Again, this is just a rumor but the publishers and—to their shame—many professional societies are losing their minds and demanding that the proposal be withdrawn. They’re forecasting all sorts of doom if the policy is implemented. About the only good thing you can say about their reactions is that at least they haven’t said, “Think of the children.” Of course, it’s still early days.
According to the Gizmodo story at the link, federally funding is responsible for 44% of basic research so there’s a lot at stake. My take is that if such a rule is mandated, it will force the publishers to adopt a new business model. The most common suggestion is that publishers get paid up front: the universities or other research organizations would pay to have the papers published and the publishers would make them immediately available.
That idea more or less preserves the current situation but is that a worthy goal? Is there really any reason we need to print and store paper copies of the research in our current digital world? If you accept that we don’t, then what, exactly, are the publishers contributing? Virtually all of their labor—editors, reviewers, and content providers—is from volunteers. They do have staff that (maybe) tweak the LaTeX input of the papers and they do provide the servers that house the digital copies but most of their employees are on the business end.
Universities pay truly staggering amounts for subscriptions to these journals (until they refused to renew their subscriptions, The University of California was paying Elsevier \$11 million a year). If every organization publishing research contributed a modest amount, they could easily provide the servers and staff to run them. Doubtless that’s a little over simplified but it does merit thought.