Oxford’s Radcliffe Camera, in a view from University Church of St. Mary the Virgin on the north side of the high street. Image – Getty: JJ Farquitectos
By Richard Charkin | @RCharkin
‘Challenging the Orthodoxy’
I know that many or even most Publishing Perspectives readers think of our industry as almost entirely composed of literary agents, royalty advances, copies returned from retailers, launch parties, bestseller lists—all the trappings of books written for the general public and sold through bookstores.
Richard Charkin
This column is risky, both in discussing another publishing world—that of academic research publishing—and an issue, access to publications at zero cost to the reader, that’s moving toward becoming the universal business model.
There may be lessons and concerns for all of publishing. See what you think.
In my university years, I was blessed by having a decent and obliging overall tutor at my college. He allowed me to switch from studying medicine after a week of incompetent and disgusting (to me) human dissection.
I dropped anatomy and replaced it with experimental psychology—mainly rats and pigeons in Skinnerian mazes rather than ‘soft’ psychology about feelings and all that. After three undistinguished years, he allowed me to switch again for my fourth and final year to study history and philosophy of science. I loved it.
Diving into the course, I became engrossed in the 1969 edition of TS Kuhn’s landmark book, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.
Kuhn’s thesis was that scientific understanding of the universe—or any scientific discipline for that matter—did not progress in a linear straight line but in a series of revolutions in which the current paradigm became unsupportable because it simply ceased to fit the facts.
The biblical explanation for the existence of innumerable species was, of course, that God created all of them at some point in the past—October 23, 4004 BC, according to James Ussher, Archbishop of Armagh. Over time, this theory of creationism was brought into doubt by studies of the fossil record and was abandoned by all but a few theologians.
The paradigm shifted because there was a growing body of evidence to contradict it. It was briefly replaced by a new theory, Lamarckism, which posited that species evolved by inherited characteristics. The sons of blacksmiths had strong arms as a result of their father’s exertions. And then came Darwin, whose theory of evolution by natural selection has more or less stood the test of time—until that theory accretes too many exceptions or work-arounds to withstand the next paradigm shift.
A paradigm shift happened in the 1990s in the UK publishing industry.
Retail price maintenance had been the universally accepted way of maintaining a healthy bookstore network. Challenging the orthodoxy was thought to be misguided and the result of change, it was assumed, would be catastrophic.
However, economic pressures and the actions of a few brave booksellers an publishers—or stupid ones, depending on your viewpoint—led to a new orthodoxy in which there is absolutely no retail price maintenance. It has been a tough transition but there’s still a thriving and competitive book ecosystem in the United Kingdom.
‘Threatening the Very DNA of Scientific Research’
And now to what I regard as dogma, but which many academic publishers and scientists see as the true and virtuous way forward for scholarly research publishing—the open-access movement in which the results of research are made available free of charge to everyone in the world immediately on publication for the benefit of scholars, lay people, librarians, research funders, governments, and universities.
“Moving from a pay-to-read to a pay-to-publish model was driven by a number of highly articulate scientists complaining about the cost of journals … and the perceived hyper-profitability of some academic publishers (typically described as greed).”Richard Charkin
Open access comes termed in many shades—green, gold, blue, diamond (platinum), yellow, grey—and probably more in the making.
It’s a great concept led by great scientists and publishers, many of them my friends and mentors. The impetus for moving from a pay-to-read to a pay-to-publish model was driven by a number of highly articulate scientists complaining about the cost of journals, the erection of Internet paywalls to all but subscribers, and the perceived hyper-profitability of some academic publishers (typically described as greed).
The argument was that by changing the business model, university libraries’ budgets would benefit, scientific research would be more readily accessible—not least research funded by taxpayers—and importantly to some the greedy publishers would be punished.
How has the experiment worked?
The big STM publishers have found that charging governments and funding agencies to pay for publication is just as profitable or even more profitable than the traditional subscription system and the publicly-quoted share prices seem to confirm that, although this example can only be illustrative, as RELX has many more activities than pure scholarly publishing.
Also, among the most profitable publishers are learned societies where any surplus is recycled into the scientific community: reducing their margins inhibits their ability to fund scholarships and future research.
University librarians’ budgets are just as stretched as ever despite the growth of free-to-read journals.
In addition, librarians and their growing cohort of legal advisors have been forced to spend enormous amounts of time, overhead, and money on the various new contracts they have to sign with publishers to get their faculty publication rights in their key journals.
And perhaps most frightening of all is that where profit is derived by the volume of papers published rather than their quality or their readership, it feels inevitable in an imperfect world that editors will lower the bar for publication in order to achieve whatever targets they have been set.
This in turn, and particularly now with the advent of AI-created articles, threatens the integrity of the scientific record, the very DNA of scientific research.
‘Similar Pressures Are Building in the General Book Market’
Open access is a worthy experiment but perhaps, as in scientific research, we should remember that not all experiments come to a successful conclusion.
“Galileo was excommunicated. I sincerely hope I won’t suffer a similar fate at the hands of scientists, librarians, and publishers.”Richard Charkin
It may be too early to judge the success or otherwise of open access for primary research, but it just might be a serious mistake in the making.
It could still be reversed by abandoning the free-to-read dogma and reverting to a system of charging for reading journal papers and using the money to ensure high standards, innovation, investment, and support for scientific research.
The logistical and business infrastructure already exists and works. That system, while definitely imperfect, has, remember, funded the creation of the digital distribution platforms, the author portals, the linking of all references to their original papers, and much more—all at no expense to the taxpayer or authors.
In addition, scientists still want be published in the top journals whose preeminence is based not on how many papers they agree to publish but by the number they decline.
Twenty-five years after the advent of the open-access movement, the bulk of scientific research is still published via a reader-pays model and there’s some evidence that the market share of open access is actually in decline after a spectacular beginning.
Of course, what I’ve written might be viewed as heresy. But, as one of my legendary heroes, Galileo Galilei, is supposed to have said in relation to the earth’s position in the universe, Eppur si muove —‘And yet it still moves,’ whatever the views of the priestly establishment at the time.
Galileo was excommunicated. I sincerely hope I won’t suffer a similar fate at the hands of scientists, librarians, and publishers.
And now back to those readers who have little interest in scholarly publishing. Are there any lessons? Not yet.
However, I do worry that similar pressures are building in the general book market in which the prices of some ebook genres are approaching zero.
The measure of success in all of publishing has been to find the best authors and to serve them by finding the best audiences for what they write. When the success of publishers is dependent on the quantity of both writers and readers rather than the quality, I fear for entrepreneurial innovation and for the integrity of the human record.
Join us monthly for Richard Charkin’s latest column. More coverage of his work from Publishing Perspectives is here and more on open access is here. Richard Charkin’s opinions are his own, of course, and not necessarily reflective of those of Publishing Perspectives.