The SSP debate on “the open access movement has failed” — part 1: speech for the motion

As I noted a week ago, to my enormous surprise I was invited to be one of the two participants in the plenary debate the closes the annual meeting of my long-term nemesis, the Society for Scholarly Publishing. I was to propose the motion “The open access movement has failed” in ten minutes or less, followed by Jessica Polka’s statement against the motion; then each of us would make three-minute responses to the other before the debate was opened to the floor. What follows is the opening statement that I gave.

The motion before us is that the Open Access Movement has failed. To demonstrate the truth of this proposition, I have to identify what the “open access movement” actually is. And one of the problems that Rick Poynder pointed out in his Scholarly Kitchen interview is that there has never really been a single organization that represents “The Open Access Movement” in the way that the Open Source Initiative represents its movement. So we’re going to look at four initiatives going back 30 years.

We’ll skip over the World Wide Web itself, which was originally announced by Tim Berners-Lee in 1991 with the words:

The project started with the philosophy that much academic information should be freely available to anyone.

The first Open Access Movement we’ll consider was Stevan Harnad’s “Subversive Proposal” of 1994, calling on scholarly authors to self-archive their manuscripts in open repositories. This proposal led to the publication of a book, the development of the EPrints repository software and the creation of the CogPrints repository for cognitive sciences. But can it be said to have succeeded? To quote from the proposal: “If every scholarly author in the world […] established a globally accessible archive for every piece of esoteric writing he did […], the long-heralded transition from paper publication to purely electronic publication would follow suit almost immediately.”

Measured against this vision of a sweeping global change, This open access movement surely failed.

Now we consider a second open access movement: in 1999, Harold Varmus, director of the National Institutes of Health, published a proposal called E-BIOMED. I quote:

We envision a system for electronic publication in which existing journals, newly created journals, and an essentially unrestricted collection of scientific reports can be accessed and searched with great ease and without cost by anyone connected to the Internet.

Now, Harnad’s Subversive Proposal had failed due to insufficient grass-roots momentum. But the same fate could surely not befall E-BIOMED, which was backed by the might of the USA’s biggest civilian research agency.

But there was opposition. In a welcoming editorial about E-BIOMED, The Lancet noted “Much of the biomedical publishing community is scrambling to defend itself against what it sees as an unprecedented act of aggression.”

Looking back sadly ten years later, Varmus wrote: “The most shrill opposition came, disappointingly, from the staffs of many respected scientific and medical societies […] The for-profit publishing houses were also unhappy, and sent their lead lobbyist, the former congresswoman Pat Schroeder, to Capitol Hill to talk to members of my appropriations subcommittees.” — in other words, to get the NIH defunded in retribution.

And the societies and publishers got their way. E-BIOMED was dead on arrival. Twenty-five years on, it’s so thoroughly forgotten that it’s hard to find on the Internet. It doesn’t have a Wikipedia entry, and isn’t even mentioned in the entry for Harold Varmus.

So the E-BIOMED open access movement failed utterly.

A third open access initiative arrived in 2002: a conference that united 16 open access advocates with different perspectives and gave rise to the Budapest Open Access Initiative. Its foundational document finished with this plea:

We invite governments, universities, libraries, journal editors, publishers, foundations, learned societies, professional associations, and individual scholars who share our vision to join us in the task of removing the barriers to open access.

Publisher opposition was significant. This very society [the Society for Scholarly Publishing], hired the consultant Eric Dezenhall to discuss public relations strategies for discrediting open access — for example, equating subscription-based publishing with peer review, and messaging such as “Public access equals government censorship”.

The Budapest Initiative would have needed a tidal wave of support to achieve escape velocity. In the face of this opposition and institutional inertia, it only raised ripples.

So the Budapest open access movement failed.

And there are more. I could talk about

• The Public Library of Science (launched in 2003), and its progressive stagnation; or
• The Cost of Knowledge petition (2012) that started brightly but ultimately achieved only free access to a handful of journals.

But our time is limited, so let’s jump ahead to our fourth open access movement.

Coalition S launched in 2018: a group of 11 national research funding organizations, quickly joined by the World Health Organization and hefty private funders like the Gates Foundation and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. The tagline on their website summarizes the goal: “Making full and immediate Open Access a reality”. Surely if anyone could create a successful open access movement, it would be this powerful and wealthy group?

Coalition S started by launching what they called Plan S, which required open access for grant-funded articles. It used a wrinkle in this requirement as leverage to transition subscription journals to open access. I quote from the document Guidance on the Implementation of Plan S:

Authors publish Open Access with a CC BY license in a subscription journal that is covered by a transformative agreement which has a clear and time-specified commitment to a full Open Access transition.
[…]
In 2023, Coalition S will initiate a formal review process that examines […] the effect of transformative agreements.

Well.

In June 2023, Coalition S published its analysis of journals that had signed up to the Transformative Journals programme. It showed that only 1% of the journals in the program had flipped to full open access. More encouragingly, 30% of journals were meeting their open-access growth targets. But 68% had failed to meet the targets they had signed up to. A quarter of the enrolled journals had an open access rate of 10% or less.

The report says:

The fact that so many titles were unable to meet their [open access] growth targets suggests that for some publishers, the transition to full and immediate open access is unlikely to happen in a reasonable timeframe.

Later that year, Coalition S published a review titled Five years of Plan S: a journey towards full and immediate Open Access. Even the title feels like an admission of defeat: can you really have a journey towards something immediate? The report affirms what the analysis had suggested. I quote:

Based on progress reports and the very low Open Access transformation rate of Transformative Journals, Coalition S decided to end its financial support for Transformative Arrangements.

So Plan S’s goal of transforming subscription journals to open access failed.

In fact, all these open access movements have failed.

So where do we stand now? Going right back to the start, Harnad’s Subversive Proposal said:

Paper publishers will then either restructure themselves (with the cooperation of the scholarly community) […] or they will have to watch as peer community spawns a brand new generation of electronic-only publishers.

That’s still true, and represents the only real threat open access has ever presented to publishers.

I quoted earlier the report in which Coalition S “decided to end its financial support for Transformative Arrangements.” But the report goes on to say this:

Instead, [Coalition S] will direct its efforts to more innovative and community-driven Open Access publishing initiatives. [It] acknowledges the growing need for alternative, not-for profit publishing models, and is actively involved in European and global efforts for Diamond open access.

Plan S has failed; but Coalition S is pivoting. The world’s richest research funders are getting together to build their own open access platforms. That should be cause for publishers to carefully consider whether, in their quest for short-term gains, they have painted themselves into a corner.

We’ve looked at four open access movements and touched on several more. Every one of them has failed. And they have failed, mostly, because of opposition, obstruction and short-term opportunism on the part of publishers who have exchanged their original mission for shareholder value optimization.

But each wave has washed further up the beach.

There are three questions for this group:

• How many more open access movements will fail before one succeeds?
• When it does, will it succeed with the help of publishers, or despite them? And most crucially:
• Will it succeed with publishers or without them?

But until that day comes, we can confidently say that the open access movement has failed.