The Inevitability of Open Access

The Inevitability of Open Access David W. Lewis Open access (OA) is an alternative business model for the publication of scholarly journals. It makes articles freely available to readers on the Internet and covers the costs associated with publication through means other than subscriptions. This article argues that Gold OA, where all of the articles of a journal are available at the time of publication, is a disruptive innovation as defined by business theorist Clayton Christensen. Using methods described by Christensen, we can predict the growth of Gold OA. This analysis suggests that Gold OA could account for 50 percent of the scholarly journal articles sometime between 2017 and 2021, and 90 percent of articles as soon as 2020 and more conservatively by 2025. pen access (OA) has emerged challenge subscriptions as the primary as an alternative to subscrip- method for the distribution of scholarly tions as a business model for journal articles and, if so, how quickly scholarly journals. Many open might this occur. The pace of change access advocates are optimistic that it will will determine how long libraries will be enhance scholarly communication by burdened by high subscription costs and making content broadly available and by how long large portions of the scholarly providing relief to libraries from continu- record will be inaccessible to many who ing large price increases of subscription could benefit from it. journals. Open access has made an impact This article will explore this question in a relatively short time. As Richard using the lens of business theorist Clay- Poynder puts it, “What is remarkable ton Christensen’s work on disruptive about the open access (OA) movement is innovation.2 It will be argued that open that despite having no formal structure, access, especially in its pure Gold form, no official organization, and no appointed is a disruptive innovation and that given leader, it has (in the teeth of opposition this we can anticipate that it will become from incumbent publishers) triggered a the dominant model for the distribution radical transformation in a publishing of scholarly journal content within the system that had changed little in 350 next decade. years. Most notably, it has demonstrated that it is no longer rational, or even neces- Defining Open Access sary, for subscription paywalls to be built Open Access comes in two major forms— between researchers and research.”1 Gold and Green. Gold comes in several An important question for scholars flavors. Direct Gold OA refers to journals and librarians is whether open access will that provide all of their articles free to David W. Lewis is Dean of the IUPUI University Library; e-mail: [email protected]. © 2012 David W. Lewis, Attribution-NonCommercial (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/) CC BY-NC 493 crl-299 494 College & Research Libraries September 2012 readers at the time of publication.3 Some Subscription journals might be free to the subscription journals make their articles reader if their library has a subscription, open access after some period of time. but access controls will inevitably cause This form of Gold OA is referred to as at least some inconvenience. In addition, Delayed OA. Other subscription journals subscription journals, again because of provide the alternative for authors to access controls and copyright constraints, pay a fee to make their particular article are harder to share with colleagues, stu- freely available. This is referred to as dents, or friends. Hybrid OA. The market for the best articles is Green OA refers to self-archiving of a more complex and, as noted above, more version of the article, often not the final important. One interesting aspect of this published version, on the author’s per- market is that authors do not exchange sonal Web site or in an institutional or their work for money; instead, they trade subject repository. it for prestige, a much less tangible com- For the purposes of this analysis it is modity. Enhancements in prestige then important to note the differences between make it possible for authors to earn tenure forms of open access. Green OA sits and promotion or to compete for grants or alongside the subscription journal system better jobs. Because it takes time for a jour- and does not attempt to replace it. Rather, nal to establish a reputation, today most it is a supplement that provides a version high-prestige journals are subscription- of the content to people who would not based. Authors wishing to enhance their otherwise have had access to it. Delayed reputations often feel compelled to pub- and Hybrid OA can be thought of togeth- lish in these established, highly thought-of er, as they are both open access options venues and, especially before tenure, are offered by subscription journal publishers unwilling to risk exploring other alterna- who maintain their subscription business tives. Established scholars have generally model. Among open access strategies, been successful with subscription journals Gold OA is the only one that exclusively and often feel no need to change their pub- uses a different business model, one that lishing choices. Currently, inertia favors does away with the overheads associated subscription journals. with restricting access to content and for Open access journals claim two advan- collecting money from readers or their tages: the first is pragmatic and the second libraries. is principled. The pragmatic advantage that open access claims is that, by being Markets for Scholarly Journals freely and easily available to anyone con- As we assess how open access and nected to the Internet, the author’s work is subscription-based journals will fare in available to the widest possible audience. the future, it is important to understand The work is not restricted to those whose that journals compete in two differ- libraries can afford the prices of high- ent markets. The first is the market for prestige subscription titles. This in turn readers’, or their libraries’, dollars. The leads to more use of the work and more second, and ultimately more important, citations to it. The sharing of open access market is for the right to publish the best articles is also easy and not constrained scholarly works. by access controls or copyright restric- Open access journals and their sub- tions. The open access argument is that, scription counterparts offer different over time, the advantage of openness will value propositions in these two markets. lead to an advantage in prestige. Whether For the reader, open access journals have or not open access actually leads to more a clear advantage. Articles in open access prestige is a matter of debate. Nearly journals are easily available at no cost all studies show that open access leads to anyone with an Internet connection. to more downloads, but the case for a The Inevitability of Open Access 495 citation advantage, which is the accepted most of the early journals. The technology proxy for prestige, is less clear. Many used was simple, often just Web pages. studies show an increase in citation with There was rapid growth from a very small open access, while others argue that this base both in the number of journals and is the result of confounding variables.4 articles. Many of these initial efforts did There is some evidence that faculty are not survive. beginning to accept open access options. The “Innovation Years” coincided with Rajiv Nariani and Leila Fernandez found the rapid movement of all types of jour- that authors did not believe publishing in nal content to the Web. These years were open access journals would be a barrier characterized by strong growth, both in for promotion and tenure as long as open the number of journals and the number access journals had high-impact factors of articles and in the development of new and were indexed. They also found that business models, most notably author the accessibility open access provides charges. BioMedCentral demonstrated mattered, especially when publishing that open access was compatible with for- with international collaborators.5 profit publishing, and the Public Library The principled case for open access of Science (PLoS) demonstrated that open is based on the observation that many access journals could be of high quality subscription journal publishers, particu- and prestige. Advocacy for open access larly for-profit publishers, have used their became important during this period. position as monopoly providers to charge In the “Consolidation Years” the num- excessive prices and that these pricing ber of journals and articles continued policies are at odds with the interests of to expand, and the average number of scholars and their universities. George articles published by open access journals Monblot in a Guardian article makes per year increased. The infrastructure to the argument in its bluntest form: “The support open access publishing became knowledge monopoly is as unwarranted well established. The Public Knowledge and anachronistic as the corn laws. Let’s Project’s Open Journal System open throw off these parasitic overlords and source software, which provides an in- liberate the research that belongs to us.”6 expensive and relatively easy to deploy publishing platform, became widely History and Current Status of Open used. The Directory of Open Access Journals Access Journals (DOAJ) documented and then indexed Mikael Laakso et. al. have recently docu- open access journals. Google and Google mented the history of Gold OA journals.7 Scholar provided a means of discovery. They overcome the limits of earlier stud- Creative Commons licenses made manag- ies by using a robust sampling meth- ing rights easier. odology to estimate the demographic Laakso et. al. estimate that in 1993 there characteristics of open access journals were 20 open access journals that pub- over time.

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