Video of the 2024 SSP debate: “The open access movement has failed”

October 18, 2025

Readers with good memories will remember that back in May last yearI announced I would be one of the two participants in the plenary debate that closes the annual meeting of the Society for Scholarly Publishing. I was cast against type, proposing the motion “The open access movement has failed”, with preprint advocate Jessica Polka providing the honorable opposition.

I postedthe full text of my opening argument andof Jessica’s argument in opposition — but not of the shorter rebuttals that each of us gave, or of course the unscripted Q&A that followed the formal part of the debate.

Now, only a year and a bit late, comesthe video of the debate! My apologies for the delay: it wasn’t available straight after the meeting, and then I forgot to check back a month later.

I’d like to embed the video in this page, but WordPress won’t let me (not unreasonably — I wouldn’t let people embed arbitrary JavaScript in my site, either). So you’ll have to link through tothe SSP’s page with the video.

It’s the only way to find out who won the debate, after all!

doi:10.59350/qsajq-6tn97

“Rights of papers are owned by the publishers hence, there is no consent needed from authors”

August 13, 2025

Straight from Elesevier’s own mouth, ina letter sent by a “Customer Experience Champion” in response to Professor Iris Van Rooij’s enquiry:

Rights of papers are owned by the publishers hence, there is no consent needed from authors.

(This is in the context of scholarly papers being fed to their LLM.)

Folks, when you send your work to Elsevier journals, you are literally giving them away. Giventhem rights that explicitly invite them to ride roughshod overyour rights.

Is that what you want? Huh? Is it?

doi:10.59350/svpow.24078

Journal articles are trying to do six things at once — no wonder they’re unreadable

August 1, 2025

Adam Mastroianni’s blogExperimental History is consistently fascinating. Ina recent article on whether conversations end when people want them to, he makes this point, very much in passing:

Journal articles […] must simultaneously function as a scientific report, an instruction manual for someone who wants to redo your procedure, a plea to the journal’s gatekeepers, a defense against critics, a press release, and a job application.

This is a brilliant insight, and it explains so much about what’s wrong with journal articles. When you’re balancing all six requirements, how are you ever going to write something that people are going to actually enjoy reading?

Because I think Mastroianni missed out the seventh and most important thing that journal articles must do: they must tell a compelling story that communicates interesting information.

(You might think that’s what “function as a scientific report” means. In a perfect world, you’re right; in our present world, it often does not.)

I love that Mastroianni’s throwaway comment has clarified this issue so well. And I wonder how much, having now been made aware of this, Matt and I can consciously push back against that tendency.

looking at the six aspects of a paper listed in the original post and the seventh that I added, how do I feel about them all?

• a scientific report — this is important, for sure. In a sense, it what you leave behind. We still quote, for example, Hatcher 1901 all the time because it’s a solid scientific report.
• an instruction manual for someone who wants to redo your procedure — also very important in the experimental sciences, maybe themost important thing. But less so for many of kinds of palaeo papers that Matt and I write. I deeply wish this had been important to Stevens and Parrish (1999) in the original DinoMorph paper.
• a plea to the journal’s gatekeepers — sadly, unavoidable. If you don’t achieve this, then your paper simply doesn’t get published.
• a defense against critics — this, I’m not too bothered about, provided we make it past those critics who are gatekeepers. Once our work is published, it’s there to be shot at,and that is part of the process. I don’t especiallywant to make it harder for critics to bring legitimate criticisms about my published works.
• a press release — I think this is just a mistake: if you want a press release about your paper, you should write one.We’ve done this on occasion, but most papers are not going to be of interest to the general public and there’s no point in forcing the issue.
• and a job application — happily not a problem for Matt or me: he has tenure and I have anti-tenure — i.e. I don’t have a secure academic job but I don’t want one. I pity the people who do have to write their papers as recruitment-process fodder.
• a compelling narrative — if we don’t achieve this, we’ve failed, simple as. Matt and I always aim to make our papers as comprehensible and as narratively coherent as we can — andwe have been criticized by peer-reviewers for doing so.

In the end, the bits that matter to me are: presenting scientific information in a way that reads easily and draws the reader through, and enables other to build on the work (including by criticizing it). And to do that, I have to get it through the peer-review gauntlet.

doi:10.59350/svpow.24000

Did journal articles survive the last ten years?

July 19, 2025

Ten years ago, almost to the day, Matt and I were having a conversation vie Google chat. We got onto the evergreen topic of scholarly publishing. Let’s ignore the somewhat dated references to Twitter and Skype, and listen in on those two starry-eyed youngsters …

Matt: People will continue to publish papers (as currently understood) beyond the natural lifespan of the medium, because papers are easy to count. But the very word ‘paper’ betrays the weakness of the form: it was dictated by a few centuries of reliance on physically publishing science on dead trees. It does not need to be now. And people are veeerrrrry gradually waking up to that fact.

Mike: “Paper” is funny, sure, but no more so than “file” or “folder”. It’s really just an old word repurposed. I don’t think the fact that it’s a homonym of an obsolete storage medium really betrays a Think Fail, just some history. I think papers will always exist. Even if we start to call them something else, like articles. Because a single, coherent, crafted narrative about a hunk of research is an inherently useful thing.

Matt: Papers may always exist, but other forms that are less constrained in space and time will spring up around them.

Mike: I don’t want to read four years of someone’s Open Notebooks about the new aquatic titanosaur, I want to read the paper.

Matt: Those other forms will be harder to measure with current metrics.

Mike: And harder to use. If a researcher doesn’t do the work of writing an actual paper (or something strongly analogous) he’s not getting his job done.

Matt: We-e-ell, would you read someone’s blog about the new aquatic titanosaur?

Mike: Sure. But that’s not at all the same thing. I wouldn’t want or expect the same kind of rigour. There are going to be half a dozen blog posts about the titanosaur, just like there are about the Archbishop, all wildly incomplete and somewhat contradictory.

Matt: Someone from a century hence will say, “If a researcher doesn’t publish her data as early and openly as possible, then follow up in a few months with analysis and discussion, then field questions and suggestions on the same platform for the rest of her career, she’s not getting her job done.”

Mike: I won’t disagree with that. Those things are also part of the job. But in the end, someone is going to want the Here’s What We Learned rigorous summary. That’s the paper.

Matt: Or the abstract. Or the talk. Right now we see these as qualitatively different things. But they may be just points on a more continuous research stream, that is accessed and evaluated as such, in the future.

Mike: Dude. Srsly. You do not want to have to come to grips with someone’s entire research program. You want them to do the work of giving you what you need to know in a discrete package.

Matt: Oh, I agree. For most people, anyway. For you, Pat O’Connor, and one or two others, I want the whole stream. We already have a spectrum of packaging, of which the paper is by far the premiere entity. But it may not always be so.

Mike: Right. I might read the Whole Stream behind Wilson and Allain’s rebbachisaur work, but not for the other 100 papers I’ve been interested in this year.

Matt: For example: right now when people include video along with their papers, it’s video-as-data. But there’s no reason why it couldn’t be video-as-abstract or video-as-discussion-section.
You won’t have to, because there will be other levels of packaging for those other research streams. At least as many levels as there are now, and probably more (but maybe different in kind). What if the discussion section of the paper was not one person writing about what they thought about it, but a captured Skype conference or Twitter stream between that person and their colleagues, lightly edited.

Mike: Sounds awfu’ complicated.

Matt: Doesn’t everything from the future sound complicated when you first hear about it?

Mike: Bottom line, I read 100 times as many papers as I write, which means the people doing the research I’m reading about have a duty to make it as easy as possible for me to digest what they’ve done, including all relevant background material and discussion. Whatever tech we come up with for doing that, it’s going to be analogous to a paper.

Matt: See, there are huge swaths of most papers that I would happily jettison. I hardly ever read introductions – it’s pretty damn obvious what the paper is about already, and either the background is very familiar to me or so far afield that I’m unlikely to be reading the paper anyway. And I don’t really care about M&M unless there’s a new method that I need to either learn for myself, or understand to decide if the results are actually valid. Until very recently, all of these boxcars had to be delivered as part of a single train. But I should be able to go online and download a ‘paper’ that is just abstract-figures-discussion-references. And someone else should be able to click different boxes. Chemists probablyreally care about Materials & Methods.

Mike: Interesting,.

Matt: The paper doesn’t go away — it will always be possible for users to click the same pattern of boxes that are the default contents now — but they can also get less, or more (open data, video discussion, Skype conference with author offered from within the paper-access outlet, etc.). In fact — and I hate to admit this —Science &Nature are maybe ahead of the curve here since they’ve been relegating most of the intro, M&M, and all but the most cursory results to SI for a while now. I’m not arguing that papers of the future should evolve to match the tabloids. Just that access may be much more a la carte for users.

Mike: That is total BS. Excuse my sudden apparent hostility.

Matt: Say on

Mike: It’s one thing to unbundle the traditional parts of a paper.
WhatS&N are doing is relegating crucial parts.

Matt: Yes. I didn’t say they were doing it right. I said they were doing something similar.

Mike: They are the ones saying “Oh, you guys don’t need this”.

Matt: I shouldn’t have said they were ahead of the curve. But I won’t be surprised when in 20 years they claim to have invented the new form of papers back when.

Mike: Anyway I’m not sure how your a la carte vision is practically different from just not reading the intro.

Matt: Because you are talking about what constitutes a paper as a necessary thing, that will continue to be called forth because users find it most convenient.

Mike: The specific sections are not important. The thing that’s important is the process where the author sits down and writes “OK, this is what we did and what it means”. All the supporting data in the world is great, but it’s not that, and that is almost always what you need — at least, it’s your route in.

Matt: And I’m talking about what constitutes a paper being a historical accident that we’ve all gotten used to, which will not disappear so much as spread out into multiple sections (possibly at multiple depths — I can imagine a one-paragraph summary for each classic paper section) so that in a few decades, it will be impossible to say where the online data and post-hoc discussions end and the paper begins.

Matt: Here’s a slippery-slope way it might happen.PeerJ already lets you navigate to each section of each paper by the hyperlinked section headings. It would be super-easy to add a DOI to each section, with instructions on how to cite it. Then what is the paper? Everything that is linked on that page? That’s a pretty arbitrary definition.

Mike: Maybe you should encourage PeerJ to assign those DOIs, and see what happens?

Well, I guess history will show which of us is right. Want to reconvene this conversation in ten years?

Matt: If you’re betting that the future will look like the past with a minor digital facelift, I’ll take that bet. :-) And yes, we should reconvene in 10 years. Because I’m certain that the future will be surprising on some axis that is orthogonal to everything we’ve discussed. Some young genius will come up with a platform that will be to scientific publication what Twitter is to chat.

Mike: OK, I am putting this in my Google calendar.

Matt: Awesome.

And here we are, ten years later. (Well: ten years and three days, in fact, as it took me a while to find the time to write this up.)

Who was right?

Well, me more than Matt. But I think we’d probably both says we’re surprised — and disappointed — at how little things have moved on in those ten years. Not only are we still publishing all our work as papers in journals, we are stilldesperate to get into one or two special anointed journals that we believe (rightly or wrongly) are necessary for career progression. Articles remain very static objects. PDF is still the preferred format — because HTML versions don’t use any of the affordances of the Web to let us do interesting things, but merely stuff the margins with adverts and menus. (Also: still no aquatic titanosaurs.)

I still think thatsomething analogous to a paper or article is fundamentally desirable: something that provides a complete through-line of thought, rather than just inviting you to dip your hand into a lucky dip of research articles. But there are surely better ways to present it.

The only things that have really changed are (A) that very nearly every journal has its content online, and (B) open access is increasingly ubiquitous. Yay for both of those. But …

What changes do we still want to see? Plenty, I reckon.

But rather than give youmy list, let’s hear from y’all in the comments.

doi:10.59350/svpow.23922

Burn it all down

February 18, 2025

Clarivate is the content-hoarding corporation that owns ProQuest, the Web of Science and EndNote, among many other services widely used in academia. Plus a ton of content.Today’s announcement, “Introducing ProQuest Digital Collections, a new library subscription offering unparalleled breadth, value and access”, sounds nice, doesn’t it? And the first few paragraphs are certainly full of praise for the changes they’re making.

Those changes amount to: libraries will no longer be able to buy books. Specifically:

Customers can continue to purchase content via perpetual archive license through December 31, 2025, after which this content will be available via subscription only.

You will only be able to rent content, not buy it.

I am quite sure this is not what the authors of books now controlled by Clarivate had in mind.

I think it’s too late for the commercial scholarly publishing sector to turn itself around — in truth it was probably already too late a decade ago, but I and others have fooled ourselves that maybe the good people at these corps can do something. They can’t. Commercial scholarly publishing is owned and controlled by terminal-stage capitalists, and is consequently all about increasing the next quarterly figures — not just ignoring the needs of researchers, but even the medium- and long-term finances of the companies.

In short, the commercial scholarly publishing industry is owned by people who are quite prepared to burn it all down so long as they get rich doing it.

And I think the only response is for us to burn it down first.

The difference is, we’ll replace it with something better.

doi:10.59350/qe20a-7t467

More on PalArch: it’s dead

August 12, 2024

Last time we talked aboutthe evident hijacking of the PalArch Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology. No-one seemed to know what had happened or how. I managed to track down Andre J. Veldmeijer, who was involved with the PalArch journals a while back. Based on my Facebook Messenger discussions with him, here’s what we now know:

Andre is not involved any more with these journals.He advises to stay away from the journals. The old publications that were published when the journal was still managed by the PalArch Foundation can apparently be found elsewhere on the web (though I don’t know where).

So how did we get here?It seems another publisher took them over, probably by a legitimate buy-out, with the idea to expand their fields of publishing. At that time, the PalArch Foundation saw no signs they were predatory. But now they’re making their money with bad papers that appear to be peer-reviewed but which are not in any meaningful sense.

Apparently the hijacking was announced several times on various websites and email lists, but somehow I missed them all and I think most of us did.

Anyway, this is an ignominious end to a journal that I liked and that was one of only a few in the important Diamond OA niche. Rest In Peace, PalArch.

doi:10.59350/mpzrk-7tw46

PalArch’s Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology has been hijacked

July 22, 2024

Back in ourannus mirabilis of 2013, one of the Wedel-and-Taylor papers was Neural spine bifurcation in sauropod dinosaurs of the Morrison Formation: ontogenetic and phylogenetic implications (Wedel and Taylor 2013). We this published inPalArch’s Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology, which we chose because it was a small, open-access journal in our field that was obviously mission-driven and did not charge an APC.

We were pretty happy with our experience at PalArch, and it remained on our will-probably-go-back-this-journal list.

Until a couple of weeks ago, whenSkye McDavid pointed out on the Dinosaur Mailing Group that the journal has been hijacked. Journal hijacking is a pretty new phenomenon, and needless to say a contemptible one. The idea seems to be  to obtain access to a journal’s website — for example, by snaffling the domain when the true owners let the DNS registration expire — then use it to publish a bunch of low-quality or straight-up fake papers, lending them the appearance of legitimacy because they’re associated with a recognised journal.

In the case of PalArch’s JVP, this meant thatthe Current Issue page was stuffed with a bunch of new papers that have nothing to do with vertebrate palaeontology, and the Editorial Board page was replaced with “coming soon” text that had no contact details.Our own paper remained up on the site, presumably to help lend that site credibility (it’s been cited 48 times) but who knows how long it will remain there? (This kind of thing is why we always keepour own copies of our papers on our websites, too.)

But in the last few days, that Current Issue page has gone away — not a 404, just a blank page — and in fact even the home page is similarly blank.

I don’t know what can be done about this. I can’t contact the site’s true owners, because nothing on the site says who they are. I’m posting this mostly in the hope that one of the PalArch people stumbles across it and can do something to rescue what was a nice little journal.

References

• Wedel, Mathew J., and Michael P. Taylor. 2013. Neural spine bifurcation in sauropod dinosaurs of the Morrison Formation: ontogenetic and phylogenetic implications.Palarch’s Journal of Vertebrate Palaeontology10(1):1-34. ISSN 1567-2158.

doi:10.59350/ya1g1-zse50

SSP debate, part 2: Jessica Polka opposing “the open access movement has failed”

June 8, 2024

In opposition tomy speech supporting the motion “the open access movement has failed”, here’s what Jessica Polka said in opposition to the motion.

The open access movement has not failed. It is in the process of succeeding.

Indeed,over 50% of papers are now open access. And this proportion is set to increase, for three reasons:

1. Top-down leadership
2. (Overdue) attention to cost and equity
3. New filters

First, top-down leadership.

Richard Poynder argues that the movement has failed because “ownership” of the movement has been handed to universities and funders. To quote him:

OA was conceived as something that researchers would opt into. The assumption was that once the benefits of open access were explained to them, researchers would voluntarily embrace it – primarily by self-archiving their research in institutional or preprint repositories. But while many researchers were willing to sign petitions in support of open access, few (outside disciplines like physics) proved willing to practice it voluntarily.

Fundamentally, I agree. Individual scholars are still too hamstrung by their incentives to act alone, without the strength of collective action. Free thinking and individualism are prized in academia, with investigators evaluated based on how unique and iconoclastic their individual contributions are. And, in this competitive environment, sticking your head above the sand to question the rules of the game – the rules by which everyone who is evaluating you has succeeded – is not a recipe for success.

This is why I am grateful that funders, governments, and coalitions are finally stepping in at scale to change the rules. I believe it is the only pragmatic solution to this wicked problem. I’ll share some examples.

When discussing coordinated support for open access, we have to begin where the movement began: Latin America, which has been leading the way in coordinated support. For a quarter of a century, the publicly funded bibliographic database SciELO, based in Brazil, has been providing free access to scholarly journals. There are now over 1.2 million articles from over 1,600 journals in collections representing 16 different countries in south and central america and Africa.

And in 2018, a coalition called AmeliCA, which stands for OPen Knowledge in Latin America and the Global South, launched to strengthen partnerships between academic institutions and publishing infrastructure. 400+ journals, nearly 3,000 books, and 100 institutional repositories have joined.

But even outside of Latin America, in the last few years, we have seen prominent funders establish public access policies.

Europe has been making serious inroads since the establishment of the open access provisions of Horizon 2020. And when cOAlition S formed in 2018, it represented an unprecedented commitment to coordinate among governments and philanthropic organizations in support of open access.

In 2021, UNESCO releaseda recommendation on open science, elevating the cause to an international stage, and providing a strong moral imperative for individual governments to take action.

And in 2022, the United States White House Office of Science and Technology Policy released the Nelson memo, which ensured zero-embargo public access to federally-funded literature. When this takes effect at the end of 2025, we are going to see even greater strides towards open access and open data.

Second, we are seeing some movement on cost and equity. That’s long overdue, but at least it’s happening.

The declaration of the 2002 Budapest Open Access Initiative suggested that open access publishing would lower costs, and promote equity by “shar[ing] the learning of the rich with the poor and the poor with the rich.”

In fact, the concept of an article processing charge wasn’t even mentioned in the principles. Instead, the authors wrote:

Because price is a barrier to access, these new journals will not charge subscription or access fees, and will turn to other methods for covering their expenses. There are many alternative sources of funds for this purpose, including the foundations and governments that fund research, the universities and laboratories that employ researchers, endowments set up by discipline or institution, friends of the cause of open access, profits from the sale of add-ons to the basic texts, funds freed up by the demise or cancellation of journals charging traditional subscription or access fees, or even contributions from the researchers themselves. There is no need to favor one of these solutions over the others for all disciplines or nations, and no need to stop looking for other, creative alternatives.

Unfortunately, the creative alternative (that is to say, the article processing charge) created by the publishing industry is coming at a high cost.APCs increased 50 percent from 2010 to 2019. And with individual APCs reaching in to the six figures, it’s no surprise that in 2022,OSTP estimated that American taxpayers are already paying $390 to $798 million annually to publish federally funded research.

That’s why it’s so damaging that many recent policies, like the Nelson memo and plan S, don’t go far enough to reduce economic exploitation. Instead, the Nelson memo directs federal agencies to, quote, “allow researchers to include reasonable publication costs […] as allowable expenses in all research budgets,” which implies support for article processing charges. This model creates major challenges for researchers WITHOUT federal or other funds, to say nothing of those in low and middle income countries, or in fields where resources are less plentiful.

But, there is a light at the end of the tunnel.

In May 2023, the European Union’s council of ministers called for a “no pay” model, in which costs for disseminating and evaluating research are paid directly by institutions and funders. This can be achieved in several ways, including with “diamond” open access journals. CoAlition S’s responsible publishing proposal is another acknowledgement of the need for fundamental change. And the new Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation policy, which prevents the payment of APCs from grant funds, is a strong signal that the system is being questioned.

And the third reason open access will succeed: new filters.

Richard Poynder questions the very benefits of having information publicly accessible, given current developments around mis- and disinformation. He argues for having a “membrane between scientific research and the chaotic mess of false and arbitrary information that swirls around the web.”

Yes, preprints, the financial incentives around open access, and other forms of open publishing do tip the balance away from gatekeeping and toward inclusion. This means that the rate of spurious knowledge available is going to increase.

However, it also lulls us out of a false sense of security in a system that NEVER was equipped to form a fool-proof defense against misinformation. For proof of that, you can look back to the Wakefield paper, or to the current papermill crisis.

Instead, we need a better immune system for misinformation. To me, this looks like moving away from a model in which 2-3 invited peers, who cannot possibly be experts in everything covered in a highly interdisciplinary paper with 30 co-authors, are rushed to give their evaluation at a time when they are not at liberty to discuss the paper with their colleagues. Then, all the information about whether a paper is rigorous or interesting (and to whom) gets compressed down into a single value – the title of the journal in which it is published.

Luckily, many journals are conducting transparent review, in which the reports are published. But, In order to create a system that is powerful enough to identify and correct problems in the literature, we need to disseminate research to large audiences BEFORE putting a stamp of approval on it. We need to disentangle the functions of traditional journals into a “publish, review, curate” model in which preprints and other means of sharing research are the first step, and the entire community can then discuss the work together.

And beyond that, we need to continue to experiment with new ways of organizing knowledge altogether – and this is what we are seeking to support at Astera.

For example, there are many exciting experiments in publishing: integrating code with narratives (like the Notebooks Now initiative from AGU), micropublications (which are single figure papers), publishing individual modules that can be linked together (for example, Octopus.ac), creating machine-readable nanopublications (which break knowledge down into triples: a subject, predicate, and object), discourse graphs (that create knowledge graphs out of evidence and ideas), and many others.

These threads are going to come together to create a future in which knowledge is shared and interpreted in completely new ways. The success of the open access movement is going to both lay the foundation for, and maximize the benefits of, this technological transformation.

doi:10.59350/wp0pb-xaa40

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

June 5, 2024

As I noteda 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 inhis 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 originallyannounced 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 wasStevan 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, publisheda 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. Ina 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 documentGuidance 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 publishedits 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 titledFive 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; butCoalition 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 thatthe open access movement has failed.

doi:10.59350/cbmpt-b8k31

Westin What’s-coming-up Wednesday — Wrangle over Whether OA is a Washout

May 29, 2024

As he noted yesterday, Matt is out this week at the Tate conference, where he’ll be giving a keynote onthe misleading patterns of sauropod taphonomy. But why am I not out there with him?

We did start making tentative plans for a WyomingSauropocalypse centered on the Tate conference, but we couldn’t find a way to make it work for various reasons.

One of those reasons is that I am — surprisingly — one of the two contestants inthe plenary debate that closesthe annual meeting of the Society of Scholarly Publishers at the Westin Hotel Boston Seafront. I have been invited by the SSP to debate the motion “The open access movement has failed”.

I say “surprisingly” becauseIhaveneverhiddenwhatIthinkaboutlegacyscholarlypublishers (11 separate links). Yet they have invited me to walk into their den and address them directly — an opportunity that I couldn’t turn down.

To make matters stranger still, I have been assigned the role ofsupporting the motion “The open access movement has failed”, while my counterpart,the preprinting advocate Jessica Polka, will be arguing against the motion.

The format of the debate is very firmly prescribed. Jessica and I have each prepared ten-minute opening statements which we will read exactly as submitted. We’ve seen each other’s opening statements, and have been invited to prepare three-minute rebuttals. Then there will be a period of discussion with the audience before the final vote is taken.

I won’t give teasers of my content here, because I want to keep my powder dry. But I will post my contribution after the debate has happened on Friday afternoon, and hopefully a video will also be available.

UPDATE (18 October 2025).The video is finally available!

doi:10.59350/jws0e-x3p74