[:en]
By 2020 #openaccess will be a reality. Scientific publications will be freely accessible to everyone.
This twitter quote is Sander Dekker’s summary of the main outcome of a meeting of the EU Competitiveness Council that took place in Brussels just last Friday, May 27th. Sander Dekker, as you might or might not know, is the Dutch State Secretary for Education, Culture and Science. As such he is also a leading figure in the current effort by the Dutch government to use its presidency of the European Union to push all European researchers towards Open Science and Open Access. And pushed he has, since it has now been agreed that all scientific publications from all EU member states will be freely accessible by 2020.
So Total Open Access is coming – at least in Europe – and it will be a reality very soon and very fast. “Total” open access, of course, also means open access for phenomenology or, in other words, free access to all (European) phenomenological research to everyone. This is all very well and exciting, but raises the following questions: what will open access for phenomenology look like? What will the reality of open access imply for the researchers, institutes, societies and publishers involved in phenomenology?
Let’s start close to home with the Open Commons itself. As is evidenced by our name and the fact that we make all our contents available under a CC-BY-SA Creative Commons license, the Open Commons is already fully committed to open access. Along with journals such as Metodo, Horizon, Phenomenological Reviews, as well as South and Central American publications available through the SCIELO network, it represents the already existing reality of “open access phenomenology”. In short, there will be no transition or disruption for us, we are already living the dream.
By contrast, one can expect big changes for subscription-based journals such as Husserl Studies or Research in Phenomenology, as well as book series such as Phenomenologica or Orbis Phenomenologicus, or for that matter any book publishing by Alber, Oxford University Press, Northwestern University Press, Vrin, Springer or Zeta Books. Indeed, any article or chapter published in such venues by a researcher with European funding will have to be open access, i.e. made freely accessible and reusable to everyone. Crucially, “European funding” will not simply mean EU funds (such as ERC or Horizon 2020 grants) as it does now, but will extend to any money coming from a public institution in the EU. So, for example, any publications produced on the basis of research carried out on a professor salary or post-doctoral stipend will count as having received European funding: if you are a faculty or adjunct at a university somewhere in the EU, basically all your work (books,book chapters, articles, reviews) will have to be published in open access. Conversely, a huge chunk of the contents of the above-mentioned publications and publishers will need to become open access – thus completely transforming their business model.
From the perspective of the Open Commons, this is of course good news, since the transition towards openess means we can aggregate and provide easier access to current research – on top of the more historical, public domain materials we are accumulating now. What is good for the Open Commons is of course also good for researchers taken as a whole, since they will also have broader, easier and better organised access to contents, including the latest, most topical books and journal issues. Access will become much easier in regions such as South East Asia, South America or even Central and Eastern Europe, where financial capacity is often limited, but interest in phenomenology very keen.
That being said, there are two potential problems or downsides to the open access transition, of which we are fully aware and that need mentioning here.
Firstly, open access might disrupt book sales and thus fragilise some of the smaller publishers and university presses involved in phenomenology. By potentially making phenomenology publishers more fragile, open access might contribute to restrict publishing options: instead of expensive or hard to access books, we will not get all these same books in open access, but significantly less books. In the same way, open access may deprive learned societies from the revenue provided by their publications, or simply make it too difficult and expensive for them to produce these publications in the first place.
Neither of these developments, I’d like to point out, are a foregone conclusion. Regarding books, there is evidence that open access does not impact sales all that much: most researchers still prefer reading 300 pages on paper, and thus continue to request acquisitions from their libraries, even though digital copies are available online for free. Moreover, small publishers often already depend more on subsidies from big national funders such as the DFG (Germany), HEFCE (UK) or FWO (Netherlands) than on the sales of their books. In some cases, such as in Switzerland, the funding agencies have increased both the number and the amount of their publication subsidies in order to help publishers produce open, digital versions of their books. As far as journals are concerned, their publishing cost has decreased so significantly that they can be edited and published professionally with minimal expenditure – as we are demonstrating with Phenomenological Reviews. And platforms such as Cairn, Open Edition or the Open Library of Humanities are showing that revenues can be generated from open access journals.
A second, it would seem more serious problem, is linked to the cost of open access, or to be more precise, the bearers of that cost. One of the paths towards open access, one that big publishers such as Springer or Elsevier have been treading more assuredly these last few years, is the so called “Gold” route. Gold Open Access generally implies that the authors pay a fee to the publisher in order to get their article published. Said fees (known as author processing charges or APCs) can be very high, especially for prestigious, international journals published by big publishers. Because researchers will be forced to publish in open access, and will for obvious reasons of prestige want to publish in these pricey venues, they will thus be directly confronted with the cost of the open access transition, on a personal, individual level. Now, most universities have set up funds to help researchers pay APCs. But this does raise the issue (among other) that not all researchers will be able to obtain such funding and get their research published in prestigious venues. This system also increases the hassle for individual researchers, who will need to secure funding for their publications themselves (instead of conveniently relying on the library to buy subscriptions).
At this point, one might want to conclude that open access is at best a mixed bag, bringing free and easy access on the one hand, but shifting the financial and administrative burden onto researchers, societies and small publishers on the other hand. My personal view is much more upbeat and confident. As I see it, the Open Commons can serve to mitigate or even solve the two potential problems raised by the advent of “open access phenomenology”. On the one hand, because it will eventually crystallise into a powerful resource that will be valuable not only to the community of researchers in phenomenology, but to the wider philosophical and academic public, the Open Commons has the clear financial potential to generate significant amounts of money, which can (and will) be used to encourage and sustain publishing in phenomenology. On the other hand, thanks to the involvement of many of the most prominent scholars in phenomenology, the Open Commons can facilitate the creation of new prestigious venues that can then function not on the golden, high APC model, but are provided as services to its community of stakeholders.
There is obviously quite a way to go towards realising these financial and publishing prospects. Their mere possibility, however, underscores that the phenomenological community has all the cards in its hands to master the oncoming open access transition and turn it to its full advantage. These possibilities also underscore the strategic importance of the Open Commons and the need to get to work together to make it successful![:]