Caveat Lector

Thanks to the indefatigable Open Access News, I now know about and subscribe to two Spanish-language blogs on open access. It’s indescribably gratifying to see word getting out.

OA News also posted details about a blowup at the Canadian Medical Association Journal that led to a new open-access journal with a similar theme. To me, this points to another reason to expect the scales to tilt slowly but surely in favor of open access: journal churn.

Journals fail. New journals rise. Journals get bought and sold. Journals move. Journals break apart because of editorial dissension. Every time this happens, there’s another opportunity for a new (or newly-) open-access publication. It’s not even necessary that a journal go gold, though I’m certainly not against that and it does seem to be happening more frequently these days. Whenever a journal changes hands, someone reviews editorial policy, which is an opportunity for journals to go green, either by allowing self-archiving when it wasn’t previously permitted or by making self-archiving rights more explicit to authors.

The CMAJ/Open Medicine case looks on the surface like other editorial-board revolts, but I see a new wrinkle. Previous revolts (such as Donald Knuth’s from the Journal of Algorithms) took place specifically over access policies, usually too-high subscription prices. The CMAJ revolt, however, had to do with editorial freedom; open access for the new journal is a byproduct, a side benefit.

Why did that happen, and will it happen again? Worst-case, open access was the natural outflow of this specific situation only, and we should not expect other journals to follow Open Medicine’s example. Open access might simply be earning some rebel chic, in which case we can expect a few more examples like Open Medicine, but no widespread change. Or, best-case, the world has changed (or is changing) such that open access is now a natural choice for fledgling and metamorphosing journals.

Time was, someone wanting to start a new journal naturally looked for a society to fund it. Not so long ago (judging from what I hear around me at MPOW), a new journal bootstrapped itself as best it could in hopes of a buyout from one of the big publishers or aggregators. That, I am told by someone at MPOW who used to work for a society publisher, doesn’t work any more; the big publishers own so much of the journal market that a small subscription journal can’t accumulate enough cachet to be worth buying.

So it seems to me a new or breakaway journal has two choices: manage itself indefinitely as a bootstrap operation, or find an ally that isn’t a society or a big publisher. Both options strike me as open-access–friendly. It’s just plain easier to bootstrap an open-access journal than a subscription one; subscription journals have to build a money-handling infrastructure that an open-access journal doesn’t. And I believe libraries, who have their own reasons for preferring open access, are the up-and-coming ally for new journals.

Indeed, the CMAJ/Open Medicine case should have librarians perking up their ears. One way to assure editorial-board independence is not to ally a journal with an interest liable to compromise that independence. In all likelihood, a library won’t—or, perhaps better-stated, a library is far less likely to allow ideological ax-grinding than a professional society or even a scholarly society. (For those of you who don’t already know, librarians are specifically and explicitly trained to avoid letting our personal ideological biases get in the way of collection decisions. That doesn’t mean we don’t occasionally do it anyway, but training does tell.) So library-supported publishing efforts are a natural haven for beleaguered knowledge producers. That’s a structural advantage—societies and big publishers can’t just wish it away—and in my opinion a telling one over time.

As always, my crystal ball is murky at best; take this analysis for what it’s worth.