When the first NIH public-access policy was watered down to meaninglessness, I pointed out that while the publishers could count that a victory, it was a rather Pyrrhic one, because it proved that relying on voluntary action by researchers does not achieve open access in any measurable degree.
The NIH victory turns out to have been Pyrrhic in another way, too. While the AAP and certain of its members spent gobs of money in Washington futilely trying to stop the NIH policy from sprouting teeth, Harvard quietly flanked them. I didn’t know the Harvard permissions policy was even on the table until a few days before it passed. Judging from the lack of concerted response from scholarly publishing, they didn’t see it coming either.
I would be afraid, very afraid, right now if I were a journal publisher who believed my profits depended on preventing widespread self-archiving or playing dog-in-the-manger with copyright. The Harvard policy puts publishers in an extraordinarily weak position. They can’t denounce it; that’s tantamount to denouncing faculty, which would be utterly suicidal. (Publishers can and do slag librarians. They can and do slag government. They can’t slag faculty, and they know it.) I don’t think they can sue; even if they could win in court (which I rather doubt, though standard not-a-lawyer disclaimers apply), the hideous publicity from suing Harvard would stick like tar. They can’t prevent eager librarians at Harvard from setting up and filling a repository. Even their standard lines of FUD won’t work—they can’t seriously spin this as “a vote against peer review,” because really, is Harvard going to do anything that damages peer review? Of course not! All the publishers can realistically do is plead poverty, and a look at their lobbying budgets and profit margins scotches that argument.
At Harvard itself, publishers are impotent. The sly cleverness of Harvard’s strategy has me in awe. Since we know that arguments based on increased impact and altruism make no headway with faculty, Harvard went straight for the jugular: faculty’s sense of ownership over their work. As the trajectory of the CIC Addendum proves, that argument works. Another viciously clever move was the per-article, in-writing petition requirement for opting out. Suddenly a publisher who wants its articles out of the Harvard IR has to contact each and every Harvard faculty member who publishes with them, for every single article published. Can you imagine the backlash from faculty? And what can a big-pig publisher actually say to convince faculty to put in the effort? Society publishers, with their privileged position in faculty hearts and minds, may indeed be able to convince a few authors… for a time, until the incessant dunning becomes an annoyance.
If Harvard is smart, it will automate as much article-gathering as possible. The less faculty have to do, the less they even notice that this policy is in place, the more it will be able to accomplish. I look forward to finding out what the Harvard provost’s office has up its sleeve.
Stopping other institutions from following in Harvard’s footsteps is a completely different game from stopping legislation in Washington. There are no words for the fiasco that attempting to bribe faculty would create, as faculty are not lobbyists or legislators; the opprobrium the AAP faced over PRISM would be a wet firecracker by comparison. Whereas Washington is a single big fat noisy target, faculty governance bodies are legion, and they tend to do their work quietly and in private. Publishers would have to find one or more individuals at every research institution powerful enough to block policies in faculty senates and gung-ho enough about publishers to do so. It’s just not possible, not without advance warning of which institutions have policies on the table, and Harvard’s under-the-radar action proves that’s a tall order.
Exacerbating the problem are consortia such as the CIC, and state university systems with a unified voice on these matters such as California. Not only need publishers keep their eye on individual institutions, they need to block policy and advocacy efforts coming from collections of institutions. I’m sorry, they just can’t, not with the worst will in the world.
No, I have a feeling the deafening silence coming from publishers right now is deliberate. Their only realistic hope is that the Harvard policy sinks like a stone in a vast sea of institutional indifference, and the best way for them to create that outcome is to keep their mouths shut so that the initial flurry of coverage and interest fades quicker.
The ball is in our court now, we open-access advocates. We can’t let Harvard’s fusillade go quiet. Come on, Cornell. Come on, California. Come on, MIT and Yale and (dare I say it?) Wisconsin. Let’s do this thing.
