OPEN ACCESS to scholarly work (i.e., making it available free to anyone who wants to read it) is now a subject of controversy in the archaeological community. The Archaeological Institute of America recently published the following editorial by Elizabeth Bartman in Archaeology Magazine: From the President: Open Access. A reply by Sebastian Heath and Charles E. Jones has been posted at the Ancient World Bloggers Group blog: The AIA and Open Access: A response.
My take: there are two issues here, which need to be kept separate. The first is whether Open Access is a good thing, an ideal toward which we should be working as fast as is practicable. The answer is yes, and I think all three writers above would agree. The second question is whether governments should step in and enforce it now, top down. The AIA says no, and I agree: no government interference. The AWGB post does not address the issue, which leads to a certain amount of the two talking past each other.
It is unfortunate that the AIA editorial blankly stated "We at the Archaeological Institute of America (AIA), along with our colleagues at the American Anthropological Association and other learned societies, have taken a stand against open access." I think what Elizabeth Bartman meant and should have said was that the leadership of these bodies had consulted together and took a stand against the US legislation now under consideration.
Why does the AIA oppose it and why do they charge for articles in some of their publications? I think I have quoted Robert Heinlein before to the effect that the answer to most questions that begin "Why do they?" is "money." It costs a certain amount to produce top-quality peer-review publications. If this legislation, however well meaning, makes it impossible for publishers to recover their investment, the unintended consequence will be that those publishers drop academic publishing and stick to things they can make some money on.
In some ways these costs have been rising precipitously, but in other ways they have also been dropping. Online publication can massively reduce the costs associated with dead-tree publishing by eliminating the typesetting and binding costs and displacing the printing costs onto readers. This is a win, since readers will only want to print out articles they actually read, and that on cheap paper without typesetting. In addition an increasing number of readers will use ebook readers and tablets and not need to print at all. But the bottom line is still the bottom line, and editors still have to be paid and peer-review organized (even if it is unpaid) and all this is not going to happen through volunteer work. Some publishing costs cannot be eliminated, and publishers still need to show a profit. If these basic market forces are not recognized, academic publishing will suffer.
My solution? Kill these bills and keep governments out of it. But the AIA and related academic publishers should make it a company goal to make academic publications available by Open Access once they recover their costs and a reasonable profit and they should provide sufficient financial transparency that it can be verified that they are doing so.
My very strong view is that such an arrangement should be voluntary and arranged among publishers in consultation with their specialist authors and ruled by market forces. If authors really care about such things, they will publish with those publishers and not others. And there is always the specter of government interference from above, with the attendant perils of unintended consequences, if the academic world can't get its own act together to make its work available to the interested public as soon as is reasonable.
UPDATE (29 April): Chuck Jones in a comment to the link above notes Elizabeth Bartman's response: Dialogue on Open Access. As I thought: "I am personally opposed to slated government legislation on the issue. I am not against open access as a concept, however."