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Open Access & Self-Archiving

Recently, there has been a lot of discussion about Open Access (OA) and the ridiculous profits that publishers make from our slave labour, not just in philosophy but more generally. This has had an actual impact — a positive one — on University and Research Council policies, at least in Europe. For instance, Research Councils UK (RCUK) recently announced their new Open Access Policy. Among other things, the policy states that:

Peer reviewed research papers which result from research that is wholly or partially funded by the Research Councils:
1. must be published in journals which are compliant with Research Council policy on Open Access

In practice, this means that the journal must either be entirely OA, such as Philosophers' Imprint or The Australasian Journal of Logic, or support the option to purchase OA for individual articles for a fee. The latter option is being offered by most big publishers. However, the RCUK policy has an additional clause:

Research Councils will accept a delay of no more than six months between on-line publication and a research paper becoming Open Access, except in the case of research papers arising from research funded by the AHRC and the ESRC where the maximum embargo period is 12 months.

This clause applies even to those papers that are not already OA due to the paying of a separate fee. Philosophy falls within AHRC, and the maximum embargo for any papers emerging from AHRC funded research is 12 months. After that, the paper must be OA. This, I think, should become a standard.

RCUK is not alone with this. The European Commission has also announced a recommendation for a maximum embargo of 6 or 12 months.

Such initiatives are exactly what is needed to change the profession, as not all of us have the possibility to just say "no" when it comes to publishing, i.e. to only publish in full OA journals to begin with. However, there is a compromise available and it has been made especially easy for us philosophers. I'm thinking of the possibility of using PhilPapers as a self-archiving depository, similarly to how arxiv works for physics and the mathematical sciences. At the time of writing, only 3,589 out of the more than half a million papers in the PhilPapers index have been archived in PhilPapers, although many more are available from various self-archives. Not everyone has a web page though, or the desire to self-archive on their own web page, so this is a good, centralized opportunity.

The PhilPapers archive can certainly be used to self-archive after the 12 month embargo has passed — and it's one way to ensure that your paper is OA — but I see many papers archived even before that, despite publishers' embargoes. But has anyone ever heard of someone getting into trouble for copyright violation by posting their own work online? We certainly have the power here: the publishers will not be able to function without us.

Besides, PhilPapers has all sorts of nifty tools and features, such as the recently introduced download graphics and rankings:

PP_Analytics

The above is a screen capture of the Analytics section for my most downloaded paper, "The Law of Non-Contradiction as a Metaphysical Principle", which, incidentally, was published in the full OA journal AJL.

So, if you are in favour of OA, I urge you to self-archive in PhilPapers, there's no reason why it couldn't become the arxiv of philosophy. What's still problematic is that penultimate versions, which people generally archive, don't have correct page numbers and hence can't be properly cited. We can only hope that the pressure from both the funding bodies and academics will help to address this problem as well.

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14 responses to “Open Access & Self-Archiving”

  1. Marcus Arvan

    Hi Tuomas: I’m obviously all on board with respect to turning philpapers into a philosophers’ version of the arxiv. However, I don’t think it’s such a good idea to self-archive the published versions of your papers. I’m pretty sure this violates your copyright agreements with the publishers, as these agreements usually state that it is permissible to post pre-published versions of papers online, but not the published ones. Even if it’s unlikely that you’ll get in trouble, it still seems to me a dicey (i.e. unethical) thing to do.

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  2. David Morrow

    I’m with Marcus on this one: It would nice if PhilPapers were used as an arxiv, but it would probably be unethical to post one’s published papers there in violation of your agreement with the publishers. And as for our “having the power here,” that’s true of us collectively, but not individually.

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  3. Tuomas

    Thanks Marcus. I’m of course aware of this, but people do it all the time. Many people regularly post the proofs of their articles on their personal web pages, and I have never heard of anyone receiving complaints about that. If people start doing this systematically, what are the publishers going to do? I doubt that they will sue the people whose work their livelihood depends on. I see nothing morally dubious about this, especially in light of the recent discussion about the multi-million profits that the publishing houses make, while charging ridiculous fees from libraries etc. It’s our own work after all. Not that I want to encourage people to violate copyrights, but the fact of the matter is that it’s already done all over the place.
    In any case, the problem with self-archiving penultimate versions only is that they can’t be properly cited, so they are of little help to those who have no access to the other side of the paywall. It’s silly, I still encounter situations where my library doesn’t have access to a certain article from a relatively mainstream journal, or an older issue of even some top journals. Judging from the numerous requests for articles on PHILOS-L, this is a daily problem for many working philosophers. Incidentally, that’s a another venue where copyright infringement is a daily issue, since people send published articles to each other all the time. I see no harm in that, but they shouldn’t have to do it in the first place.

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  4. Tuomas

    Well, it does occur to me that I should cover my own back and omit any explicit encouragement for self-archiving published versions from the post, which I’ve done. But I don’t see anything unethical about doing so. If anything, it’s the publishing houses that are engaging in unethical behaviour, as was made quite clear in the much discussed CHE article that I linked to in the post. In fact, the big publishing houses are already having to give in to the funding bodies such as RCUK, because otherwise they just won’t get the articles to their journals.

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  5. Marcus Arvan

    Tuomas: with respect, I’m a bit surprised that you don’t find anything unethical about breaking an explicit legal agreement that you signed. I am inclined to agree that existing publishing practices are unethical. Still, it seems unethical to me to sign a valid legal agreement and then violate it. Maybe I’m just a stickler for doing the right thing (probably true), but I don’t think an agreement is non-binding just because one side is engaged in practices one morally disapproves of.

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  6. Tuomas

    Marcus, the ethics question is subtle, but let me try to explain my view. Would you consider it unethical to sign a legal agreement and violate it even if the terms of the agreement are unreasonable, or unethical? It’s not like you’re given a choice. Either you publish in the journals of the major for-profit publishers, or you’re stuck with the one or two OA journals out there. Not many can afford the latter option. This looks like coercion to me, you just have to accept the unreasonable terms.
    Let me put it in the form of a practical case. If someone without access behind the paywall asks for a copy of a published paper of yours — the published copy, so they can cite it etc. — will you not send it to them? Would you consider it unethical to do so?

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  7. Marcus Arvan

    Hi Tuomas: you raise a good issue. I’m not sure I have a good answer to it. I guess I want to say it’s a matter of degree. Here’s an analogy: most of us think “white lies” are okay, because they’re rather trivial. Serious lies, on the other hand, are (usually) wrong. I think the same applies here. If someone asks me for a published copy of my paper, I’ll send it to them with a clear conscience. The same would be true of a CD. If a friend asks me for a copy of a CD, I have no problem sending it. Illegally posting copyrighted music or movies on the net, on the other hand, seems wrong to me because it so blatantly harms the people who hold copyright over it. I want to say the same goes for papers.
    With respect to your more general question, I agree that some contracts (e.g. murder contracts) are so unethical that there’s nothing wrong with breaking them. However, I think the wrongness of a contract has to exceed a certain hard-to-specify limit, and I don’t think that applies to journals. Yes, the present-day academic publishing system is pretty crappy — but I still think you have a duty to keep your word in this case.
    I know none of this sounds like an argument. Sorry, it’s the best I can do. I’m home sick today! 😉

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  8. Kenny Pearce

    A well-established philosopher told me not long ago that she had gotten into an argument with Blackwell (I think) about self-archiving. She said that after arguing with several people on the phone, someone finally admitted to her that there was nothing they could really do about it if she posted a copy of the paper on her web-site, as long as it wasn’t the journal’s own typeset version and there was a word or two different somewhere. However, as an early career philosopher, I don’t want to push it. I always read copyright agreements carefully and try to do as much, and only as much, online distribution of my papers as they permit.
    The latest Cambridge University Press contract allows immediate self-archiving. Illinois University Press (publisher of History of Philosophy Quarterly) allows self-archiving and non-profit (e.g. PhilPapers) archiving after an embargo period. Interestingly, UPenn Press (publisher of Journal of the History of Ideas) allows you to post the paper during the gap between refereeing and publishing but asks that you take it down for a while once it’s been published. Some of these contracts explicitly allow you to pass on your article to a certain number of people one-on-one. CUP actually gives you a special link that you can give to people to get them past the pay-wall. I haven’t published with Springer or Blackwell; I imagine they are more restrictive. (I note that you said you had no choice but to publish with the major for-profit publishers, but most university presses are non-profit, and they publish some of the top journals. If you always got into the journal of your choice it wouldn’t be difficult to have a successful career without publishing with any for-profit presses. Of course no one always gets into the journal of their choice, and you might run out of good non-profit options for a particular paper.)
    On the moral question, my own view is that it is immoral to agree to a contract that is sufficiently morally objectionable or otherwise unreasonable that you would be justified in breaking it for that reason. Of course, (i) once you’ve made the mistake of agreeing to it, it will not be an additional moral mistake to break it, and (ii) it may not be morally wrong to go through the motions of consenting to the contract in cases where the level of coercion was sufficient that it wouldn’t actually count as (free) consent. I don’t think either of these applies to most contracts between authors and publishers, but I wouldn’t be surprised to discover that there had been some real world cases of publishing contracts that fall under one or the other.

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  9. David Morrow

    Tuomas,
    I don’t see that the publishers are asking you to do something unethical, so your concern is presumably that the terms of the contract are unreasonable. And presumably what’s unreasonable is not that the contract forbids you from widely distributing your paper yourself (via your own web site, via PhilPapers, or whatever). The unreasonable contract is actually the one the publishers force on university libraries, which must subscribe to certain journals in order to be decent libraries, provide adequate services to their faculties, etc. So to justify violating your agreement with the publisher, you would need a principle that allows you to violate an agreement with someone when that entity is using your agreement (among others) to get some third party to make an unreasonable agreement.
    The principle you have in mind is that you may violate agreements that you make because of coercion. (This doesn’t depend on the publishers’ unreasonable contracts with the libraries, but it would justify your violating the agreement.) But I doubt that this is coercion in the relevant sense. It’s true that it is very difficult to become a professional philosophers without publishing in these journals (although Kenny makes a good point about university press journals). But I’m not sure that being unable to enter one’s chosen profession without contracting with some subset of powerful companies counts as coercion. By analogy, there are many industries that are hard to enter without licensing the intellectual property of specific companies. I don’t think that entitles start-ups to steal the necessary intellectual property.
    None of this is to say that the current system is a good one or even a just one. But we philosophers are the ones who have allowed a system to develop in which access to a vital professional resource is controlled by for-profit companies. I suspect there are more ethically defensible ways of breaking the grip of for-profit publishers than violating our copyright agreements with them.

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  10. Tuomas

    Thanks for the comments. I’m mostly in agreement about university presses, although their terms as well could sometimes be more reasonable.
    However, I think there’s an implicit assumption here which is guiding people’s intuitions, and which I think can (and should) be questioned. Namely, it is assumed that posting published papers online causes some harm to the publishers, presumably in terms of lost profits. This, it seems to me, is not true.
    The only people who do not already have access to the published versions of papers are independent scholars and scholars from underfunded universities. They will not be able to purchase access to the articles in any case. The vast majority of people with any interest in the papers in the first place will have access to the published version via their university libraries anyway. So I really don’t see how the for-profit publishers would be losing any income here, as the university libraries that can afford it will subscribe to the journals anyway (and note that they will also get the print version).
    Accordingly, the way I see it, the current situation is harmful to those who are underprivileged, and no significant harm would come to the publishers from changing this. In fact, I’m much more concerned about the prospects of these philosophers than I am about the profits of commercial publishers in any case.

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  11. Kenny Pearce

    By way of clarification, I didn’t mean to suggest that the university presses always have great copyright agreements, but only that the fact that they are non-profit is relevant to the situation: theoretically, they exist for the purpose of disseminating research, and not for the purpose of lining somebody’s pockets. Donating time to the former cause is obviously preferable to donating time to the latter.

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  12. David Morrow

    That’s an interesting point, Tuomas. I wonder, though, if publishers’ profits would suffer in the long run if there were a general system of archiving papers on PhilPapers. Just yesterday, my university’s librarian asked for the philosophy department’s input on our current journal subscriptions. For many journals, we have a less expensive subscription that gives us access to an article only after it’s been published for a year. We told her that we really need full access to several of those journals. If we knew that we could always get the latest articles from PhilPapers, we probably wouldn’t have pushed for those journals — and we probably wouldn’t resist if she proposed ending subscriptions to other journals. But that’s all rather speculative.
    The “no harm” argument, however, doesn’t directly address the “contract violation” argument. Would the publisher have agreed to publish your paper if it knew that you were going to post the final copy online? If they wouldn’t be harmed by it, then maybe they would — in which case violating the contract would be less problematic. If they wouldn’t agree, though, then it seems ethically problematic to break the contract in this way.

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  13. Tuomas

    I’m sorry to have abandoned this thread (been busy). As David points out, there are of course complications to consider, but I’m highly doubtful that self-archiving entails anything like a grim future for for-profit publishers.
    The “contract violation” case may have another dimension. But even if it were the case that there is something inherently unethical about contract violation (which is not clear to me, but I won’t debate it here), I still hold on to my claim that for-profit publishers are engaging in more unethical behaviour. If the points I’ve made above don’t appear convincing, then have a look at this very recent article, making pretty much exactly the same point as I’ve attempted to (with some added, shocking statistics about 40% profit margins!): http://www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2012/10/08/glen-newey/shmublishing/

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  14. David Morrow

    I’m still not convinced, Tuomas.
    You say that you’re “highly doubtful” that a widespread practice of self-archiving entails “anything like a grim future for for-profit publishers.” Is the case different than the widespread practice of media file sharing, which has significantly harmed record labels’ profits? If so, how? (I’m making no claim about the legitimacy of record labels’ previous profit rates, their importance to the music industry, or whatever. Maybe it’s a good thing that the record labels are losing out — I have no idea. The point is simply that there is precedent for the kind of thing you’re suggesting, and it did have a significant, negative effect on profits.)
    I think the article you linked is making a slightly different point: I take its main point to be that academics ought to abandon for-profit publishers altogether and set up rival journals of their own. That strikes me as a reasonable and ethically acceptable response to publishers’ behavior. But it’s different than authors making and then breaking agreements with for-profit publishers. (The recent kerfuffle about Phil. Imprint’s submission fee, though, suggests that these academic-run alternatives wouldn’t be quite as cheap as the article suggests.)

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