From: Chris Beckett <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Fri, 8 Jun 2012 13:21:22 +0100

I believe that David's original post went to
[log in to unmask] and was then cross-posted to
LibLicense.
Simon Inger responded to the post on Lis-E-Resources and there has
been some subsequent to and fro on that list.
I thought it might be useful for Liblicense readers to see that
discussion since, as well as being illuminating it may avoid a degree
of duplication of effort on everyone's behalf.  I have pasted it in
below.

I was pleased to see in the course of this exchange that David comments:

"I don't believe for a moment that the fact that these two reports
were funded by publishers influenced the findings"

The introductory remarks to his initial post could be inferred
differently.  I am glad this has been clarified.

Many thanks,  Chris


-----Original Message-----
From: An informal open list set up by UKSG - Connecting the Information
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Press Release: The Publishers Association
releases report detailing the potential effect of making journals free after
a six month embargo - corrected link

David,

It may be the summary of the report didn't contain the same exact language
used in the body of the report. That I will concede. The survey, and the
report that followed from it, was there to test acquisition preferences
across a range of purchasing options - open access content being one of
them, journal subscriptions and aggregated databases being the others. The
report found, amongst other things, that libraries were even more likely to
substitute aggregated database access for subscriptions than they were to
substitute open access for subscriptions. Six years on, as I talk to
librarians, I find that this is increasingly the case.

You say that we should have sanity-checked the results at the time by
comparing with real librarian attitudes toward embargoed openly accessible
journals. I have several points to make on this:

1. At the time, this was very early in the whole open access debate as far
as the great majority of libraries were concerned and I, for one, wouldn't
have expected much of a result from any testing of this at that time.
Libraries, and institutions in general, are slow to steer. And perhaps quite
reasonably so.
2. There was anecdotal evidence at the time that libraries were not
acquiring (rather than actively cancelling) subscriptions that meet your
criteria for the test. I had feedback as part of the survey from a number of
librarians particularly in SE Asia that they would take the embargoed free
version rather than spend their money on these products. They saved their
money for other products. Now there weren't a statistically significant
number of these to report, so I chose not to report them. Quite rightly I
believe, because we would have been criticised for putting out such
anecdotal evidence as if it were provable.
3. Not all "OA after 6-months" products remain free forever. A number of
them go free after 6 months or a year, stay free for a couple of years, and
then disappear once more behind a pay-wall. So that would be another factor
for librarians to take into account.

I did try to get a research project going a few years ago now looking at the
subscription numbers for titles from across a range of publishers that
publish titles that go open after an embargo period. While individually they
all had a mass of anecdotal evidence about cancellations due to their OA
policy, you couldn't show it from the raw numbers because there were so many
other factors present that made such an analysis impossible, for example
decline in some market sectors and regions, growth in others, enhanced
marketing to counteract cancellation, product realignment (so not everything
in a journal became free, so a direct comparison for cancellation would be
no longer possible) and so on.

I would love to see such a study actually conducted, but it isn't going to
be simple.

Let me paint one scenario for you. Let's say that for the last ten years a
publisher has offered embargoed free access to its own journals. Let's say
that had the effect of leading to a 4.5% cancellation rate each year. At the
same time new money and new markets have emerged. Let's say that adds back
1.5% per annum. And then the publisher, seeing a decline, invests in further
marketing and sales activity to increase its subscriptions in its core
markets. Let's say that adds another 1% back in. This would lead you to a
conclusion where the publisher has shrunk by an average of 2% per annum, but
compounding up the 4.5% you see that it would have lost over 40% of its
subscribers to its own OA policy, even though it gained others back. I'm not
saying that this is how things are, but this is one scenario that would give
you the end results observed by many society publishers with this policy.

My point is that there is no study out there right now that could prove this
point either way.

Simon.

-----Original Message-----
From: An informal open list set up by UKSG - Connecting the Information
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: Press Release: The Publishers Association
releases report detailing the potential effect of making journals free after
a six month embargo - corrected link

Hi Simon

Interesting.  Reading your Executive Summary again (p. 3
http://www.publishingresearch.net/documents/Self-archiving_summary2.pdf) I'm
not sure I can see the 'organised' aspect.  I can see emphasis on the
dangers of embargoes and from the Conclusion:

'We believe our research demonstrates that mandating self-archiving within 6
months or less of publication will undermine the subscription-based peer
review journal.'

What neither you or the author of the new report asked was what actually
happens when journals make their content available after 6 months or even
less.  This I think is a flaw in the new study as it was, unfortunately, in
yours.  There are definitely examples to draw on today as there were six
years ago.

And I'm not sure the 'organised' argument works - what can be more
'organised' than content from the journals' own website?  If these journals
do not see the catastrophic collapse in subscriptions you predicted you
would?

But perhaps as you say these journals with freely available content on their
own sites' at six months or less have experienced slower subscription growth
than journals where no copy is available.  It is a bit of a stretch - the
journal market, certainly in the West, is not a growing one.  Perhaps in
emerging markets?  But wouldn't their publishers have noticed - one journal
going great at 44% growth, the other not growing at all.  The only
difference the length of embargoes?  And as embargoes are a controversial
issue then somebody may have mentioned it.  (Not forgetting that the tenor
of the latest press release and your report was not that six month embargoes
would make massive growth tricky, but that, to quote you again, they would
'undermine the subscription-based peer review journal'.)

I don't believe for a moment that the fact that these two reports were
funded by publishers influenced the findings.  But I still don't understand
why there was no 'reality check' - comparing the results of the survey with
the evidence of what is (or was, in the case of your report) actually
happening in libraries.

I also posted my original comments to Liblicense - you may wish to follow-up
there.

Best wishes

David


On 7 Jun 2012, at 16:59, Simon Inger wrote:

> David,
>
> The study that Chris Beckett and I undertook in 2008 showed a
> preference in acquisitions that would place a significant percentage
> of librarian preference for selecting "green" open access materials if
> access to that material were *organised*. I would suggest that the
> aggregate of institutional and other open repositories today is far
> from organised from the point of view of user discovery and as such
> does not represent a viable alternative for the great majority of
> librarians doing any kind of selection. So I'm more than happy to
> stand by our findings of the time.
>
> Even if that weren't the case, I would have to add that you cannot
> possibly know how much growth in subscription purchase from those
> markets that still have money (or have growing amounts of money) has
> been thwarted by the availability as it stands right now of green OA
> content. No-one to my knowledge has that data, nor are they likely to
> ever have it. It may mean that 44% of subscriptions "never happened"
> because of this effect.
>
> Of course, what would be interesting would be to actually build a
> discovery platform for green OA content, organised along the lines
> that libraries clearly understand (i.e. in journal-title silos, each
> with a ToC pointing to the relevant component of each, now
> virtualised, journal), and then see how well they are "acquired". I
> appreciate such an experiment would need the buy-in of publishers to
> test the impact, but it would be a good thing to build and would prove
> the point one way or the other.
>
> By the way, I don't like the inference that the funder of the research
> that Chris and I undertook in 2008 influenced the outcome. Chris and I
> don't work like that.
>
> David, would you mind posting this reply to all the lists you posted
> on? I probably don't monitor all of the same ones. Many thanks.
>
> Simon Inger
> Simon Inger Consulting Ltd.
> [log in to unmask]

On 8 Jun 2012, at 01:57, LIBLICENSE wrote:

> From: David Prosser <[log in to unmask]>
> Date: Thu, 7 Jun 2012 16:31:56 +0100
>
> This survey reminds me of one carried out by Chris Beckett and Simon
> Inger back in 2007.  Both were surveys of libraries carried out on
> behalf of publisher associations, both appeared to suggest that
> six-month embargoes would trigger massive rounds of cancellations, and
> both took no account of what actually happens in reality.
>
> There are a growing number of journals that already make their content
> freely available after six months.  These journals make the content
> available ether through their own websites, through others (such as
> PubMedCentral), or both.  Some of them have been doing so since well
> before the Beckett and Inger study so we potentially have six years of
> data to test the hypothesis that a six-month embargo could lead to
> subscription losses in the order of 44%.  We also have extensive
> experience in some fields of what happens to subscriptions if
> peer-reviewed copies are made available immediately on publication.
>
> As far as I know, there is no evidence to suggest that six months
> embargoes have led to 44% reductions in subscriptions as predicted by
> this latest survey.  The journals that make their content available
> after six months appear to be thriving and are sustainable.  If I have
> missed the evidence please let me know.
>
> So, what do you do if you discover that your survey results do not
> necessarily reflect reality?  Well, I guess that if the results match
> your ideological bent you ignore the discrepancy and issue press
> releases.  If you are interested in actually looking at behaviour you
> try to dig a little deeper.  One can begin to think of a number of
> possible reasons for this discrepancy, including:
>
> 1. Librarians don't realise that the material is available six months
> after publication (unlikely, surely)
> 2. The journals that make material available tend to be in biomedical
> fields - perhaps these areas are less susceptible to cancelations.
> But it doesn't explain high-energy physics and economics where green
> OA copies of all papers in some journals can be found without embargo.
> 3. People don't always do what they say they do in surveys.
>
> The trouble is that in the cases where six month embargoes have been
> tried they give results that completely fail to match the results of
> the survey.  Until we come to terms with why this is the case I find
> it hard to see how we can take the survey at face value.
>
> Best wishes
>
> David