From: Richard Poynder <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Tue, 27 Aug 2013 12:28:46 +0100

A new Q&A in a series exploring the current state of Open Access has
been published. This one is with Alexander Grossmann, who earlier this
year took up a post as Professor of Publishing Management at the
Leipzig University of Applied Sciences. To do so Grossmann gave up a
job as Vice President at the scholarly publisher De Gruyter, returning
to research after ten years in the publishing industry. In that time
he also served as Managing Director at Springer-Verlag GmbH in Vienna
and as Director of physics publishing at Wiley.

Grossmann has also recently co-founded an OA venture called ScienceOpen.

*Some excerpts from the Q&A*:

“I have the impression that there is no publishing house which is
either able or willing to consider the rigorous change in their
business models which would be required to actively pursue an open
access publishing concept. However, the publishers are certainly aware
of the PR value of Open Access and many are taking steps in this
direction by founding new gold Open Access journals, offering hybrid
models or acquiring OA companies. All attractive trimmings as long as
the profit margins from subscription-based journals are not
threatened.

Active lobbying against OA takes place in parallel to these cosmetic offerings.

“I have been involved in many internal meetings with publishers since
the early 2000s in which copyright issues, embargo periods, or
self-archiving were heavily discussed. The Science/
Technology/Medicine (STM) sector has always been particularly
demanding, and even within a publishing house one always remains an
advocate for one’s authors — physicists were early proponents of open
access with the ArXiv preprint database for example. I always tried to
sensitize my colleagues to these demands — only a fair and transparent
handling of access issues would result in a positive and persistent
settlement between authors and publishers.  But at complete variance
to my earlier expectations, publishers continue to tighten their
rules, for instance for self-archiving and embargoing. The yearly drop
in subscription numbers has everyone on edge and the occasional
experiments in Open Access are not designed to save the bottom line.”

—

“The introduction of ‘Green OA’ should be considered simply as the
first response of the publishing industry to the new legal
requirements or regulations introduced by funding agencies such as the
National Institutions of Health (NIH) in the US. When it was first
introduced I expected Green OA to be an intermediate concept to be
replaced by a new business and publishing concept in general. At
variance to this expectation, the concept has become established as
something which shall exist forever. Certainly Green OA cannot be
considered as meeting researchers’ demand for an easy way to
immediately make their research freely available to everybody who is
interested in accessing the results.”

—

“[I]t is not sufficient to continue to launch single new OA journals
in individual scientific disciplines. Rather, both the visibility and
acceptance of OA concepts among the scholarly community worldwide
needs to be increased.

The development of a platform concept similar to ScienceOpen for many
scholarly disciplines may be one approach, and that is one of the
reasons why I launched the project.”

—

“The OA movement should uniformly focus on supporting libraries to
develop strategies to modify their budget policies. This should result
in having more money available to be spent on OA at their
institutions. At least it should be possible to reallocate a part of
the present budget which is spent on big deals for subscription
journals towards OA in order to meet the costs of Gold OA
publications. As long as libraries are caught in the big deals and
traditional subscription models, we all have less chance to move
forward with OA. Although this task sounds of a technical nature, it
seems to me to be the prerequisite to providing the necessary budget
for more OA publishing today and in the future.”

—

“The present business models of subscription based publishing forces
librarians to spend most of their budget or all of their budget on
package deals with the major publishers. Just to illustrate the
situation: For some libraries, in particular smaller libraries which
cannot afford all the journals they need, publishers offer to take
their whole budget to get access to the complete list of that
publisher. As a result, no money is left to buy the publications of
other publishing houses, or other content resources. However, those
libraries accept that situation as the lesser evil.

“It is apparent that such a situation and such a business practice is
totally unacceptable in terms of providing researchers and their
institutions with the freedom and flexibility to access the
information they need for their work, and to make the outcome of that
research available for everybody worldwide working on the same
problem. I am confident that it simply requires one or a few key
scholarly institutions to make a significant change in how their
libraries acquire and fund their research content.”

The Q&A with Alexander Grossmann can be read here:

http://poynder.blogspot.co.uk/2013/08/alexander-grossmann-on-state-of-open.html

Richard Poynder