[TYPES] Towards Sustainable Open Access: thoughts on the ACM OPEN transformative plan

[Roberto Di Cosmo]

Dear all,
      the strong reaction to ACM signing the infamous letter from the 135
institutions
<https://presspage-production-content.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/1508/coalitionletteropposinglowerembargoes-864869.pdf>
confirms
that in our research area we are today largely in favour of Open Access: it
is not surprising considering the tradition and values of our community.
The good news is that after a quarter of a century of declarations,
discussions, and little progress, powerful forces are now setting tight
deadlines in order to finally trigger a real transition on a global scale.

In Europe, Plan S <https://www.coalition-s.org/> has been a strong
political move, pushing a coalition of funding agencies to force 100% open
acces by 2021 on publications issued by research they fund; we can expect
the US proposal that sparked the infamous letter will be an equivalent
strong push forward in the US.

Moving from a generic support of Open Access to a rational approach to
*Sustainable
Open Access*, though, is more complex than it seems.

   - Should we go for "green open access
   <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_access#Green_OA>", i.e. self
   archiving the author version of our papers somewhere like we do in France
   with the HAL platform (that still has a cost to cover)?
   - Should we go for "gold open access
   <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_access#Gold_OA>", aka "author pays",
   maybe with some discount as per SIGPLAN sponsorship?
   - And what about the "diamond" or "platinum" open access, where neither
   readers nor authors pay (rest assured, somebody *does* pay, there is no
   free lunch :-))?

In any case, the big question is how costs should be covered, and here the
debate seems mostly focused on the "right" price for publishing a single
article (or APC, for article processing charge).

The original version of the Plan S was strongly oriented towards gold open
access ("author pays") with capped APC covered by institutions, not
individuals, even if it was later clarified that green open access is also
acceptable (this is called the "repository route" in II.2 of the
implementation guidelines of Plan S
<https://www.coalition-s.org/addendum-to-the-coalition-s-guidance-on-the-implementation-of-plan-s/principles-and-implementation/>
).

Let me say upfront that I *strongly dislike* the APC approach, for a very
simple reason that can be resumed in a statement that was attributed to a
famous billionaire: "*If you want to get rich, build something that has a
fixed cost and engenders variable income, and then get as many customers as
possible*".

There are indeed two main approaches to charging for an infrastructure
(like a telephone network, a highway, the Internet or ... a publishing
system):

   - the first is to charge "per use", e.g. phone calls by the minute, data
   per megabyte, etc., and this is how many big fortunes were made: these
   infrastructures have usually a fixed cost that is independent on its use,
   so when you have many users, the "variable income" quickly outweighs the
   fixed cost, and you can buy a Ferrari, a private Jet, a skyscraper, etc.
   - the second is to calculate the cost, add some reasonable margin for
   investments, and divide the result among the users (aka "mutualising
   costs"): this way, the more users come, the less the amount they need to
   pay. No Ferrari, here :-)

Framing the debate in terms of the value of an APC, even capped, falls
squarely in the first approach, and IMHO is a Trojan horse for large
publishing corporations to keep their double digit profit margins, or even
increase them, in the transition to Open Access.
And those double digit profits are money that is stripped away from our
global research effort!

The ACM OPEN plan (https://libraries.acm.org/subscriptions-access/acmopen),
on the other hand, falls squarely in the second approach, and is
potentially a viable and virtuous one. I say *potentially* because, as many
pointed out (and as stated in the text of the ongoing petition
<https://www.change.org/p/association-for-computing-machinery-acm-support-open-access>),
the calculations of the "cost" that is proposed to mutualise seem to
include more than the publication process alone.
But also because we should think at a *more global scale* and see what
parts of the ACM publishing infrastructure is specific, and what part
should be mutualised with other entities, bringing the overall cost down.
More clarification is needed, but the recent second letter from ACM
leadership
<https://www.acm.org/binaries/content/assets/about/acm-letter-to-ostp.pdf>
lets us hope that ACM is able to listen to its members.

In any case, it's important in this debate to have a clear sustainability
plan, and analyze all the costs involved. On the one hand, one should not
add to the bill costs unrelated to the publishing infrastructure. On the
other hand, one must refrain from thinking that there is no cost apart from
our own work as researchers/reviewers/editors/pc-chairs: even simply
maintaining an online archive for the long term has a real, uncompressible
cost, that we usually do not see until we have to actually run one
[disclosure: I'm running one now <https://www.softwareheritage.org> :-)].

All the best

-- 
Roberto

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Computer Science Professor
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