The U. of California’s Open-Access Promise Hits a Snag: The Faculty

Three summers ago advocates of open-access publishing scored a major victory when the University of California’s Academic Senate voted to make research articles produced by faculty members across the 10-campus system freely available.

Now that big win looks less than overwhelming.

Despite the faculty vote, only about 25 percent of professors systemwide are putting their papers into a state-created repository that allows free outside access. The majority, said Christopher M. Kelty, a professor of information studies and anthropology at the University of California at Los Angeles who helped lead the open-access effort, appear indifferent. “They don’t know about it, they don’t really care about it,” Mr. Kelty said. “They publish their work, and they just go on doing what they do.”

Participation in the 2013 California policy was made voluntary: Faculty members can opt out or ask for their work to be embargoed. That was a chief source of concern at the time, Mr. Kelty said.

But publishers, predicted to be the primary obstacle, have proved surprisingly compliant: Only about 5 percent of publishers have made any attempt to ask faculty members to opt out, he said.

The lack of faculty buy-in suggests, once again, that the drive for open-access publishing — the concept that the public deserves to see the results of the research it funds, and that science over all will progress faster when information is fully shared — will remain slow.

There’s a complicated mix of reasons for that faculty reluctance. Advocates said much of it stems from logistical fears and expansive attitudes about the meaning of academic freedom.

“If they’re encountering inertia, forgetfulness, preoccupation,” said Peter Suber, a leading open-access advocate at Harvard University, of his counterparts in California, “that’s consistent with the experience of other schools.”

Much of the open-access movement centers on efforts to persuade scientific journals to adopt revenue models that do not rely on subscription fees. A common alternative asks authors, or their institutions or funders, to pay a fee to cover the costs of reviewing, editing, and assembling their journals.

Some universities, meanwhile, have begun asking authors using subscription-based journals to simply place copies of their articles in any free online repository, such as the National Institutes of Health’s PubMed Central. The University of California, the world’s largest system of public research universities, gave that approach a huge boost when its tenure-track faculty endorsed open-source publishing, in 2013.

The California system strengthened that commitment last year, when its president extended the open-access requirement, which had applied only to tenured and tenure-track faculty members, to “all employees and students,” including professors off the tenure track. And Gov. Jerry Brown signed legislation in 2014 requiring free public access within 12 months to any publication stemming from research financed by the California Department of Public Health.

But with little actual means of enforcement, compliance is difficult to measure and appears spotty at best. The University of California’s main free repository, eScholarship, is receiving only about a quarter of eligible papers, Mr. Kelty said. Some California researchers are probably using other public repositories, such as PubMed Central, he said, but there is no clear way to measure that usage.

Wanted: ‘a Scalable Solution’

Universities can take steps to overcome faculty reluctance. Harvard has created a team of open-access fellows — staff members or students who essentially go door to door, asking faculty members for their most recent papers and then doing the work of filing them into open-access repositories.

That tactic has had some success, said Mr. Suber, director of Harvard’s Office for Scholarly Communication and of the Harvard Open Access Project. But even at Harvard, “we don’t have nearly enough fellows to cover the entire faculty,” he said.

The challenge is even stiffer in the University of California system, which is both larger and financially strapped. With some 50,000 people in the system writing scientific papers, an idea such as open-access fellows “is not a scalable solution,” Mr. Kelty said.

Instead, California has relied on automation, creating a computer system that looks for any article by a university faculty member. The system then sends an email to the author, offering a link that automatically puts the article into the state’s open-access repository. That approach has been key just to getting up to the 25-percent compliance rate, Mr. Kelty said.

The situation is frustrating to policy makers such as Brian Nestande, deputy executive officer of Riverside County, who as a Republican state assemblyman sponsored the 2014 bill signed by Governor Brown. The bill passed nearly unanimously in both chambers of the State Legislature. Yet when Mr. Nestande, now in his county-government role, began studying ways to help children with incarcerated parents, he immediately realized that his goal of true open access remained elusive: An article on the subject by a researcher at the University of California at Davis was behind a paywall, inaccessible beyond its summary.

“I thought, Wow, whatever happened to the law where they were supposed to do this?” Mr. Nestande said.

Open access will continue to grow, Mr. Kelty said, but slowly. Some California faculty members tried in 2005 to adopt a policy that would have required all articles to be placed in an open-access format, whether or not the publisher agreed. That idea “went down in flames” in the Academic Senate, he said, because too many professors saw it as threatening their ability to use whatever journal they wanted. By the time the Senate approved its current policy — allowing researchers to opt out when their publishers refuse to allow a freely available public version of an article — several other universities in the country had already done the same, Mr. Kelty said.

Now innovations such as Sci-Hub — an international online repository that posts scientific-journal articles in an open format without regard to copyright rules — show that attitudes are changing, Mr. Kelty said. Researchers increasingly speak openly about using Sci-Hub, with little of the moral ambiguity that surrounds similar online collections of copyrighted material in areas such as music and movies, he said.

But pushing faculty members to relent won’t work, at least in the United States, Mr. Suber said. Some academic institutions in Europe are trying to force their faculty members to use only open-access journals, but the tradition of faculty governance is too strong in the United States to allow for that here. “This is a group,” he said, “that never does anything in concert.”

Paul Basken covers university research and its intersection with government policy. He can be found on Twitter @pbasken, or reached by email at paul.basken@chronicle.com.