Payola, Anyone?

I have been attending a lot about "Open Access" lately. Between attending Open Science: Driving Forces and Practical Realities and Eileen Joy's Freedom, Responsibility, E-Publishing, and Building New Cultural-Intellectual Publics, my brain in still processing Green Open Access, Gold Open Access, Open Science, Open Data, Self Archiving, et al.

Open Science forum two things stood out to me. Dr. John King, from the University of Michigan, made the observation that tenure would end. He didn't know when. He didn't favor it. He was seeing signs that it was ending, a increasing percentage of professors and teachers were holding non tenure track positions. In the afternoon session, The Future of Open Science, one of the state roadblocks is no one wants to pay for Open Science. Everyone likes the idea of freely available peer reviewed papers, but no one is willing to pay for it. Each organization looks to someone else to provide the infrastructure. Publishers don't want to reduce profits for Open Science. Schools see Open Science as an added cost. Agencies don't think they can sell the costs to the public.

The marginal cost of information is extremely low.₁ Many would insist information should be free. It is not. It is like a free lunch. Even if you're not paying for it someone is. Usually they expect something in return. People who create and disseminate information need to have access to broadcast information. That costs something. They like to eat. That costs something. There needs to freedom to broadcast information and appropriate limits to protect information that could be harmful to others. Enforcement and protection cost money. Sometimes these costs are born by a publisher. Sometimes they are born by the author, sometimes they are born by someone else, usually a government, or an advertiser.

I see a potentially bad scenario: a young researcher is trying to get tenure. The requirements are publication and citation. A paper is accepted at a high impact open access journal. The researcher can choose to pay to have the article open and more likely to be cited, or behind a pay wall. The University does not pay publishing fees for non-tenure researchers. We have a classic catch-22 - if you're tenured you are printed in open journals and cited. In order to be tenured you need to be cited. In order to be cited you need to be in an open access journal. In order to be open in an open access journal you need to pay, but the University doesn't pay publication costs for non-tenured researchers. The problem has an eerie resemblance to payola schemes.

There are a host of things to keep this from happening, not the least of which is funding agencies my allow portions of a grant to go to publication costs. Right now, most publishers wave the price for open if the research can't pay. It will be interesting to see where this all goes.

¹ I would like to see someone actually sit down and figure out the cost of a page of internet information. Not how much does it cost me the user, but how much did it cost. You know, it takes three hours to type and edit one page of 500 words on a computer, assuming a wage of $X per hour, prorated cost of computer equipement/cell phone/tablet, cost of internet connection, server costs to host for a year, etc. what does information actually cost?