Publishers and their advocates make the case that the OA EO would throw the research ecosystem into chaos.
Interview with Brian Crawford
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A growing number of scholarly journal articles are published today as Open Access, often with publication fees paid by the authors or funders. But under an Executive Order that could emerge soon from the Trump White House, the published results for all federal-funded research will be made immediately available to the public online, with no clear funding mandate.
That possibility troubles many publishers, who currently finance the production of peer-reviewed articles with publication fees, subscriptions and other business models. The proposed White House order, these publishers assert, would nationalize a function now performed in the private sector, and impose rigid, one-size-fits-all business terms on a diverse, competitive and innovative American industry.
In December, reports first appeared that the Open Access Executive Order was imminent. The White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (WHOSTP) has since begun a series of meetings “with academic groups to discuss open science & public access [while] exploring opportunities to make the products of federally funded research more accessible.” In the meantime, publishers and their advocates continue to make the case that the OA EO would throw the research ecosystem into chaos.
From Washington, Brian Crawford recently offered his perspective as a publisher and a researcher regarding the possible White House move.
“The US enjoys a significant trade surplus in intellectual property assets, and these publications are one type of such asset. Stripping American publishers of compensation for their sales and subscriptions and potentially instituting market pricing caps, which we’ve heard is a possibility being considered as part of this executive order, would put the US at a significant competitive disadvantage. That would turn the promise of our world-leading federal research programs into basically a gateway – an open gateway – that would weaken US trade positions in crucial markets, including Asia, Europe, and elsewhere,” Crawford said.
“It would serve as really a disincentive for both professional organizations and commercial publishers to invest in scholarly publishing, because the economic value of copyright would be completely undermined,” he told CCC’s Chris Kenneally.
Brian Crawford is currently on the Copyright Clearance Center board of directors. With more than three decades of experience in scholarly publishing, he is a former Chair of the Board of the Association of American Publishers, as well as former member of the Executive Board of the International Association of STM Publishers. He recently retired as President of the American Chemical Society’s Publications Division, the world’s leading non-profit publisher in the field of chemistry and its allied sciences. Previously he served in a series of executive roles with John Wiley & Sons, Inc, overseeing Wiley’s global life and medical sciences publishing. He completed his doctoral studies in the biochemical and biophysical sciences at the Johns Hopkins University School of Public Health, and was a J. Robert Oppenheimer Fellow of the Los Alamos National Laboratory. Brian Crawford joins me now from Washington with views on the possible White House action, from his perspective as a publisher and former research scientist.
