A collaborative community for planetary sciences.

At the AGU 2005 Fall Meeting there was an under-publicized meeting on Thursday entitled the "AGU Publications Open Forum". It was held by the AGU Publications Committee, and one of the items on the agenda was "AGU plans for open access", so I decided to attend and see what they had to say on the issue.

After the Publications Committee Chairman thanked us for attending and opened the floor, I asked him just what the AGU's plans were for open access in their journals. The answer is that the AGU is working on a broader open access policy that will allow individual authors to opt to make their papers, in their words "open access."

The concept of open access has a number of shades of meaning from just self-archiving your papers (which you can do under the current AGU copyright agreement) to papers that are available under a copyleft license (like Creative Commons) and which have their contents freely available on the web.

My understanding of the statement by the AGU Publications Committee was that authors would be able to opt to have the contents of their papers freely available. It didn't occur to me to ask at the time, but I assume this is something that will be available via the websites of the various Journals (hopefully available through their DOI URL as well), but not that the papers will be released under a different copyright status. However, I didn't ask, so I don't know.

However, there will be an added cost for authors to enact this "open access" option, which will be based on a percentage of the cost of the article. They indicated that they were still trying to nail things down, but I pressed them on the ball-park neighborhood of the percentage cost, 10%, 30%, etc. They relpied that they didn't know for sure, but that it might be in the neighborhood of a couple thousand dollars. It was quite unprofessional of me, but I think I actually laughed out loud at this point. I honestly don't know what they are thinking, I know that AGU publications serve a wide spectrum of different kinds of sciences. Perhaps our colleagues in other disciplines are flush with grant money, but I know that in Planetary Sciences, "a few thousand dollars" is a non-negligible percentage of any given grant, especially for those smaller grants written by new investigators.

Further discussion indicated to me that there might be two general forces within the Publications Committee, neither of which appears to really understand all of the issues about open access, but perhaps the person with the real expertise wasn't there. It appears that the scientists on the committee like the generalized concept of open access. However, the elements of the committee that represent the business elements of AGU Publications view open access as something that might damage their revenue stream. My opinion is that they appear to be bent on an "open access" policy which will allow them to say that they have one, but that is so cost prohibitive that no one will use it.

Persuing this policy may well damage their revenue stream, but not in the way they fear. I think that other journals will adopt more open-access friendly policies or new open access journals will appear, and the slow, ponderous, backwards approach to open access that AGU seems to be on, will cause authors to publish in these other journals, and not AGU journals.

Forgive me for not remembering his name, but an official (perhaps the President) of the EGU who was there indicated that their journals are all operating under an open access model where there is a flat fee for papers, and then the papers are available under a Creative Commons license on their website. He indicated that their journals are entirely self-supporting.

After the meeting, I approached the Publications Committee Chairman, and offered to help with their open access efforts. My name and e-mail address were taken down, and I was told that once they have a draft policy, that they would send it to me for review. I wonder if it will be too late to make any significant changes by then?