The Nelson memo and the dinosaurs

In our inaugural blog post, Standard Error presents a short chat on the OSTP’s Nelson memo with SocArXiv founding director Philip Cohen

In August 2022, Dr. Alondra Nelson of the White House Office of Science and Technology (OSTP) circulated guidance updating a 2013 memo from the same office that had directed federal agencies with expenditures of over $100 million to develop plans to boost public access to federally funded research. 

Dr. Nelson cited as the impetus for the 2022 update researchers’ experience during the COVID-19 pandemic, which threw into stark relief the divergence between the public’s interest in having immediate access to the latest research results and scholarly publishers’ incentive to impose long embargoes on the public release of new research to support their subscription models. The new public access policy laid out in the Nelson memo aims to expand the remit of the 2013 policy so that the public can enjoy “near real-time returns on American taxpayer investments in science and technology.”

No barriers between the public and the new research it funds

In practical terms, the new guidance encourages all federal agencies, regardless of budget, to develop plans to make peer-reviewed publications resulting from federally funded research immediately available to the public in designated repositories. The repositories are also urged to make available the data underlying the research to foster rapid scientific progress and innovation. “There should be no delay,” Dr. Nelson writes, “between taxpayers and the returns on their investments in research.”

Supporters of open science have largely greeted the Nelson memo with enthusiasm. Preprint servers like arXiv and its many specialized variants, which offer free public access to manuscripts in their various versions from preprint to acceptance, lauded the announcement and touted their own advantages in helping agencies and researchers align with the OSTP guidance in both letter and spirit:

Distribution of preprints of research results enables rapid and free accessibility of the findings worldwide, circumventing publication delays of months, or, in some cases, years. Rapid circulation of research results expedites scientific discourse, shortens the cycle of discovery and accelerates the pace of discovery… Preprint archives can support and sustain an open and innovative ecosystem of tools for research discovery and verification, providing a long term and sustainable approach for open access to publicly funded research.

Will the Nelson memo hobble the academic publishing behemoths?

On its face, the memo’s nixing of embargoes for federally funded research appears to weaken the IP protections that underpin incumbent scholarly publishers’ wildly profitable business model. But does the new guidance actually have bite in terms of its potential to disrupt the rents of the notorious academic publishing oligopoly? To gain a bit more insight on the memo’s possible effects, we talked to University of Maryland sociologist Philip Cohen, an open scholarship advocate and founding director of the Open Science Foundation’s curated online repository of social science papers, SocArXiv.

While Dr. Cohen notes that the guidance in the Nelson memo “solves the one problem of the actual research not being publicly available,” our discussion made clear that the memo is hardly a death knell for for-profit academic publishers. He outlined a variety of ways that industry incumbents, long reliant on embargoes to generate subscription revenues, are currently maneuvering to protect their margins.

One is through an increasing reliance on article processing charges (APCs), whereby researchers can pay upfront fees (often running to several thousands of dollars) for “Gold” treatment so that their articles are released with immediate open access. In 2021, for example, Nature rolled out a Gold option for all 32 of the journals in its portfolio, with Gold fees at its flagship Nature publication reaching 9,500 euros. In effect, under this model, authors can use their grant funding (or, in some cases, pay out of pocket themselves) to buy the publishers’ monopoly IP rights to their manuscripts for the duration of the embargo period and offset lost subscription fees. 

Cohen noted that in some cases, as in the University of California system, the publishers sign agreements worth millions of dollars per year directly with universities or research institutions, which agree to shoulder (at least a portion of) the open access APCs for all of their researchers. 

But Cohen pointed out that this shift in publishers’ business model raises a whole new array of questions about accessibility: “If everything switches to an author- or institution-paid article processing charge model, it may be that no one pays the subscription fee for the journal and all the money comes to the journal from the researchers and their institutions, which is great in terms of immediate access but terrible in terms of the high cost. And even if they all have fee waivers or something for people from poor countries, there’s sometimes inadequate or bureaucratic [hurdles] or people are afraid to ask for [the waivers]. Even if they don’t, it’s still a giant rip-off. [The publishers are] still just bilking the public.”

Eating the competition

Another tactic that scholarly publishers are deploying in the face of the open science revolution is vertical integration of the scholarly publishing supply chain—for example, by directly acquiring commercial preprint platforms and author services providers themselves.

“I think the reason publishers are embracing preprint platforms is because they want to capture the papers,” Cohen explained. “What they want is for you to post to Research Square or whatever and submit it from there to one of their journals. So then when their top journal rejects it, they have a cascade model where they’ll say, ‘Our number-one journal rejected it, but click here to submit it to our number-two journal. And by the way, your preprint can remain on our site, so it’s publicly accessible during this process, you’re not violating our policies, etc.’ Eventually, one of their journals will accept it and [the researcher or subscriber] will pay.'” 

In the meantime, the publishers can assemble vast corpuses of machine-readable research on which AI products such as LLMs or ML tools can be trained or run. The aggregate data from such platforms can also “can be tremendously valuable for predicting the future directions of research,” Cohen noted.

A third strategy of scholarly publishers is to leverage hybrid open access/subscription models. In this case, said Cohen, “some articles are freely available because the author pays, and some are paywalled because the author doesn’t pay and then people subscribe to those journals. So [the publishers] are double-dipping because some libraries are paying a subscription fee for the whole journal but half the articles in the journal are free. So supposedly they adjust their journal subscription price to reflect this composition.”

The advantage to researchers of this hybrid model under the new OSTP policy is that they can choose their publishing modality: “If [researchers] have grants that allow it—or if they’re rich—they pay the APC because they want their article to be available faster, free. If you decide not to pay that charge, you can publish in a hybrid or totally paywalled journal but post your preprint in a legit repository.” Criteria for these designated repositories are expected to be specified by the OSTP during the implementation of the guidance in the Nelson memo, but Cohen noted that he sees no reason why commercial preprint repositories run by the big publishers themselves would be likely to be excluded. 

New business models, resilient bottom lines

“I love the policy,” Cohen concluded. “I’m so glad the OSTP did it, and I do think it pushes things in the right direction.” But he noted that he doesn’t anticipate a revolution in the structure of academic publishing as an industry, beyond some further tinkering with business models. Indeed, far from hemming in incumbent publishers’ field of play in the scholarly publishing industry, the OSTP memo leaves them much room for strategic maneuver—and even opens potentially lucrative new territory to be mined under the banner of open science.