On the HighWire Press Facebook page, John Sack tipped me off to the Occasional Pamphlet, where Stuart M. Shieber has a terrific post up about University open-access policies as mandates.
Essentially, Schieber notes that university open-access policies are not mandates, in the sense that “there is no such thing as a mandate on faculty.” According to Schieber, all open-access policies have an implicit waiver option anyway, so:

it makes great sense to take the high road and provide for the waiver possibility explicitly. This has multiple benefits. First, it acknowledges reality. Second, it explicitly preserves the freedom of the author. Third, it enables much broader acceptance of the policy.

Perhaps the most important part of the post is this:

I am not claiming that there can be no true open-access mandates on faculty. Rather, such mandates must come from outside academia. Funders and governments can mandate open access because they can, in the end, refuse to fund noncompliers. They have a stick. All a university, school, or dean has, in the end, is a carrot.

In As library budgets collapse, authors need to take responsibility for access, Shieber implies that one of the carrots we have is, ironically, shrinking library budgets. As libraries are forced to cancel subscriptions to high-priced journals, the best way to ensure that the maximum number of other scholars have access to your scholarship is to publish it in open-access journals and deposit it in open-access institutional repositories.

John

I finally got around to reading Conventional Scholarship as “Legacy System” and Open Access as “Middleware” at Academic Evolution.
I think it is a very useful analogy for understanding why some scholars are slow to embrace open access.

You see, academia’s knowledge economy is so symbiotically connected to for-profit (toll-access) publishing at this point in time that academics, ostensibly devoted to open inquiry and the pursuit of knowledge for social good, can be profoundly closed-minded about Open Access publishing or any method of distribution if it varies from the tried and true, even if those methods far exceed the reach and impact of traditional print publishing.

And more on the potential consequences for academic publishing of not changing:

If academic publishing stays within its established genres and persists in the gateway model of peer review, it can continue to pretend to fixed and certain authority, as though knowledge is a commodity (as indeed, it is within the academic reward system). This is understandable given tradition, but it is inconsistent with the open and ongoing review of knowledge that is the new paradigm of communication and knowledge production. Ultimately, traditional academic publishing will prove to be inferior knowledge of diminishing significance (largely due to its own self silencing and its voluntary withdrawal from persistent social knowledge systems).

Read the whole thing to get to the parts about how current Open Access models are “middleware”, and how academic scholarship and publishing will evolve.

Scholarly Communications @ Duke recently posted a summary of the Durham Statement on Open Access to Legal Scholarship.

The Durham Statement calls for law schools to “commit to making the legal scholarship they publish available in stable, open, digital formats in place of print.” In addition, “As a measure of redundancy, we also urge faculty members to reserve their copyrights to ensure that they too can make their own scholarship available in stable, open, digital formats.”

Kevin Smith at Scholarly Communications @ Duke rightly points out that while the usual profit motive is missing from law school publications (since students do all the editorial work), the same reputation and impact motives are at work. Open access law school journals could provide a proof of concept for open access publishing in other areas of scholarship.

Although recent research seems to indicate that the citation boost that accompanies online access is paradoxically larger for fee-based access than open access, I think that trend could change as free open access becomes more common and normative. The Durham Statement seems to be a clear step in the right direction for open access.

I’m happy that my colleague at Stanford’s Crown Law Library, J. Paul Lomio, was one of the signatories; and has already posted it at Legal Research Plus.

My buddy James Evans (with co-author Jacob Reimer) continues to produce important and methodologically rigorous research on publishing and citation patterns.

In a study published in Science magazine (no link available yet, PDF (subscription required)), Evans and Reimer find that:

when a research article is offered online after being in print for one year, the use of an open-source format increases citations to the article by 8 percent. But when a paid-subscription format is used to distribute a year-old print article, the citations increase by 12 percent. (from The Chronicle of Higher Education)

Some of the Chronicle comments note that Evans and Reimer elected to publish in a fee-based journal themselves.

There is a complicated self-fulfilling prophecy mechanism at work in the pattern they find. For a scholar seeking tenure, citation count matters more than simple exposure. If the fee-based journals get cited more, they will remain more attractive publication vehicles for scholars. As the best scholars and rising scholars continue to publish in fee-based journals, then those journals will continue to get cited more.

Update (Feb. 25, 2009): Evans describes his research in this video interview from National Science Foundation.