Open Access publishing has been a hot topic around these parts. Coturnix who writes A Blog Around the Clock and is the online manager for the Public Library of Science is a vocal advocate of the Open Access movement. Dr. Isis has been a bit of a flip-flopper on the issue -- one day cheesed at paying page and submission fees and the next day equally sympathetic to the public's desire to read the research they fund and the publisher's need to stay afloat.
Dr. Martin Frank of the American Physiological Society appeared today on Marketplace along with others to discuss the outcome of Open Access for publishers. The five minute audio can be found here:
At the end of the day, someone is going to pay for the cost of publication. The majority of those appearing in the story (including a young man dying from brain cancer) seem to advocate that the onus is on the publisher to change their business model. This makes Dr. Isis feel squeemy. After all, academic publishers aren't going to dissolve and disappear in the forseeable future and the solution is to charge page fees. Where will scientists obtain the money for these page fees?
The tax payer is still going to pay the cost of publication in the end.
As some background, in September of last year, Rep John Conyers of Michigan introduced the Fair Copyright in Research Works Act to Congress as a response to Open Access. According to the bill's description, it
Prohibits any federal agency from: (1) imposing, as a condition of a funding agreement, the waiver of, or assent to, any such prohibition; or (2) asserting any rights in material developed under any funding agreement that restrain or limit the acquisition or exercise of copyright rights in an extrinsic work.
When the bill was first introduced, Frank said:
NIH has undermined our publishing activities by diminishing a basic principle under copyright--the right to control the distribution of the works we publish. The NIH could have provided access to their funded research without diminishing copyright protections.
So, listen to the audio. How do you forsee this ending?
Technology
Life Science
Comments
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The web works for porn or for shoes or for ...
*...tom... snickers at the context of that thought*
...tom...
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Posted by: ...tom... | April 28, 2009 10:06 PM
While it is impossible to argue that the public won't end up paying either way, it seems to me that there is one major difference:
Without open access, the public pays the universities, which pay the scientists, who write the papers, who give them to the publishers, who sell them to the universities so the scientists can see them. If the public wants access, they get to pay twice.
With open access, the public pays the universities, which pay the scientists, who pay the page fees. Then, everybody has access.
The publication has to be paid for either way; but one way creates limited access, and creates an opportunity for serious skimming by the publisher(the powerful ones anyway), while the other creates broad access.
Of course, we want to make sure that the page fees come out of the former journal buying budget, rather than squeezing the scientists.
Posted by: phisrow | April 28, 2009 10:41 PM
Rep. Conyer's act looks like it would kill PubMed Central, which I think is an absolutely wonderful resource that should be maintained. I called his Detroit offices shortly after this was announced trying to ask him why he felt that the bill was necessary and an assistant took my question and information. No one ever got back to me. I might have to go bother them again.
Posted by: Toaster | April 28, 2009 11:21 PM
There is the little wrinkle too, that closed journals on average charge more per-page and publication fees than open-access journals. If you want to avoid paying, you should aim for open access, in other words.
Posted by: Janne | April 29, 2009 12:05 AM
The majority of those appearing in the story (including a young man dying from brain cancer) seem to advocate that the onus is on the publisher to change their business model. This makes Dr. Isis feel squeemy. After all, academic publishers aren't going to dissolve and disappear in the forseeable future and the solution is to charge page fees.
Hand loom weavers at the beginning of the 19th century also had problems changing their business model. In the short term this was traumatic for the weavers and their families, but industrial production has given us all cheaper clothes and probably better fabrics.
I can't see any current publishing model, not just academic, surviving our generation. Why should it?
Posted by: chris y | April 29, 2009 5:41 AM
* Re PubMed - I don't expect that the proposed leglislation will kill PubMed either as an index, or as a repository (as far as I know, the leglislation doesn't prohibit researchers using Open Access journals, or otherwise making their work availanble; it only prevents the government requiring it).
* There are pages on the web debunking anti-Open-Access talking points (such as page fees). I'm sure Coturnix can point you at one.
* I believe that the wide availablility of access to the scientific literature benefits society. Technology change in the form of the internet has changed the economic landscape so that the marginal costs of wider access are relatively small, so social and economic pressure will be in the direction of Open Access.
* One advantage of Open Access is the democratisation of science, and the greater scope for amateurs to contribute (where there aren't other capital barriers). I am an amateur botanist. Without Open Access I wouldn't have access to the literature. With Open Access I have reached the point where the professionals listen to me, and I have one paper published, and one in revision.
* Funding models will have to change. The existence of PLoS, BioMedCentral, Hindawi, etc., and of Open Access journals published by professional societies shows the viability of alternative funding models. There are other possibilities; for example the NIH or charitable foundations could fund journals directly.
* Note that USGS mapping data has always been Open Access.
Posted by: alias Ernest Major | April 29, 2009 7:12 AM
If the web should work the same for shoes and science, does that mean that shoes will be freely available soon? Because I could get behind that idea.
Posted by: hgen9804 | April 29, 2009 9:23 AM
What are the costs of the current publishing model? The most obvious has been providing hard copies to libraries, etc, but this is rapidly becoming unnecessary. The future model will require server space, personnel to maintain the electronic record, and the costs of peer-review. The latter is really the key to the integrity of our scientific literature.
Without peer-review, I can post my findings on my website and let the world review it. The first problem is that anything can be posted - no one is there reviewing the design or ethical considerations to see if it is gold or unadulterated crap. With public review, the people reading it may not be peers who can "impartially" judge the science. Outside interests may trash or elevate it, depending on their own needs. The literature would then become even less useful for the public who would have to judge the manuscript and each of its reviewers to decide who they believe. A peer-reviewed article has, at least, met some minimal standards to be deemed reliable (although even this system can be gamed).
Most peer review is provided for minimal, if any, cost. It is seen as part of our jobs in academia, and our institutions cover our salaries for this activity. There are people and systems that make the system work, though, and these do cost money.
The successful journals are the ones that figure out how to publish in the current environment while preserving peer-review. Just as newspapers and television are required to adjust to the changing media (like this blog), biomedical journals have to change as well. Those that fail to evolve may not survive. I'm not certain what the literature will look like 5 or 10 years from now, but I know it will be different.
Posted by: Pascale | April 29, 2009 9:53 AM
I very much like the idea of free public access in principle. The money for pages fees really needs to be accounted for in grants though. Particularly in Europe (at least in the UK from my experience) there is no money set aside in grants for page fees. Taking $1000s (from what I've been told for some journals) out of your grant just to get a paper published is always going to have an inhibitory effect on research unless extra money is put into the grants to begin with to compensate. Perhaps money could be moved from the savings in the library budget that was previously paying the subscription fees. I'm no expert on this topic so it's possible this is a very naive view. My 2c anyway.
Posted by: AA's BH | April 29, 2009 10:18 AM
Reading the comments here, I get the impression that the major cost of publishing is editing and peer-review. Well, couldn't the publishers come up with a way that researchers could avoid paying page fees, such as performing so many peer-reviews per year or something?
It seems to me that this is one more case of businesses that can't adapt complaining. Well, if they want to stay in business they should adapt. Use more imagination, and less legislation.
Oh, yes, and I wonder how many of these "not-for-profit" journals really are? They seem to be adapting the models of for-profit businesses that try to turn everything they do into a profit center. Perhaps somebody should take a look at the incentives (paywise) their senior executives are working under.
Posted by: AK | April 29, 2009 11:13 AM
I think open access is a very good thing overall, but when you throw government funding into the mix IMHO it's very cut and dried. If it's paid for by taxpayer money, it's paid for period and should be available under the same terms as a government publication -- public domain. I've little sympathy for content providers that try to preserve their business models through legislation rather than making an honest effort to try to adapt their business models.
Posted by: Brian X | April 29, 2009 11:31 AM
There are several major costs in publishing: hard copy printing and distribution is only one, and it may soon disappear. It’s not the major cost by any means though, and maintaining electronic access is replacing it.
Others include administering the peer review system, editing (for journals with in-house editors) and typesetting costs, i.e. turning the author’s edited files into something resembling a journal page with a halfway decent layout. The actual peer review is generally done by academics for free, but someone has to run the system. Also, editing costs, i.e. the salaries of full-time qualified, experienced scientists, are considerable, particularly for journals where most of the authorship does not speak English as a first language and may need help with this. For many publishers (particularly outside the US?), at least in my field (chemistry) this is a major consideration and, I might add, a major benefit that the publisher adds.
And don’t forget the cost of any technological developments, for instance additional tagging/linking/enhancement of html versions – that can require considerable investment.
The cost of producing a journal can be divided up in several ways – authors pay, or readers pay, or a mixture. But for the same costs, you might want to add up the relative numbers of authors and readers, among whom the costs will be spread. More readers than authors mean hefty author fees. Alternatively, more authors than readers means lower author charges. That’s simple arithmetic.
Posted by: chocoholic | April 29, 2009 12:30 PM
So far all the comments have centered around Open-Access relations to the publisher and/or the public having access. No one has realized the benefit that SCIENTISTS gain from it. I did my masters degree at a small university prior to the mass availability of downloadable PDFs (I had to walk to the library and photocopy the article). I was unable to have access to many relevant articles because our university could not afford the subscription and/or did not have the space. This is a university in Canada, where most uni's are well funded. What about universities in other not so wealthy countries? Open Access is invaluable to many many scientists that do not have the funds that some of the Big US RO1 have.
Posted by: ScientistMother | April 29, 2009 2:08 PM
Another benefit of open access is that people can actually get to and see what their taxes are paying for. I wonder whether this might not help grow public support for paying those taxes. Especially when somebody could know that they, or their children/relatives would have access during their own education.
IMO science is too isolated from the public, and making everything they do available to anyone with a computer and internet access will help them feel they have a stake in it.
Admittedly, scientists who need help editing their manuscripts gain from the current system, but isn't science supposed to be about communicating, as well as experimenting? Shouldn't scientists be responsible for their own documents, and perhaps pay an editing fee if they can't?
As for adding links or so on, I've just been doing a lot of searching for open access papers, and I found many that had to be paid for as HTML, but the PDF was free. This could be a general solution.
BTW, the amounts people are asked to pay is ridiculous! $10-40 for one day's access? $1-2 forever would be a much more reasonable figure, and might get a lot more play.
As bloggers, I have another point: no matter whether you have access to a paper, if your readers don't you lose value in your work. Personally, I hate to link to anything that all my readers won't be able to see.
Posted by: AK | April 29, 2009 5:36 PM