About two weeks ago I wrote an entry on what I hated about scientific journals. I intentionally did not include the issue of public access to publicly financed research, but it came up in the comment section. Interestingly Maxine, an editor at Nature, replied:
On the access problem mentioned here in the comments -- can't speak for other publishers but institutions almost always have site-license access to Nature which gives complete online access.
Nature ran a debate on this topic a while back which is free-access and can be see at:
http://www.nature.com/nature/focus/accessdebate/index.htmlIn this debate are articles representing most points of view on the topic, so it might save you writing your post, Alex.
Then in another comment:
Printing is very (extremely) expensive, online is not. Printing is one reason why journals have to charge subscriptions, which also bugs you. It is hard to have it all ways. The information is not just printed/posted raw from author to journal, it goes through a lot of filtering first. That does not come cheap. Also you get to read the stuff that is worth reading and not that which isn't, by being able to select journals that you find interesting.
I agree. We have a problem. We live in the supposed information age. Liberating all this gathered knowledge through open access would benefit all scientists and the public who pays for most of the research.
In addition, articles published in open access journals MAY receive more citations than articles in pay-per-view journals ... although I personally don't believe it is true in my field (and besides the article was published in an open access journal, PLoS).
So the question becomes, who pays for the cost of publication? As Maxine hints in her comments, this is the crux of the problem. My feeling is that if the public wants to see it, they should pay for it too, but from tax dollars. Cost of publication should come out of grants. I realize that this proposal requires not only a commitment from the journals but also the government.
But there are other possible solutions. Why doesn't Nature provide free access after one year of a publication's print date? Other journals, such as PNAS and JCB, provide this service. If printing is the bulk of the cost, perhaps we should abandon printed articles. Or perhaps let the government pay for a repository of the printed material. Another idea ... if libraries, labs and individuals want to get Nature hard copies, they should pay for this service ... but the online versions could remain free.
What I personally do not understand about this whole debate is that if PLoS can do it, why can't Science or Nature provide for open online access?
Things may change soon, from the May 11th edition of The Scientist:
A Senate bill that would require federally funded scientists to post their research papers freely on the Internet is drawing fire from many journal publishers and scientific societies. The Federal Research Public Access Act of 2006 (S 2695), introduced last week, mandates that scientists funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and other agencies make their research results available without charge within six months after publication in a peer-reviewed journal.
The legislation, sponsored by Senators John Cornyn (R-Tex.) and Joseph Lieberman (D-Conn.), applies to all research funded by NIH and 10 other Federal agencies that annually award more than $100 million in extramural research grants. These include the National Science Foundation, NASA, the Environmental Protection Agency, and the departments of Agriculture, Commerce, and Homeland Security.
Not-for-profit research societies generally depend on journal subscription revenue to support peer review, scientific outreach, and other activities. Many fear that if articles become freely available too early, they might lose significant revenue, impacting their ability to conduct peer review. For-profit journals also argue that they need subscription fees to survive.
Let's see what happens.
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It's easier to read journal articles online versus in print. Open access publishing does seem to speed up the process of getting new and interesting findings out to the community of scientists quicker.
On a personal note, the library that I use to read the literature via computer does not have a subscription to the European Journal of Human Genetics so I cant read the full text. Paying $30 to read one article is way to much. That $30 dollars cost more then what it takes to fill my gas tank from empty to full.
If Cell, PNAS, Science, Nature, Developmental Genetics, Molecular Cell, etc, start to push for open access publishing then the rest will need to follow. At least the journal Nucleic Acids Research is open access.
When discussing open access publishing models, people usually discuss a new system that differs from the current system only in who pays for access to research papers (author vs. subscriber and how the government and taxpayers factor in). I think this is an important discussion and I hope it leads towards wider access to the literature.
But there's at least one other idea I've come across motivated by physicists' experience with arXiv.org (for those who don't know, in some fields of physics self-archiving _before_ publication has reached essentially 100% with many journals accepting submissions of a paper by simply taking its arXiv number). Paul Ginsparg, who founded the arXiv, asks what peer review is really for and based on his analysis proposes a truly alternative publishing model that I find very interesting. From the article: "My own experience as a reader, author, and referee in Physics suggests that current peer review methodology in this field strives to fulfill roles for two different timescales: to provide a guide to expert readers (those well-versed in the discipline) in the short-term, and to provide a certification imprimatur for the long-term. But as I'll argue further below, the attempt to perform both functions in one step necessarily falls short on both timescales: too slow for the former, and not stringent enough for the latter."
You can read the whole thing here:
http://people.ccmr.cornell.edu/~ginsparg/blurb/pg02pr.html
Andre,
Thanks for that article, I'll try to get around to reading it next week as I'm travelling this weekend.
and besides the article was published in an open access journal, PLoS,
I couldn't let this pass even though the rest of your post was so spot on. Why does where a paper get published matter? Either the results are accurate and well interpreted or they aren't. The fact that the Eysenbach article was published in PLoS Biology should be an indication that it was rigorously reviewed because that is what the journal prides itself on; this is a piece of submitted research not a commissined opinion piece after all. If anything you should trust that research more as publishing a weak pro-OA article for political reasons would be completely counterproductive to what PLoS is trying to do.