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Saturday, Nov 7, 2009
Victory Cabal is as good as the PR man the publishers hired. He is either misleading the readers or he is ignorant of how open access journals function. All scientific journals - open access or toll access - do have a refereeing system in place. Refereeing has nothing to do with the business model followed by journals.
The open access movement is gaining momentum. Six of the eight research councils in the UK, the Wellcome Trust and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute have mandated open access to research they fund. The European Union and the US Congress are considering legislation that would mandate open access for all publicly-funded research. And over 92% of about 9,000 journals surveyed allow open access archiving of papers published in them. More than half the open access journals do not charge an author-side fee for publishing a paper. Books in leading libraries are being digitised by several agencies. Even companies like Microsoft are supporting open access and open science.
It is therefore difficult to understand why the publishers association should have thought that it could stall the inevitable, hire a very expensive consultant who charged them such a hefty some to tell them to tell lies and earn such a bad name for all its members. New technology makes old ways obsolete. With the arrival of Gutenberg's printing technology all the monks lost their jobs as scribes. With the arrival of the Internet and the World Wide Web conventional publishers are no longer needed as intermediaries between scientists.
It is incorrect to say that authors publish freely. A general rule of thumb is that journals run by societies (J. Electrochem. Soc. for example) charge pages fees to authors and operate at break-even or at a loss due to the low or zero subscription fees for members (the ECS membership fee of $98/yr includes free online-only access to J. Electrochem. Soc.). Journals that are run by for-profits or have high subscription rates do not charge page fees for authors.
Also, the peer-review process is not free for the journal. The journal needs to identify reviewers, send out manuscripts, hound reviewers to send their reviews in, deal with conflicting reviews, get revisions from authors, etc. And that doesn't include typesetting, publishing, etc.
In the case of journals that do not charge page fees to authors, the government has spent no money to publish in those journals. These papers are distinct from the progress and final reports that contractors to the government (companies and University and National Lab researchers) provide as a requirement of their receipt of government funds. As such, the public does not have a clearly identifiable right for free access to the journal papers, but should, and in most cases do, have access to the final reports provided to the government.
These two types of publications serve two distinct purposes. The reports to the contracting agency provide a more broad-based, usually application-oriented, description of the work. The scientific papers provide more detail for those people/parties working in the field. Those who are interested in these details can purchase subscriptions to the journals.
As an aside, in 15+ years of research I have never come across a journal that provides free access 6 months after publishing. This parctice is apparently limited to the bio and med journals due to NIH requirements. But, almost all of the journals available online have free access to article abstracts.
I work in a science library at a major US research university, and it's been clear to us librarians that the scholarly publishing system is broken for some time. We are, after all, the major consumer base for scientific publishers, and since we're publicly funded institutions, most of us have had to deal with flat or diminishing budgets over the past few years. Yet prices for journal subscriptions go up every year, at a rate faster than inflation, leaving us with no choice but to cut subscriptions to lesser-used or less-prestigious journals in order to keep journals that our researchers can't live without (like, say, Nature) or out of the inability to cut titles from large publishers due to the terms of the "big deals" that we sign with them. Even institutions like mine only have so much leverage to bargain with these publishers, since they are the exclusive providers of the content - they have us over a barrel. Is Open Access the answer? I don't know. But something has to change.
Victorycabal: nobody's proposing a non-peer-reviewed system. It's perfectly possible to construct peer-review models that are consistent with open access. Example: the physics community has been archiving preprints of its work online since the mid-90s. A physicist posts a new paper to the community's website, and other physicists comment on it. In essence, the entire community of researchers conducts peer review on everybody else's papers. The niche for "traditional" journals in physics has become copy-of-record, rather than peer review - and those journals still have subscriptions, and still make money. Where's the problem here?
The corporation AccuWeather, through Rick Santorum (via lobbyists, I'm sure) tried to pass legislation forbidding the National Weather Service from providing readable forecasts to the public for free. Said Santorum and Accuweather: The government is stepping on the toes of the free market by giving something away for free; something which could be sold by the private sector (the weather forecast). Therefore, the NWS should only release raw weather data, since that is what taxpayers are paying for. Then we, the private sector, will interpret that raw data and provide forecasts to the news media -- for a price.
Santorum was not successful, but I'm sure AccuWeather will continue to try to pass such legislation.
Mr. Leonard ignores the core issue behind the availability of scientific information - it costs money. Scientific research has to take place somewhere, it has to be funded. Scientists, researchers and reviewers have to be paid. There are administrative costs, insurance costs, health care costs, electric bills. The editing, transmission, design and delivery systems, whether printed on paper then sent through the mail or delivered electronically, have to be designed and sustained.
The Open Access sites have been sustained by grants. None are self-funded; none are generating their own sustenance. This is no different than a tobacco company giving money to a favorite organization, ostensibly without strings attached, to publish anything without the tiresome issue of having the research and the researcher vetted, examined or judged until after the fact of publication, when the paper is already part of public knowledge.
Open Access and Wikipedia are based on the same premise that grants primacy to the values inherent in a free market economy. A free market is amoral. It does not regard creativity, originality, need, accuracy, inequality of access or even usefulness, only survival. Common knowledge is often superstition and a widely held belief does not mean what is believed is true. In the open access model a published paper, even a bad, ridiculous or dangerous one, is regarded as equal to any other.
Authors have to pay to submit to open access journals. Peer review is supposed to just happen. Both these tasks are work. I don't pay my boss for the privilege of working for him, why should a writer or reviewer pay for the privilege of working? Open Access doesn't remove the work, it just asks for free money to pay some of its own people but no expectation that it pay for what it markets as its own product. Open access journals merely offer a platform then charge scientists to stand on it.
No doubt there is a conflict between the for-profit industries that provide the resource material and the non-profit educational industry. (Make no mistake, like health care, education is an industry.) The issue is partly about the cost and expenses of education or information, but more about how we pay for it.
Publishers pay their writers and editors and the societies whose journals they publish. They negotiate to market and distribute the work they publish. More often than not, they do not own the copyright, but negotiate for shared royalties based on the number of copies read, sold or distributed; the better the distribution, the more the revenue to share. Like newspaper organizations, they provide the environment and support individuals or academic societies cannot provide for themselves. Being a chemist is a different job than creating and sustaining a chemistry journal.
Perhaps subscriptions or textbooks cost too much. Is the cost due to profiteering or a rise in publication costs? Those are legitimate questions, but the answer is not Open Access. The answer is setting a political high priority on funding education and educators, public libraries, electric and electronic infrastructure and demanding that access be equal, then it will be open.
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Salon headlines in your mailbox
