Open Access News

• Ian Gibson, Overview of the House of Commons Science and Technology Select Committee inquiry into Scientific Publications
• Tom Graham, Scientific Publications: Free for all? The academic library viewpoint
• Ann Okerson, Open access: reflections from the United States
• Jan Velterop, Open access: principle, practice, progress
• Stephen Pinfield, A mandate to self archive? The role of open access institutional repositories
• Martin Richardson, Open access: evidence-based policy or policy-based evidence? The university press perspective
• Marie McVeigh and James Pringle, Open access to the medical literature: How much content is available in published journals?
• Agnès Ponsati and Mercedes Baquero, An analysis of the use of digital collections in a scientific research library network: Part two of a case study from CSIC, Madrid, Spain
• Chuck Hamaker and Brad Spry, Google Scholar

(PS: In the past when I've listed OA-related articles from new issues of journals, I've included deep links to the individual articles. But this takes time that I rarely have these days. As long as the article links are only one click away, through the TOC, I'll feel free to omit them.)

From BMC's page on the Publicon partnership: 'Publicon also offers a BioMed Central article template, and supports export in BioMed Central's native XML format, which makes it an ideal tool for BioMed Central authors. Publicon notebook files authored using the BioMed Central template can be submitted directly to BioMed Central, and offer authors the following benefits: [1] a template which streamlines the process of creating a correctly formatted manuscript, [2] full support for complex mathematical formula and equations, [3] automatic conversion to XML within BioMed Central's production system, leading to: [3a] faster manuscript processing, [3b] avoidance of typographical errors introduced during XML markup, and [4] a £30 discount on the Article Processing Charge payable when the article is published.'

One nugget before getting to the NIH discussion: 'The biggest boost [in usage] by far came from being indexed by Google in the summer of 2004. Earlier that year ASPET signed an agreement allowing Google to crawl the journal sites so they can be fully indexed. Google quickly outpaced PubMed and Medline in referring users to ASPET's journals. This has been the case for other scientific journals as well. Likewise, Yahoo refers more users to the Society's journals than the NIH sites.'

On the NIH policy: 'ASPET makes all of its online journal content freely available after 12 months. The Society has not made a decision as to how soon accepted manuscripts from its journals may be released through PMC. An obvious concern for ASPET and many other societies and publishers is the effect that free access through the NIH will have on subscription sales. There are several hotly contested points of view on this topic. Some feel that free access will have no impact. Their reasoning is that libraries must have full journal content, not just the NIH-funded research. And, the final publisher's version is desired --sometimes necessary-- because of errors caught in copyediting. Some journals already release manuscripts after a short or no delay. On the other hand, the library community has been vociferous in supporting open access in general and the NIH policy specifically. Some librarians see it as a solution to rising subscription prices and clearly think they will be able to cut subscriptions. If a significant number of articles from a journal are free immediately at PubMed Central, a library may decide that it can use inter-library loan or document delivery to get the remaining content and do without a subscription. Many society publishers like ASPET feel that the NIH policy is unnecessary because our journals make their content freely available after 12 months. The NIH policy creates a duplicate system that takes money away from research to serve needs that are already being met by journals such as ASPET's....Neither those for or against the NIH policy can guarantee the outcomes they predict. We can be sure, however, that if subscription cancellations accelerate, there will be no way to replace that income and no going back.'

Excerpt from Roberts: '[With OA,] no longer would poorer institutions be discriminated against because, in principle, everyone with a computer and Internet access could read the full scientific literature, not just scientists and university scholars, but teachers, high school students, and the general public. Diabetics wishing to find out more about the possibilities for curing their disease through stem cell research could go to the primary literature and avoid the free junk science that pervades the Internet. For this to happen, we need to revise the way we finance and disseminate the scientific literature. We all need "open access."...While opposition was expected from commercial publishers, surprisingly, many scientific societies, including the American Chemical Society, and some disease-related foundations are against open access, even with a delayed release. They fear the negative impact on their finances, arguing that profits from journal subscriptions subsidize many worthy programs that societies frequently support. I have not yet heard a sound argument as to why library subscriptions to journals should bear the financial burden of these causes. Wouldn't a scientific society better serve its members' interests by supporting open access to the literature in its field?...Currently, we have the paradoxical situation that much of the research entering the scientific literature has been paid for by taxpayer dollars or through charitable contributions to foundations, societies, and universities. Yet much of that literature is inaccessible without expensive subscriptions. Worse still, the content of a scientific paper is given to the journals for free, yet many publishers demand page charges, color charges, and other fees before they will publish the work. The editorial and review process is often done for little or no remuneration, yet still when I wish to read the article adjacent to my own in a journal, I have to pay a fee to do so. The publishers --whether commercial or scientific societies-- are laughing all the way to the bank. We know there is enough money in the system to finance the production of the scientific literature because it exists now. The scientific literature should belong to the scientists who created it, not the publishers.'

Excerpt from Banks: 'Unfortunately for the taxpayer, there is little hard evidence for the advertised public benefits of open access and some reason for concern about costs and unintended consequences. Roberts and his colleagues claim three essential taxpayer benefits for open access: accelerating the conduct of research, eliminating a type of alleged double billing in which taxpayers pay to read the results of research they have already funded, and making accessible to patients the results of research studies that might hold life-saving treatments. The first claim is dubious. For-profit and nonprofit publishers now routinely allow open archiving of postprints (pre-copyedited manuscripts accepted for publication), and more than 800,000 final manuscripts are freely available in full text at HighWire press. It is highly doubtful that access to research articles is a rate-limiting step in the advancement of science. Nor is the second argument more compelling. The costs of disseminating research are distinct from the costs of conducting it, just as the taxpayer-funded development of weapons systems has costs distinct from their deployment. If the taxpayer wishes to gain access to research, it will require federal support for the costs of distribution that are now largely borne by private parties. The third argument of the Nobel Laureates...does not bear scrutiny. For example, a search of PubMed reveals that 7,756 papers on breast cancer were published in 2004. The vast majority are in basic or preclinical fields, many from obscure journals, and have no immediate applicability to patient care....Open access is therefore an extremely cost-inefficient way to deliver critical information to patients --and a strategy that may actually be detrimental, by providing an overwhelming volume of information that makes uncovering the few truly relevant clinical findings harder.'

The article includes rebuttal points from Roberts and Banks as well.

(PS: This is not about scholarly publishing, but it's a welcome precedent with fascinating implications for scholarly publishing. Scholarly authors have the same interests as advertisers in seeing their work disseminated as widely as possible, not just to paying subscribers. Scholarly readers have the same interests as job seekers in having ready access to the scholarship or job ads that others are trying to disseminate. All of us have an interest in taking advantage of new technology and asking older business models to find a way to exist alongside it.)