Open Access News

December 1, 2008. Budapest. The quiet frozen surface of the river stands as counterpoint to the heated discussions in the Duna (Danube) Hotel where representatives of governments, libraries, universities and major publishing houses are trying to hammer out guidelines for the implementation of a Universal Open Access Protocol (UOAP)....Scheduled for 2009, UOAP would make the contents of all scholarly publications free without subscription. The UOAP operation is to be funded by a consortium of government agencies, private foundations and commercial sources and follows a period of ad hoc funding and substantial confusion in the world of scientific journals, a situation which dates to the event now known in the publishing world as Nature Day of which the conference is the first anniversary.

On Nature Day, December 1, 2007, 100 university librarians (with backing of their respective faculties) handed an ultimatum to Nature publishing, one of the larger publishers of scientific technical journals. This rather strange manifesto proclaimed that the profit that Nature gained from providing journals to university libraries was excessive and rather than pay the price asked by Nature, the librarians offered to pay one fifth of the price for the print version and required that Nature be open access, that is, available on line without subscription. The libraries agreed to support the open access version at a further reduced price for five years even though it would be available to everybody in the world. If Nature did not agree, the libraries threatened to cancel their subscriptions. "It seems strange telling a manufacturer how much profit they can make but really this is what a consumer does every time they choose one of several competing products" said Kuan-Teh Jeang of the NIH and editor of Retrovirology, a journal that has been open access since 2003....In the end, an undisclosed compromise was settled on. Science, published by the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), was next. "They claimed to be not-for-profit" said Richard Feinman, editor of Nutrition & Metabolism, "but their journal operation was a big money-maker and the funds were used for other activities which, however worthwhile, were not what we intended to pay for when our libraries subscribed to the journal. I told them they should change their name to the American Association for the Advancement of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAAAAS)."

...[A]uthors and editors were quite enthusiastic. "Well, transparency was the key," said Barbara Starfield of Johns Hopkins, editor of International Journal for Equity in Health. "Once the faculty members recognized the burden being placed on the libraries and how unscrupulous the publishers were, in combination with the obvious benefits of wide circulation and controlling your own copyrights, everything fell into place."

Faced with guaranteed income at a lower price or a difficult battle with customers, most publishers instituted the open access movement. Quite remarkably this was done, in some cases, literally, overnight since publishers already had the tools for online publication. It was only necessary to remove the gateway. The pressure was, in fact, great - once battle lines were drawn, authors and reviewers (who are not normally paid by publishers) jumped to side with the libraries. The new contracts provided great savings for the libraries but everyone realized that they had agreed to pay for the world's technical journals, and that a global solution had to be found. In essence, it was recognized that much money flows into publishing and it only had to be redirected. This lead to today's meeting in Budapest.

The meeting today, like Nature Day itself is also the anniversary of the 2001 meeting in Budapest of the Open Society Institute (OSI) which might be said to have initiated the Open Access movement.