Open Access News

News from the open access movement


Wednesday, April 19, 2006

More on the EC report and Elsevier

Dan Milmo, Publishers watch in fear as a new world comes into view, The Guardian, April 19, 2006. Excerpt:
The move by the European commission to free up access to scientific research is the latest challenge posed by the internet to the way Reed Elsevier does business. The Anglo-Dutch publisher of the Lancet and Variety magazine is one of the most internet-savvy media groups, but while it has harnessed the web to reduce its costs, it is also threatening the group's lucrative core business. Reed performs a vital service for research scientists, who need to share knowledge. It is the world's largest publisher of science journals, a $9bn (£5bn) market which involves verifying, editing and printing the work of those scientists to sell to universities and corporate research laboratories. Reed's scientific journals arm accounts for about a third of the group's underlying profits, according to analysts' estimates, so any threat to its market-leading position is eyed nervously by investors. The man in charge of Reed's science and medical business, Erik Engstrom, is confident that the journals unit will grow at a healthy pace - the target is 5% revenue growth over the next few years. But in recent years the threat of alternative models for circulating scientific papers has emerged from the internet. So far none has made a dent in Reed's profits, but that has not stopped debate over the long-term growth prospects of its cornerstone business. Google Scholar, which collates academic material, including scientific research, and publishes it on the web for free, is one of those nascent threats. Scholar trawls the web for scientific papers, and also makes available pre-publication work. Mr Engstrom recasts the perceived challenge as an opportunity. "We see Google as a very important business partner," he says. An experienced publisher, the former chief executive of Random House, he describes Google as a "pointing engine" that complements Reed's business rather than hijacking it....

The other perceived threat to Reed's journals is open access. The movement has two distinct strands: open access publishing, where authors pay to have their articles published on the web so they can be viewed for free, and author self-archiving, where an article published in a subscription journal is also placed on the researcher's own website, again for anyone to read for free. Open access has been spurred by pressure on academic library budgets, which rose at between 1% and 3% between 2001 and 2005, while journal subscriptions have risen year-on-year - the cost of a Reed journal rose 5.5% in 2004. It is a fledgling movement, but has attracted high-profile backers including Sir Tim Berners-Lee, creator of the worldwide web, and the House of Commons science and technology select committee. Reed says open access is not a creditable business model and points to the logistical and financial challenge of replicating its 1,800 journals on a free basis. As for author self-archiving, Reed has altered its copyright agreements to allow its authors to place their own articles on the web.

Comment. Two corrections for Milmo: (1) Google Scholar doesn't "collate academic material...and publish it on the web for free." All free content indexed by Google Scholar is already free online, hosted by other institutions. (2) The open access movement is not a "fledgling movement"; it's just about exactly as old as networked computers. One correction for Engstrom: open access is a kind of access, not a kind of business model; it's compatible with many different business models.