Open Access News

Rüdiger Voss and John Enderby, The open-access debate, PhysicsWeb, January 2007.

From Voss, a senior researcher at CERN and editor of CERN's June 2006 report Open-access publishing in particle physics:

The scientific community has welcomed the idea of open access to the research literature through the Internet with open arms. Various initiatives, statements and declarations in recent years have all recommended free access to scientific results through self-archiving, the creation of new open-access journals and the conversion of subscription journals into open-access publications. Increasing numbers of funding agencies even force their grant holders to make their papers freely available online.

Physicists have always been at the forefront of the open-access revolution, which seeks to disseminate research findings as widely as possible. They...pioneered the preprint system...through preprint servers such as arXiv.org or the SPIRES database. Indeed, more than 90% of the research literature in particle physics is now freely available on the Web....

However, publishing papers via open-access Internet databases – rather than in reputable open-access journals – has been a mixed blessing. If an advance copy of almost every journal paper in a particular field is freely available online, libraries are more likely to cancel subscriptions in these self-archiving fields than in those where the practice is not as prevalent. What this means is that an increasing number of researchers – some in prestigious universities – can no longer read important journals in particle physics and related fields. A rift is fast developing, in which fewer and fewer scientists have access to the final, peer-reviewed version of a paper, while the rest have to make do with a preprint that is rarely identical to the final published version.

If journal publishers continue to hike subscriptions well above the rate of inflation in the face of declining circulation, journals will eventually cost so much that only a small number of major libraries and institutions will be able to afford them. Obviously, this business model is not sustainable for publishers in the long term and there is a big risk that it could collapse....

Open access to the final, peer-reviewed version of scientific literature is the only way out of the dilemma. It will...let them live in peaceful co-existence – but on an equal footing – with institutional repositories.

However, high-quality open-access publishing comes at a price....[Critics say] this funding model is unstable: why would a researcher pay to put their work in open-access journal X when they could just as well publish it for free in equally prestigious journal Y? ...[This] concern is more serious, but it can be overcome by a large-scale transition to open access, of the type that CERN is promoting....

From Enderby, immediate past president of the Institute of Physics and a paid adviser to its publishing arm.  He has also been a VP of the Royal Society and head of its publishing activities.

...In its purest form, open-access publishing would offer all material in its final, edited, formatted and paginated form freely available, with the publication costs being entirely borne by the authors of papers or the people who funded their work. The traditional "subscription" model, again its purest form, makes material accessible only to those who pay for it, with authors paying nothing towards publication. Between these two extremes is a continuum of business models.

I have great difficulty with open access in its purest form. Economic models in which the producer pays – but the consumer does not – are, to say the least, unusual. At the moment, if researchers do not like a particular journal, they can choose to publish elsewhere. But if all journals were open access, consumers would not be able to exercise any influence over the market. Instead, presumably, the funding agencies would have the upper hand, having to decide how much of their resources would go to publication costs....

I am also worried about the implication for developing countries. If author charges became the norm, there may be pressure from aid agencies for scientists from these nations to publish their work in less prestigious, low-impact journals that charge less because their acceptance rates are high. At present, all authors can have their research reviewed free of charge in any journal of their choice. Open-access publishing could therefore lead to journals being dominated entirely by scientists from the richest nations.

And finally those countries with an active scientific workforce would be out of pocket in two ways. Researchers in the UK, for example, produce about 75,000 papers a year, which means they would have to pay about £100m in author fees if all journals were open access. This sum is far higher than the £90m they currently pay in library subscriptions....

I do, however, have some reservations about the subscription model in its purest from. As a trustee of the International Network for the Availability of Scientific Publications, which seeks to make papers available to developing nations, I am aware of the problems of making people pay for information. Thankfully, the open-access debate has forced publishers to tackle some of the disadvantages of the subscription model....

My view is that market forces will lead to variety of models. However, for us all to move to open-access publishing, which is a so far unproved business model, is not in the best interests of science until experimentation has revealed some of its unintended consequences. I am therefore uneasy about governments or anyone else imposing new rules on authors as these could lead to unforeseen distortions in the market....

Comment.  Two of Enderby's chief objections to OA journals (that they discriminate against indigent authors and would cause high-output countries to pay more than they pay now for subscriptions) are derailed by the fact that the majority of OA journals charge no author-side fees, which I am surprised he did not know.  For other answers to his first objection, see my article from November 2003, and for other answers to his second objection, see my article from June 2006.