Open Access News

Xavier Bosch, An open challenge. Open access and the challenges for scientific publishing, EMBO Reports, 9, 5 (2008) pp. 404-408.  (Thanks to Garrett Eastman.)  Bosch is in the Department of Internal Medicine at Hospital Clinic of the University of Barcelona.  This is a long article and my short excerpt cannot do justice to it; I encourage you to read the whole thing.  However, I believe my comments address all of Bosch's major objections.  Excerpt:

In December 2001, proponents of open access (OA) to peer-reviewed literature established a new set of ideals for scientific communication. The model they proposed would make accepted scientific papers freely accessible on the world wide web and, to cover the costs for editorial services, would charge the authors instead of relying on traditional subscription-based income (Budapest Open Access Initiative). More than 3,000 journals now publish under this model....

[T]he impact and future of OA in scientific publishing and the economic sustainability of OA models are so far unclear. Other questions also remain: which journals are most likely to be affected —negatively or positively— by OA? If OA has to rely partly on subsidies from public or private funders to survive, and if legislation mandates authors to post accepted papers on government-run repositories, is there a danger that OA publishers could lose their independence?

Here, I review the history and current status of OA publishing, discuss its advantages and disadvantages....and propose a business model that both provides the public with access to user-friendly summaries of the latest research....

Another argument in favour of OA, which has been attracting authors, is that OA publications potentially reach more readers and could thus receive higher citation rates. However, a comprehensive review of the recent bibliometric data and literature found little evidence that OA publication of articles increases their citation rates (Craig et al, 2007)....

At a glance, it seems that OA online articles are cheaper to produce than printed articles. However, this does not take into account the editorial costs that increase with a journal's rejection rate [and therefore would require higher author-side publication fees]....

It remains unclear whether OA journals could ever raise enough revenue to maintain the high standard of editing that is currently provided by high-quality subscription journals....

Finally, the AAP stated that there might also be legal consequences with respect to intellectual property and copyright. The AAP argued that, "journal publishers who have opposed the NIH mandatory policy will continue to pursue their concerns with Congress regarding the policy's negative impact on science publishing and the protection of related intellectual property rights"....

Another argument against OA, namely that financial dependence on one or few funding agencies or organizations could threaten editorial independence, is not as far-fetched as it seems. There are many examples of how the current US administration has tried to meddle with scientific findings that do not support their political goals....

It is scholarly journals published by smaller societies, many of which depend on the journal's income to finance their activities, which are likely to be hurt by OA....

Is it really essential and practical for taxpayers to have free, immediate access to the full contents of all publicly funded research findings published in peer-reviewed journals? A more pragmatic model could take into account the societal relevance of the information. For example, it is unlikely that a paper on the fundamental molecular mechanisms of a rare genetic disorder will immediately influence a physician's practice or be of great interest to the layman. It might be more useful to give the general public immediate, free access to user-friendly summaries of the latest research, such as patientINFORM, a partnership of publishers and voluntary health organizations....

Comments

• Bosch's history of OA is generally well done (in passages not excerpted here).  But for someone as familiar with OA as he is, it's surprising to find that he still believes that all OA journals charge author-side publication fees, something known to be false since the AAAS/ALPSP/Highwire report on OA journals came out in 2005 (and which Bosch himself cites later in his article).  Not only do some OA journal charge no fees, but the majority of OA journals charge no fees.   A full 67% of the journals listed in the DOAJ charge no publication fees, and 83% of OA journals from society publishers charge no publication fees. 
• Bosch cherry-picks his evidence that OA does not increase citation impact.  He disregards the many studies unfavorable to his conclusion, including studies (Hajjem 2005 and Eysenbach 2006) addressing the doubt that there is correlation here without causation, and including responses to the one study he does cite.
• "[I]t seems that OA online articles are cheaper to produce than printed articles. However, this does not take into account the editorial costs that increase with a journal's rejection rate...."  It's true that editorial costs (per accepted paper) rise with with the journal's rejection rate.  But this affects OA and TA journals equally.  For journals of equal quality and equal rejection rates, the OA journal would be less expensive to produce.  Apart from dispensing with print (which many TA journals do as well), OA journals eliminate subscription management, eliminate DRM and user authentication, eliminate lawyer fees for licenses and enforcement, and reduce or eliminate marketing.  In their place they add back little more than the cost of collecting publication fees or institutional subsidies.  If Bosch's point is that journals with high rejection rates would find it hard to support themselves on author-side publication fees, that may be true.  But that's irrelevant to the proposition that OA publication costs less than TA publication.
• Bosch uncritically accepts the AAP complaint that the NIH policy violates copyright.  If he had looked closely, he'd see that the NIH policy requires grantees to retain the rights needed to comply with the policy, and therefore that the NIH use of grantee articles is authorized by the copyright holders.
• "Another argument against OA, namely that financial dependence on one or few funding agencies or organizations could threaten editorial independence, is not as far-fetched as it seems...."  If Bosch is saying that government OA mandates could interfere with peer review or journal decisions about what to publish, then he's forgetting that OA mandates regulate grantees, not publishers, that they only apply to articles already published in independent (non-governmental) peer-reviewed journals, and that they do not dictate the peer-review methods, business models, or access policies of scholarly journals.  If instead he's saying that ideological government officials could censor conclusions they dislike, by removing them from a government repository, he's forgetting the differences between OA archiving and OA publishing.  It's depressingly true that the Bush administration (for example) has interfered with the government funded science on ideological grounds.  But so far Bush appointees haven't monkeyed with repository content; and even if they did, they would not censor the scientific record.  Here's how I put it in SOAN for February 2007:

  [FRPAA, like other OA mandates,] only applies to articles that have already been published in peer-reviewed journals....[I]t's about archiving copies, not manipulating originals.  Hence, the possibility of censorship doesn't come up.  The originals will be in libraries and independent web sites around the world, wherever the publisher's market reach, distribution system, and preservation back-ups have managed to place them.  If some of the published originals are not in fact copied for OA archiving, or if some copies are removed after deposit, that would be regrettable (and violate the policy).  But it would not affect the originals at all.  It would not delete them from libraries and independent web sites around the world, shrink the range of their distribution, change their access policies, or reduce their visibility.  To use the word "censorship" to describe the incomplete copying of literature already published, distributed, stored, curated, and preserved in independent locations is incoherent newspeak.  Or (to play along), if occasional non-archiving really is a kind of censorship, then publishers who want to defeat an OA archiving mandate like FRPAA want systematic non-archiving and mass censorship.

• "It is scholarly journals published by smaller societies, many of which depend on the journal's income to finance their activities, which are likely to be hurt by OA...."  Bosch is apparently unaware that at least 425 scholarly societies publish 450 OA journals.  (There are many more, and Caroline Sutton and I are about to release new numbers and new evidence.)
• "Is it really essential and practical for taxpayers to have free, immediate access to the full contents of all publicly funded research findings published in peer-reviewed journals?"  Bosch is assuming that the primary purpose of OA policies is to make peer-reviewed literature accessible to lay readers.  But the primary purpose is to make it accessible to researchers who don't have access through their institutions.  Or to be more precise, policy-makers want to make the literature available to everyone who can make use of it, whether they are professionals or not.  And most of them happen to be professionals.  Lay readers who care will have direct access.  Lay readers who don't care will benefit indirectly because researchers will benefit directly.
• "It might be more useful to give the general public immediate, free access to user-friendly summaries of the latest research, such as patientINFORM...."  This might be true for most lay readers, but it isn't true for most beneficiaries of existing OA policies.  Because most of the unmet demand is from professional researchers, OA to mere summaries is far from adequate.  For more detail, see my many past comments on patientINFORM.