Open Access News

Richard Poynder, The Open Access Interviews: Leslie Chan, Open and Shut? June 20, 2008.  This is another of Richard's superb, detailed interviews.  In addition to profiling Leslie's tireless and important work for OA, and how he came to it, Richard gives useful background on how the broken system of scholarly communication is especially broken for researchers in developing countries.  As usual, the hardest thing about blogging a Poynder interview is to keep the excerpt short.  Read the whole thing.  Excerpt:

Every revolution has its unsung heroes: those people who contribute a great deal to a cause, but who are insufficiently recognised for it — sometimes because their efforts take place behind the scenes, sometimes because they are unduly modest, sometimes for a combination of such reasons.

That would appear to be the role that Leslie Chan has played in the Open Access (OA) movement. Without fanfare, and with little public thanks, Chan has for over ten years now tirelessly promoted OA — travelling the world to give presentations on the topic, writing articles in support of it, and advising, assisting, and motivating others to play their part too, all voluntary work that Chan has had to fit around a full-time teaching post at the University of Toronto Scarborough....

Chan could not but be struck at the absurdity of [a journal charging him $2,000 to publish a color photo of a blonde macaque in one of his primatology articles and the professional risk he'd face in posting the photo online himself] : Researchers around the world were now able to communicate with one another instantly over the Internet and yet, as he put it, "they couldn't use the medium to communicate the results of their research to other researchers...."

At the same time, Chan was frustrated by the difficulties he was experiencing accessing some of the key literature on macaques he needed for his thesis. Many of these papers were published in journals originating from countries like India, China, and Indonesia, but his university library did not subscribe to these journals....[E]ven though these journals were modestly priced, the library budget was so heavily (and disproportionately) tied to big commercial journal packages from Western publishers....

One initiative that Chan was especially drawn to was Bioline International....Since most developing country (DC) publishers did not have the necessary resources to put their journals online themselves, the Kirsops [and Bioline] decided to do it for them. In this way, they reasoned, they would make DC research more visible — benefiting not only the publishers, but also their authors, the developing world at large, and global science too....

After failing to get a grant from the Canadian government, Chan introduced a pay-per-view system for Bioline. But two years later, after Chan had made just eight sales (at $8 a time), administrators at the University of Toronto pointed out to him that it was costing $5 to process each payment. Since Chan had agreed to pass 90% of all revenue back to the publishers this meant that processing each transaction was costing Bioline five times more than it was earning from the sale....

Once again Chan was struck at the absurdity of the situation: ...Bioline had achieved the very opposite of its stated objective of making DC research more visible to the world — for by introducing a financial firewall between Bioline papers and potential consumers, Chan had simply locked out potential readers, not increased access.

At the same time...those Bioline publishers who had opted out of the payment system — insisting that their journals be made freely available to anyone who wanted to read them — had seen the number of papers downloaded from their journals grow exponentially....[creating] a vivid demonstration of a lesson the Internet has taught many: When content is made available on the Web it can attract a much larger readership than in print, but very few people are prepared to pay for the privilege of reading it online. Consequently, any access barrier introduced is almost invariably counterproductive....

Obscurity of their own work aside, researchers in the developing world face a second problem: The bulk of published research is published in Western journals, and in order to access these journals it is necessary to pay subscription fees — fees that few DC research institutions can afford to pay. This puts DC researchers at a further disadvantage when conducting their research — since they are frequently unable to access the findings of others working in their field....

Further compounding the problem, Western journals are the first choice for DC researchers when seeking to get their own papers published. While the odds are stacked against them, some succeed. And when they do, although their research will be more visible to researchers in the West, it will be as good as invisible to their compatriots....

As fellow OA advocate Jean-Claude Guédon puts it, "Leslie has played an important role in insisting that the OA movement not limit itself to core, elite, Western-led science. He sees OA also (not exclusively, but also) as a way to help developing or emergent economies develop meaningful scientific capacity."

For instance, says [Subbiah] Arunachalam, Chan's advocacy work in India a few years ago inspired Dr D K Sahu of MedKnow Publications to launch 50 local OA journals, and several Indian librarians to create institutional repositories, including repositories at key Indian research institutions like the National Information Centre in New Delhi, the National Institute of Technology, Rourkela and the National Chemical Laboratory, Pune.  Again, this was done without any form of self-publicity, and often unbeknownst to the movement at large.

Chan is also notable (in a movement not short of grumps) for his user-friendliness. As fellow OA advocate Alma Swan puts it, "Leslie is one of the world's nicest people, with a 'do good' gene being expressed in every cell of his body." She adds, "He is very good at making connections, persuading people and influencing things in general."

A good example of Chan's persuasiveness was the role he played in getting Canada's International Development Research Centre (IDRC) to adopt an Open Access policy. Arunachalam had been trying to persuade IDRC vice president Rohinton Medhora to embrace OA for some time, with little success. Then one day Chan turned up and, as Arunachalam puts it, "clinched the deal".

Another Chan quality is his inclusiveness. This was personally evident to me when he summarily rejected my claim that the movement is bedevilled with warring factions — evidenced I suggested by the frequent arguments over the respective merits of Green OA versus Gold OA, or the disagreements over the relative importance of price and permission barriers.

"I would say that views within the Open Access movement are both looser and more diverse than might at first appear," he insisted, "and have always been. Moreover, they change over time."

In any case, he said, differences of opinion are important, as are a diversity of approaches and constant experimentation. The model he constantly invokes is that of evolution. As he put it to me, "What evolution tells us is that you are more likely to find success if you try three, four, or maybe five models than if you just try one. The more diverse ways we can develop to achieve the same end goal the better." ...

What helps, says Chan, is that "I really believe in this stuff." Or as he put it during a recent email discussion I was copied into, "The geneticist Theodosius Dobzhansky famously reminded us that 'Nothing in Biology Makes Sense Except in the Light of Evolution.' I would like to paraphrase Dobzhansky and claim that 'Nothing in Scholarly Communications Makes Sense Except in the Light of Open Access'." ...

What's at stake if Bioline has to close through lack of funding, and OA fails to deliver the goods for the developed world? We can't say, but consider this: Each year half a billion people are infected with malaria and over a million die as a result. Likewise, there are 300,000-500,000 cases of African trypanosomiasis (sleeping sickness) each year, which the World Health Organisation estimates leads to 66,000 deaths.

If it is true that increasing the visibility of research into diseases can shorten the time it takes to develop cures, then we should surely be doing everything we can to hasten universal OA. And if services like Bioline can play a special role in increasing the visibility of research into neglected diseases, then shouldn't organisations like the WHO and FAO be funding it? After all, if services like Bioline can play a role (however small) in saving lives, and reducing human misery, wouldn't it be money well spent to support them? ...