Excerpt from Roberts: '[With OA,] no longer would poorer institutions be discriminated against because, in principle, everyone with a computer and Internet access could read the full scientific literature, not just scientists and university scholars, but teachers, high school students, and the general public. Diabetics wishing to find out more about the possibilities for curing their disease through stem cell research could go to the primary literature and avoid the free junk science that pervades the Internet. For this to happen, we need to revise the way we finance and disseminate the scientific literature. We all need "open access."...While opposition was expected from commercial publishers, surprisingly, many scientific societies, including the American Chemical Society, and some disease-related foundations are against open access, even with a delayed release. They fear the negative impact on their finances, arguing that profits from journal subscriptions subsidize many worthy programs that societies frequently support. I have not yet heard a sound argument as to why library subscriptions to journals should bear the financial burden of these causes. Wouldn't a scientific society better serve its members' interests by supporting open access to the literature in its field?...Currently, we have the paradoxical situation that much of the research entering the scientific literature has been paid for by taxpayer dollars or through charitable contributions to foundations, societies, and universities. Yet much of that literature is inaccessible without expensive subscriptions. Worse still, the content of a scientific paper is given to the journals for free, yet many publishers demand page charges, color charges, and other fees before they will publish the work. The editorial and review process is often done for little or no remuneration, yet still when I wish to read the article adjacent to my own in a journal, I have to pay a fee to do so. The publishers --whether commercial or scientific societies-- are laughing all the way to the bank. We know there is enough money in the system to finance the production of the scientific literature because it exists now. The scientific literature should belong to the scientists who created it, not the publishers.'
Excerpt from Banks: 'Unfortunately for the taxpayer, there is little hard evidence for the advertised public benefits of open access and some reason for concern about costs and unintended consequences. Roberts and his colleagues claim three essential taxpayer benefits for open access: accelerating the conduct of research, eliminating a type of alleged double billing in which taxpayers pay to read the results of research they have already funded, and making accessible to patients the results of research studies that might hold life-saving treatments. The first claim is dubious. For-profit and nonprofit publishers now routinely allow open archiving of postprints (pre-copyedited manuscripts accepted for publication), and more than 800,000 final manuscripts are freely available in full text at HighWire press. It is highly doubtful that access to research articles is a rate-limiting step in the advancement of science. Nor is the second argument more compelling. The costs of disseminating research are distinct from the costs of conducting it, just as the taxpayer-funded development of weapons systems has costs distinct from their deployment. If the taxpayer wishes to gain access to research, it will require federal support for the costs of distribution that are now largely borne by private parties. The third argument of the Nobel Laureates...does not bear scrutiny. For example, a search of PubMed reveals that 7,756 papers on breast cancer were published in 2004. The vast majority are in basic or preclinical fields, many from obscure journals, and have no immediate applicability to patient care....Open access is therefore an extremely cost-inefficient way to deliver critical information to patients --and a strategy that may actually be detrimental, by providing an overwhelming volume of information that makes uncovering the few truly relevant clinical findings harder.'
The article includes rebuttal points from Roberts and Banks as well.
Posted by
Peter Suber at 3/09/2005 08:04:00 AM.
The open access movement:
Putting peer-reviewed scientific and scholarly literature
on the internet. Making it available free of charge and
free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.
Removing the barriers to serious research.
I recommend the OA tracking project (OATP) as the best way to stay on top of new OA developments. You can read the OATP feed on a blog-like web page or subscribe to it by RSS, email, or Twitter. You can also help build the feed by tagging new developments you encounter.
