The scientific body that was a pioneer of peer-review journals says moves to provide immediate and free online access to research could have "disastrous" consequences for science.
The UK's Royal Society warns against "hasty" adoption of plans by public agencies to require scientists they fund to deposit research in large online "open access" databases.
The Society, which publishes seven peer-reviewed journals, says the proposed new models for open access publishing are "untried and untested" and there is no evidence they are economically viable.
It says the proposed move could stop researchers submitting papers or subscribing to existing peer-reviewed journals, which could cease to exist and leave researchers with lower-quality services.
The Society also says that a drop in journal subscriptions could also stop learned societies from running conferences from the profits raised by selling journal subscriptions. One example the Society opposes is a Research Councils UK (RCUK) proposal to make future grant recipients ensure their published peer-reviewed research papers are made publicly available at or around the time of publication.
Professor Stevan Harnad of the University of Southampton in the UK, who first recommended this particular model, argues it will supplement, not substitute, existing peer-reviewed journal publishing. He says there is a difference between open access journals (peer-reviewed journals that provide free and immediate access to their content) and open access archiving (where researchers put conventional journal articles into open access online archives).
He says the RCUK is not proposing to mandate that researchers publish in open access journals, merely that they provide open-access to their existing peer-reviewed articles.
Comment. Two quick replies. (1) The Royal Society, like so many others, misunderstands the draft RCUK policy. The policy mandates deposit on OA repositories, not submission to OA journals. Harnad's reply is on point. (2) The claim that OA archiving harms journal subscriptions has been answered many times, but the RS shows no sign of following the argument. There's evidence that deposits in OA repositories reduce a journal's downloads but no evidence that they reduce a journal's subscriptions. The RCUK policy protects journal subscripitions by not requiring deposit of the published version of an article but only the final version of the author's manuscript. It also allows publishers to impose an embargo on the OA edition if they wish. Some non-OA journals report that OA after a very short delay actually increases submissions and subscriptions. In physics, where OA archiving is most extensive and where high-volume OA archiving has coexisted with non-OA jornals for 15 years, journal publishers report no harmful effect on subscriptions. It's time to turn down the static, see what is being proposed, and take advantage of the benefits of OA for scientists as authors, scientists as readers, all who fund them, and all who benefit from their work.
Posted by
Peter Suber at 11/24/2005 08:37:00 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.
