Open Access News

The notion that scientists ‘donate’ their research articles to journals is one that seems fairly widespread...It is an interesting notion indeed, this laudable collective philanthropy. Scientists usually do not expect royalties from journal articles. Two, closely related, questions arise: why do they donate to journals, and why do they not expect royalties? Are they truly that unselfishly concerned with journals?...

Or are they not donating to publishers, but to the world? How can that be a problem? To my knowledge there is not a scientific journal publisher in the world who would dream of standing in the way of a researcher donating his or her research to the world. Publishers are simply not involved if researchers just get on with donating, for instance by publishing their article freely available on the web, such as I’m doing now with this blog entry.

But perhaps it’s not that simple. Research donated that way may not be taken that seriously by the world. And particularly not by tenure-committees and the like. Unless, of course, it has the formal imprimatur of a peer-reviewed journal. In science, publishers are not, strange as it may sound, needed so much for publishing per se. But they are for formal publishing. The formal publishing process makes a potentially worthwhile article an actually valuable one. That’s the added value of publishing....

“We don’t need publishers to keep the peer-reviewed journals going” is a sentiment often expressed, “because we do all the work, such as peer review, ourselves anyway”. The story of the midwife comes to mind. Publishers are no more than the ‘midwife’ in the publishing process. Mark Patterson of PLoS used this analogy to great effect in a few recent presentations, when he pointed out that it would be absurd if the midwife were to restrict access to the child. He’s right. But without stretching the analogy too far, we do need and use the services of midwives widely....Midwives need sustenance, and so do publishers. Those who believe they can do it all themselves, without sustenance, ought to do it all themselves, without sustenance. But please, do make it more than a short-lived hobby-of-the-day. For the sake of science.

Comments. Four quick thoughts.

• Scholars do donate their articles to journals in the sense that they willingly publish in journals without expecting to be paid. Journals do not buy their articles or pay royalties. But this doesn't mean that scholars "are unselfishly concerned with journals" let alone that they believe journals add no value. As Jan says, scholars publish in journals for the sake of the enhancement or added value. These observations are utterly consistent and there's no reason to see any tension between them.
• I've never denied that journals add value. To me the question is not whether a journal's enhancements to a raw manuscript are valuable but how to pay for the most essential enhancements without creating access barriers for readers. The most essential enhancement is peer review. (Prestige is a side-effect of peer review by an editorial board with a reputation for rigor and selectivity.)
• I've always liked the PLoS midwife analogy. Midwives perform a valuable service and deserve to be paid for it. But they shouldn't be allowed to keep the baby or to control everyone else's access to it.
• Jan is right that authors can donate their work to the world, bypassing publishers, and no publishers will interfere with them. For now, authors and publishers see a mutual interest in working together. In the age of the internet, however, authors can do without publishers much more easily than publishers can do without authors. But authors still want the enhancements that publishers have to offer. The challenge to publishers is to provide these enhancements and the benefits of the internet, including open access. Right now, scholars themselves provide the key enhancement of peer review, though they do it with the mediation of publishers. If publishers cannot rise to the challenge, scholars will realize that they can provide the same enhancement without the mediation of publishers. If Jan's only objection to this scenario is that scholars shouldn't do it as a hobby, but find some way to make it sustainable, then we agree in full.