Open Access News

This report discusses the possible consequences for German science and the larger societal context of the virtualisation of the scientific market. We define “virtualisation” as the use of new information and communication technologies to further advance what has been a millennia-old tradition of scientific cooperation and sharing among centres of learning and innovation. We also take it to mean the more intensive and ubiquitous use of joint datasets, models and methods, and the joint utilisation of experimental equipment....

The central research questions for our study were therefore the following: [1] How can the markets of virtual science be described? [2] Which indicators are needed to monitor virtualisation and its effects? [3] What are specific developments of markets for virtual science in Germany or in which German partners participate? [4] What are the drivers and barriers for the development of markets of virtual science?...

Based upon all of this work, we formulated recommendations for the Ministry of Education and Science and for other actors in the German scientific innovation system....

The knowledge produced by science does not always have an explicit or identifiable market price, but it definitely has economic value....Virtualisation as a technological and organisational innovation allows scientists to allocate production factors more efficiently, employ more advanced technologies, achieve economies of scale and scope, and produce new scientific products. To look at science as a market, we created a model of the scientific value chain...and assessed how virtualisation affects each of the individual stages of this value chain....

The aim of research policy should be to encourage the beneficial effects of virtualisation, while avoiding undesirable outcomes and harmful effects. This can be accomplished by the following policies:...

• Explicitly budget for the costs of publishing in public research funding. If the German government should decide to make the results of research funded with public money freely available, it will either have to negotiate terms with scientific publishers or require scientists to (also) publish their work in Open Access journals....
• There is reason to believe that the market will not provide a next-generation digital network that provides the same degree of accessibility and capacity to all research institutions throughout Germany. When left entirely to the market the costs of construction and access may be prohibitive, if only because the infrastructure would not be used to generate revenue and thus recover part of the costs. It is in the public interest to create a dense scientific network that links capabilities throughout Germany, provides scientists with top-of-the-range facilities, and connects science with industry and government. Public investments in and involvement with digital infrastructures are consequently justified.
• Invest in national databanks and promote free access, especially in frontier fields of science....

Virtualisation may entail commercialization and under commercial conditions access to knowledge may be restricted due to the need to recover costs and the incentive to make a profit.

Comments.

1. "If the German government should decide to make the results of research funded with public money freely available, it will either have to negotiate terms with scientific publishers or require scientists to (also) publish their work in Open Access journals...." This is incorrect. The German government can mandate OA to publicly-funded research without negotiating terms with publishers and without requiring publication in OA journals. It merely has to mandate deposit in OA repositories and make clear that the mandate only applies to the author's final version of the peer-reviewed manuscript, not to the published edition.
2. BTW, Germany's Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG), the country's largest public funder of research, has already decided to make the results of DFG-funded research freely available online. (See my short article on it in SOAN for April 2, 2006.) The German Bundesrat is also considering a bill that would permit author-initiated OA archiving six months after publication regardless of publisher wishes and regardless of the contract the author may have signed with the publisher. (See my short article on it in SOAN for 6/2/06.)
3. Section 4.7 (pp. 38ff) of the report is devoted to an analysis of OA itself especially in comparison with non-OA and is full of misconceptions, e.g. that all OA journals charge author-side fees, that non-OA journals have a stronger incentive for long-term archiving than OA journals (the reverse is true), and that OA doesn't scale as well as non-OA (again, the reverse is true).