Publish Free or Perish [Sci Amer]
Life scientists are urging publishers to grant free access to archived
research articles
When a molecular biologist or a biochemist has made a discovery–often after
many months or even years of tedious experiments—they tell the rest of the
world by publishing their results in a scientific journal. So far, these journals
have controlled who can read them and who cannot—but maybe not for much
longer.
E-mail, Internet discussion groups, electronic databases and pre- or e-print
servers have already transformed the way scientists openly exchange their
results. And in the life sciences, researchers are now demanding that their work
be included in at least one free central electronic archive of published literature,
challenging the traditional ownership of publishers. The demand has sparked
widespread discussions among scientists, publishers, scientific societies and
librarians about the future of scientific publishing. The outcome may be nothing
short of a revolution in the scientific publishing world.
It all started last fall, when an advocacy group called the Public Library
of Science distributed an electronic open letter urging scientific publishers
to hand over all research articles from their journals to public online
archives for free within six months of publication. To add weight to their
demands, the authors threatened a boycott starting in September 2001,
pledging to "publish in, edit or review for, and personally subscribe to, only
those scholarly and scientific journals" that agreed. As of April 21, some
15,817 life scientists from 138 countries had signed the letter, among them
several Nobel laureates.
The authors of the letter feel they have every right to make these demands.
After all, it is the scientists who supply the journals with their products—the
manuscripts—for free. Scientists also help journals by reviewing and judging the
quality of each other’s work, a process called "peer review," without pay.
Publishers, in exchange, edit the articles, organize the review process and
provide news items and other content. Finally, they produce, market and
distribute a printed or electronic journal.
In the eyes of Michael Eisen, one of the initiators of the Public Library of
Science initiative, the work that publishers do, however, does not justify that
they then own the copyrights to the articles. "We think of the publishers as being
like a midwife," he says. "They are paid for their role, and at the end of the day,
they give the baby back to the parents."
Publishers argue that unless they own the copyright, they cannot protect articles
from misuse. And scientific publishing is big business: like other scientific
societies, the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS),
for example, finances most of its activities with income from its publication,
Science magazine. "I think scientists all over would be shocked to realize what
a phenomenally lucrative business scientific publishing can be," Nicholas
Cozzarelli, editor-in-chief of the Proceedings of the National Academy of
Sciences of the USA (PNAS), says. "There are huge sums of money to be had
in this field."
Journals Don't Play the Game
What urged the authors of the open letter into action was the slow progress of
PubMed Central, a free electronic full-text archive of research articles started
by the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) at the NIH in
early 2000. By storing articles in a common format on a single site, PubMed
Central wants to facilitate sophisticated literature searches—for instance, those
restricted to certain parts of a paper, such as the figure legends. Ultimately it
also wants to link the literature to other online databases.
PubMed Central asks journals to contribute their articles voluntarily as soon as
possible after publication—at most after a year—giving the journals time to
offer exclusive access to make a profit (studies have shown that the demand for
research papers decreases sharply after only a few months). But so far, only
seven journals, including PNAS and a collection of e-journals, are participating,
and a few additional journals have signed up. Even though some journals make
their back issues freely available at their own Web sites, they are reluctant to
give them away elsewhere. "Journals have just not wanted to play the game,"
Eisen says.
In physics, free electronic archives are old hat. Scientists have been submitting
their own research papers—both before and after publication—to the Los
Alamos e-print archive since 1991, without the participation of publishers,
which simply had to accept the practice. Yet the American Physical Society, for
example, still sells subscriptions to three journals that publish 14,000 research
articles a year.
Perhaps not surprisingly, though, many publishers, threatened with either
financial losses or a boycott, have been overtly hostile to the open letter. A
number of scientific societies depend on the income from their journals to
support their activities. But some scientists liken this system to a tax on their
papers and think societies should subsidize their activities in other ways.
Also, some journals worry that outside archives hosting their articles will
introduce errors into the files, lowering the reliability of the information. What if
a µg (microgram) suddenly becomes a mg (milligram)? PubMed Central actually
detected errors in some of the papers they were given, thereby increasing the
overall quality. "The more eyes to look at it and fingers trying to work with it,
the more things you can find," says David Lipman, director of the NCBI.
On another level, some publishers resent a central, NIH-run archive like
PubMed Central because they fear that technical failures would affect all users
at once, and because the government might impose restrictions in the future, for
example, by ruling not to publish certain kinds of research. On the other hand,
PubMed, another NIH-managed database that grants free access to references
and abstracts from 4,300 biomedical journals and links back to their Web sites,
has been extremely successful and popular among both scientists and
publishers.
Moreover, publishers point out that a commercial electronic archive, managed
by HighWirePress and including nearly 250 journals from many scientific
disciplines, already exists and that government money is wasted. Unlike access
to PubMed Central, however, most of the HighWire Press journals are not free.
As a group, commercial publishers appear unsure about the recent
developments and do not seem to have formulated their policies yet. Elsevier
Science, Nature Publishing Group (a sister company to Scientific American,
which is not a peer-reviewed journal), Cell Press and Academic Press declined
interview requests, and Springer Verlag, as well as Allen Press, did not return
phone calls. In a written statement, Annette Thomas, managing director of the
Nature Publishing Group, commented that "many complex issues have been
raised, and we are currently soliciting feedback from scientists, librarians, and
other interested parties."
Charging Authors, Not Readers
One of the main questions to come from the current controversy is, Who will
pay for publishing original research articles in the future if subscriptions decline?
Only a small fraction of the publication costs of a print journal—some estimate
as little as 10 percent—covers the editorial and peer review process. Many
journals produce a costly print edition and add news, review articles and other
valuable information, for which they have to pay. To offset their costs, journals
derive income largely from subscriptions, as well as from advertisements, both
in print and online, and reprints.
But since subscriber numbers may decrease if the access to journal information
becomes free elsewhere, various publishers are thinking about changing their
business model: instead of billing readers, they plan to bill authors, a practice
that is already common in the form of page charges. Overall, these submission
charges would amount to only a small fraction of a scientist's total research
costs, they say, and could easily be included in research budgets. Libraries,
freed from subscription charges, could also chip in on behalf of authors at their
institutions.
Publishers would make exceptions for researchers from poor countries to
ensure that no one is excluded for economic reasons. "We feel it is probably
a better system to put the charges on the authors than the other way round,"
says Peter Newark, editorial director at BioMed Central, a commercial publisher
from the U.K. But steep submission charges could steer budget-conscious
scientists away from these publications.
Many libraries seem to be in favor of open access archives like PubMed
Central. "I think these are important efforts, and the library community is very
supportive of them," says Joseph Branin, director of the Ohio State University
libraries. In recent years, rapidly rising subscription rates for scientific journals
have forced libraries to cancel many titles. Most of them now negotiate for
electronic access to large sets of journals in consortia, giving them greater
bargaining power.
If journal articles became freely available after a while, some libraries might stop
subscribing to them. But for many scientists, instant access to the literature is
crucial to keep up with current developments, so libraries will probably keep
subscribing to the most important titles. "Because it’s available freely over the
Internet after the first year of publication does not necessarily mean we are
going to cancel our subscriptions to those," Branin remarks. Smaller, specialist
journals, however, might be in danger of going out of business.
Libraries hope that subscription rates for the first few months—before free
access takes hold—will come down. But the opposite might be true: if many
libraries opted out, publishers might try to recover their costs from the remaining
ones. "And for those institutions, my own surely included, this free information
could be very expensive indeed," writes Ann Okerson, a librarian at Yale
University, in a contribution to a Nature Web debate. Scientists and libraries in
developing countries, which often cannot afford subscriptions, would probably
benefit most from free electronic archives.
A Possible Compromise on the Horizon
Come September, will the scientists who signed the open letter really go
through with a boycott? Journals depend on their authors, but equally,
researchers in the life sciences—especially young investigators—need to publish
in "brand name" journals, such as Cell, Nature and Science, to advance their
careers. "I can’t afford to boycott these journals because my career is not
established yet," says an assistant professor from a New York medical school,
who asked to remain unnamed. Nobel Prize winners, on the other hand, may
find it easier to divert their papers to less established publications.
One of the practical problems of a boycott would be providing enough
alternative journals for scientists to publish in. Some are thinking about starting
their own journals. In mathematics, for example, some editorial boards in
Europe have already left their commercial publishers and created new titles at
their own institutions. "They are finding that while it does cost money, the costs
are actually quite minimal," notes Mary Case of the Association of Research
Libraries. BioMed Central also offers to provide the logistics for scientists who
want to start their own journals.
That said, a possible compromise has recently appeared on the horizon: only
two weeks ago, PubMed Central announced it would allow participating publishers
to link back to their own Web sites, rather than insist that they display full-text
articles on the NIH server. PubMed Central would still obtain a full-text copy for
search purposes, but they would hide it from public view. Many publishers are currently
considering this solution. "I think lots of publishers will grant free access after a
period of time on the basis proposed in this compromise," says Donald
Kennedy, editor-in-chief of Science. He also thinks that "under those
circumstances, the threat of a boycott will vanish."
But for Eisen and many others, such an arrangement doesn't go far enough.
Eisen still wants to see free access to alternative archives as well: "I remain
absolutely convinced that the real future of publishing, five years out, is one in
which nobody controls the literature."
Whatever the outcome, the scientific publishing world is in turmoil. Both Nature
and Science have started e-debates on their Web sites, and contributions from
many sides are pouring in. "It [the open letter] was not an unreasonable
proposal," Kennedy comments. "It has gotten a good conversation started." In
the end, it will probably be the authors who decide the issue. As Case puts it,
"It is the scientists who are going to have to figure out how they want their work
to be available."—Julia Karow
sciam.com |
