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SCIENTIFIC RESEARCH: THE PUBLICATION DILEMMA By
Victoria Shelton,
Scholarly communication is an essential part of the scientific
research process. Not only scientists want to disseminate the results of
their work to the public and their peers but they also need to ensure that
their research findings are original.
While the highlights of scientific discoveries are often described
in mass media, the details of the research studies are largely reported
through journal articles, which make up the bulk of scholarly publishing.
Under the prevailing subscription-based
system, commercial publishers own a monopoly over the distribution
of scientific research. They charge authors for the publication of their
works, then charge the readers subscription, advertising, and online
access fees; in addition they retain the copyright of the articles they
publish. Consequently, though the vast majority of the scientific
research is publicly financed by taxpayers dollars, access to research is
not freely and publicly available: it is restricted to customers who can
afford to pay for subscription. In
the past few years, the escalating cost of journals has forced many
individuals and institutions to cancel their subscriptions, thus excluding
large parts of the scientific community from scholarly interaction
especially in the developing countries.
Until recently, many publishers and researchers believed that there
was no better way to disseminate research findings; but in the late 1990s
a few initiatives began exploring the alternatives to
traditional subscription-based standards, launching the idea of a
new publishing model -- Open Access. OPEN
ACCESS: WHAT IS IT?
The open access movement began in the late 1990s in
biomedical sciences as a response to increasing journal cost, which
priced many individual and institutional subscribers out of access to the
latest research studies. Open access means that full-text of scientific
papers are available online as soon as they are published, free of charge,
with no restrictions on access or use. The idea of open access is based on
the view that research findings, particularly in health sciences, should
be freely and immediately available to the world-wide scientific
community, clinicians, and the public. “Timely
access to a broad range of current scientific publications is a
necessity…for both our clinicians, so that they may care for patients
with the most up-to-date data, as well as our scientists who are making
the breakthroughs in such areas as cancer, infectious, cardiovascular and
neurological diseases,” said Dr. Dorothy Bainton, vice chancellor of
academic affairs at University of California at San Francisco. OPEN ACCESS BUSINESS MODEL:
HOW IT WORKS?
According to the Association of Research
Libraries, open access “refers
to works that are created
with no expectation of direct monetary return and made available at no
cost to the reader on the public internet for purposes of education and
research." While
open access publications are intended to be free for readers, they are not
free for producers. Open access challenges the traditional
subscription-based publishing model by offering an alternative -- an
article processing fee. Instead of charging subscribers, the open access
publishers cover the cost of peer review and publication by charging
authors, or research sponsors, for each article they publish which can be
paid by authors or via their institute’s membership (for example,
PLoS initially charges authors a processing fee of $1,500 per
accepted article.) OPEN
ACCESS LEADERS
There are two initiatives that are in the center of the open
access movement: BioMed
Central and the Public Library of
Science. BioMed
Central (BMC), a UK based publishing house, provides immediate and
open access to full-text of research articles published in its 90+ online
journals covering all areas of biology and medicine. The BMC’s
commitment to open access, as stated on the BMC website, is based on the
premise that “open access to research is central to rapid and efficient
progress in science and that subscription-based access to research is
hindering rather than helping scientific communication.” Once published
in BMC journals all articles are indexed in PubMed, and, where
appropriate, in BIOSIS, ISI,
and other databases. The articles are also archived in PubMed Central, and
deposited in CrossRef. Because
of an effective online system for submission, peer reviewing, and
publication, all papers become rapidly available for a worldwide
scientific audience. Following
the lead of BMC in the open access movement, the Public
Library of Science (PLoS), a California non-profit group of
bioscientists formed in 2000, has decided to publish two online
peer-reviewed journals funded by a $9 million grant
from the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation. The
first issue of PLoS Biology, published on October 13, 2003, has been a
success and received more than half million hits throughout the world
within a few hours after publication. In the first issue of PLoS Biology,
Duke University researchers Miguel Nicoleis and Jose Carmena, publicized
their research findings about how they had trained monkeys with brain
implants to move a robot arm with their thoughts, a discovery which might
one day allow paraplegics to perform similar functions. “Nothing else
has ever argued so strongly for open-access publishing,” said Michael
Eisen, a co-founder of PLoS. In
addition to publishing research material, PLoS Biology summarized the main
points of each article in order to make it easy to read for a
non-specialist reader. The founders of PLoS, Michael Eisen,
a biologist at Lawrence
Berkeley National Laboratory, a Nobel laureate, Harold Varmus, and Patrick
Brown, a biochemist at Stanford
University, stated that their “intention is to do something that
fundamentally changes the way scientific research is communicated.” If
open access succeeds, they continued, “everyone with an internet
connection will be a click away from a comprehensive online public library
of scientific and medical knowledge.” There are a few other open access projects that deserve special attention: PubMed Central, a digital repository at the National Institutes of Health, that aims to provide open access to the full text of all peer-reviewed articles in life sciences; the Budapest Open Access Initiative; and the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC). The latter two, in addition to publishing open-access journals, also promote self-archiving by institutions. OPEN
ACCESS AND COPYRIGHT ISSUES
In June 2003, Martin Sabo, a Minnesota
congressman, introduced a bill, entitled the Public
Access to Science Act. The bill addresses several contemporary
controversies in scientific publishing including copyright to published
research material.
According to Sabo’s bill, the works resulting from scientific research
substantially funded by the government, would be excluded from copyright
protection and become public domain. Since scientific research is largely
funded by tax dollars, Sabo said, the results of research should be freely
and immediately available to taxpayers who ultimately pay for conducting
research. Sabo’s
bill poses a direct challenge to large commercial publishers. Under the
established system, most scientific journals own the copyrights to
research papers they publish. Authors traditionally assign copyright to
the publisher, which means that they cannot freely distribute their works
or allow open access to them. Under Sabo’s bill, journals would not own
the papers they publish. Contrary
to commercial publishers, open access journals leave it up to authors to
decide whether they wish to retain the copyright or transfer copyright to
the author’s institution or to the open access publisher. “But no
matter who owns the copyright,” states the PLoS’s website, “authors
will be required to grant to the public domain an irrevocable license to
print, copy, or use the work in any lawful way.” THE FUTURE OF OPEN ACCESS
Though some
publishers are sympathetic to open access initiatives, only a few of them
are willing to experiment with a new business model. Oxford
University Press (OUP) announced in June 2004 that the Nucleic
Acids Research (NAR), one of the most important OUP journals, will
adopt an open access publishing model starting in January 2005. "Open
Access is the future of scientific publication and one that we should all
work hard to make successful,” said Richard Roberts, a Nobel laureate,
Senior Editor for NAR. Springer,
a publisher of 1,250 scientific journals, has taken a step towards open
access by offering its authors the Springer
Open Choice model. Authors who select the Springer Open Choice can now
make their articles freely available online, yet by paying a considerable
fee of US$3,000 per article. Many open access advocates consider the traditional commercial publishing system obsolete and believe that the future of scholarly publishing belongs to open access. Yet, skeptics wonder whether open access journals will survive financially in the long term, since they charge relatively small article processing fees, paid upfront by researchers, instead of substantial fees for subscriptions. “…to attempt to legislate the demise of the time-honored subscription-based business model, prior to proving that another model works, does not seem wise,” stated Michael Held, the Executive Director of the Rockefeller University Press. Whether
open access publishers will succeed largely depends on whether their
journals can build the prestige and encourage scientists to publish their
research papers in an unproven journal instead of a traditional one. Gerry
Rubin, a prominent geneticist at the Howard
Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI), says that though the HHMI
encourages its researchers to publish in open access journals “they are
not yet ready to make open access an obligation, partly because there are
not yet enough high quality Open Access journals.”
LIBRARIES
AND OPEN ACCESS
While
open access advocates and their opponents are waiting to see how the new
publishing model develops, academic libraries are struggling to fulfill
their primary mission during the “serials crisis” -- to provide access
to information. On one side, open access will certainly benefit many
academic libraries with limited budgets, which have been forced to cancel
some of the expensive science journals.
On the other side, libraries are unlikely to drop the most
important subscriptions because of the value and utility of traditional
scientific journals. As
seen from the viewpoint of a science librarian, it now becomes
increasingly important that librarians and faculty work cooperatively on
developing library collections. Collaborative collection development is
the most effective way to build a balanced science collection because both
professionals – a scientist and information specialist - bring to their
partnership the unique competencies, skills, and knowledge. GEORGE
MASON UNIVERSITY SUPPORTS OPEN ACCESS
In summer 2003, George Mason
University, along with other prominent institutions around the world
has joined in the BioMed Central
membership program. The Institutional Membership waives the $525
publishing fee for all GMU researchers.
Don Seto, an Associate Professor at the School of Computational
Sciences (SCS), who has published his papers in BMC journals and reviewed
BMC manuscripts, says: "Membership in BioMed Central supports the new
generation of research publications and exchange of information. “
Another SCS researcher, an Associate Professor Iosif
Vaisman , notes that BMC is a conceptually new model of publishing
and distribution, which will become much more prominent in the future.
“Thank you very much for securing the institutional access to BMC, “
said Dr. Vaisman. “I hope many of us will benefit from the access to BMC." In
2004, GMU has joined the network of Public
Library of Science (PloS) members to support the transition to open
access publishing. GMU
authors receive discounts on publication charges of $1500 per article. References:
Keay
Davidson. Bay Area lead revolt against scientific journals. San
Francisco Chronicle: October 27, 2003, p. 44. Michael
Eisen. Publish and be praised: Why it’s high time the results of
scientific research were freely available to everyone? The
Guardian: October 9, 2003, Science Pages: p.6. Michael
J. Held. Proposed legislation supports an untested publishing model. The
Journal of Cell Biology:
v. 162 (2), 2003: 171-172. OUP takes a bold step following
its Open Access experiment. Jonathan Weitzman. Traditional publisher experiments with Open Access. The Scientist: v. 17 (17), September 8, 2003: p. 35. |