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Who Owns Science?
immerrath writes "The New York Times has an article [Sorry, tomorrow's article, no Google link yet] on a movement that is rapidly gaining support in the scientific community: the Public Library of Science(PLoS). The founders, Nobel Laureate Harold Varmus, Stanford biologist Pat Brown and Berkeley Lab scientist Michael Eisen, argue that scientific literature cannot be privately controlled or owned by the publishers of scientific journals, and must instead be available in public archives freely accessible by anyone and everyone. This has very important implications for the fundamental principle that Science must transcend all economic, national and other barriers. For a while now, PLoS has been trying to get scientific journals to release the rights to scientific papers; many major journals have not complied -- in response, PLoS is starting PLoS-standard-compliant journals (for which they received a $9 million grant from the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation), to demonstrate the validity of the idea and persuade academic publishers to adopt the free access model. They even have a GPL-like open access Licence, and their journals have some very prominent scientists on the editorial board. Here is the text of an earlier Newsweek article about PLoS, and here is a Nature Public Debate explaining the issues. Michael Eisen received the 2002 Benjamin Franklin award for his work on PLoS. Don't forget to sign the PLoS open letter!"
New Premise in Science: Get the Word Out Quickly, Online
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By AMY HARMON
A group of prominent scientists is mounting an electronic challenge to the leading scientific journals, accusing them of holding back the progress of science by restricting online access to their articles so they can reap higher profits.
Supported by a $9 million grant from the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, the scientists say that this week they will announce the creation of two peer-reviewed online journals on biology and medicine, with the goal of cornering the best scientific papers and immediately depositing them in the public domain.
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By providing a highly visible alternative to what they view as an outmoded system of distributing information, the founders hope science itself will be transformed. The two journals are the first of what they envision as a vast electronic library in which no one has to pay dues or seek permission to read, copy or use the collective product of the world's academic research.
"The written record is the lifeblood of science," said Dr. Harold E. Varmus, a Nobel laureate in medicine who is serving as the chairman of the new nonprofit publisher. "Our ability to build on the old to discover the new is all based on the way we disseminate our results."
By contrast, established journals like Science and Nature charge steep annual subscription fees and bar access to their online editions to nonsubscribers, although Science recently began providing free electronic access to articles a year after publication.
The new publishing venture, Public Library of Science, is an outgrowth of several years of friction between scientists and the journals over who should control access to scientific literature in the electronic age. For most scientists, who typically assign their copyright to the journals for no compensation, the main goal is to distribute their work as widely as possible.
Academic publishers argue that if they made the articles more widely available they would lose the subscription revenue they need to ensure the quality of the editorial process. Far from holding back science, they say, the journals have played a crucial role in its advancement as a trusted repository of significant discovery.
"We have very high standards, and it is somewhat costly," said Dr. Donald Kennedy, the editor of Science. "We're dealing in a market whether we like it or not."
Science estimates that 800,000 people read the magazine electronically now, compared with 140,000 readers of the print version. Given the number of downloads at universities like Harvard and Stanford, which buy site licenses for about $5,000 a year, the magazine says people are reading articles for only a few cents each.
In many cases even such small per-article charges to access a digital database can make for substantial income. The Dutch-British conglomerate Reed Elsevier Group, the world's largest academic publisher, posted a 30 percent profit last year on its science publishing activities. Science took in $34 million last year on advertising alone.
But supporters of the Public Library of Science say the point is not how much money the journals make, but their monopoly control over literature that should belong to the public.
"We would be perfectly happy for them to have huge profit margins providing that in exchange for all this money we're giving them we got to own the literature and the literature did not belong to them," said Dr. Michael B. Eisen, a biologist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and the University of California, and a founder of the Public Library of Science.
When scientists relied on print-and-paper journals to distribute their work, the Library's supporters argue, it made sense to charge for access, since each copy represented an additional expense. But they say that at a time when the Internet has reduced distribution costs to almost zero, a system that grants journals exclusive rights over distribution is no longer necessary.
By publishing on the Internet and forgoing any profits, the new venture says it is now possible to maintain a high-quality journal without charging subscription fees.
Continued
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Forum: Join a Discussion on Science in the News
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Did This Man Just Rewrite Science? (June 11, 2002) $
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A Man Who Would Shake Up Science; Physicist Says He's Explained The Way Nature Operates (May 11, 2002) $
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Cool, but useless.
Many authors of scientific papers, at least in Physics, Math, and CS are making preprints available for free on arXiv.org. This is a great site, and as a fellow scientist, I for one would like to see more authors do this and make their knowledge accessible to those who don't want to feed greedy journal publishers.
-- Samir Gupta, Ph. D. Head, New Technology Research Group, Nintendo Co. Ltd., Kyoto, Japan.
This is exactly the kind of stuff being done today up at Dartmouth College. The fMRI Data Center is home to a public data warehouse of MRI scans. Publishing research involves more than just glossy pictures and a paper, the actual data should be shared to allow others to repeat the experiment.
The community has not yet decided if this is a good idea but they will come around.
I keep abreast of current science using http://xxx.lanl.gov
Articles show up in the ePrint archive often 6 months before they shows up in the journals.
Don't forget, this $1500 fee, which might just seem a tad expensive to labs in North America, is oftentimes backbreaking to struggling third-world labs. Science has already strayed from discovery to business. The last thing we need is financial discrimination to totally exclude certain sections of the scientific community.
Very few journals make a profit
Actually, academic journals used to make small profits until the mid-1980s, when a wave of consolidations changed this entirely. In fact, last time I looked into this (a few years back) the profits of academic journal publishing divisions had been rising steadily and well above inflation.
A typical journal article is paid for by the investigators to cover costs of printing.
Wrong again. Depends very much on the area. Math and computer science are not this way. Physics is about half and half, with some journals being free, others charging above a certain number of pages, and lastly others charging a per-page fee.
Maybe, maybe not. In any event, in many fields of science, the investigator already pays. That's right -- for some journals, the author pays to publish, the subscriber pays to receive, and the journal holds the copyright! When I was a grad student, way back in the early 1990s, Astrophysical Journal charged about $100 per page.
The Mongrel Dogs Who Teach
Those that would steal their hard work because "Science is for everyone" doesn't quite grasp the concept of the reward system.
Someone doesn't understand the concept of the academic reward system, all right. Unfortunately, that person is you.
1) Scientists (and other academics) get their rewards (tenure, grants, etc.) by publishing material so that others can build on it, not by hoarding it or selling it for large amounts of money. That's how academia works.
2) Academics almost never get any money from journal articles. In fact, some journals CHARGE THE ACADEMIC FOR PRINTING THEM.
In the past, journals were expensive for a legitimate reason: printing a small press run (and let's face it, most academic journals have circulations measured in the hundreds or low thousands) resulted in a very high unit cost.
Now, with online publishing, there's no reason for this, yet the journal publishers are still charging exorbitant fees to their subscribers.
Academic publishing isn't anything like commercial fiction or non-fiction publishing, sorry. It's an entirely different business model.
If you have a vision of some guy doing neurobiology becoming the next Tom Clancy, you're just wrong.
I sent more or less this as a reply to the editorial board of the New York Times earlier today:
You had a feature describing the reality of scientific publishing today.
As a scientist I can unfortunatey inform you that it was nowhere near
the actual situation today.
This is the typical sequence of events for a scientific publication:
1) We do science. This is sort of a basic prerequisite for anything else
to happen. It is also usually funded directly by the public, or
indirectly funded by various foundations. This part - which by many is
seen as our core competency - is largely funded by public institutions.
2) We try to publish. Now, here is the problem: We try to publish in the
most 'prestigious' journals that we can. Why? Because the number of
papers that we publish - and the importance of the journals that we
publish in - is absolutely critical to our future careers. And our
carreers is rather important to things like money for food, clothes to
our children and so on. There is no certainty in the academic world
apart from the one that expounds that few papers = few citations = no
future. Of course, having a lot of papers in prestigious journals
guarantees nothing except a greater chance of being noticed.
3) So, our important paper has been sent away - in some cases with a $10
charge (or more) per page. This paper is immediately sent on to the editors. Who
are the editors? Why, our own colleagues. The very act of being an
editor for any publication is still regarded as being important. In no
case is either the author nor editor compensated for anything-
4) Now, after several rounds between us, the editor and the reviewers
(who, like the editor, are doing the work for free), the paper is
finallyu ready for publication. Observe that not only is the content
finalized, but the entire typographical layout has been perfected by the
very same authours that are being paid by the university (ie. either a
private grant or by the public) to do research, but are now spending a
month of their time making usre their manuscript is conforming to the
smallest detail to the publications' standards.
4.5) As a small addendum, the authors are requested to sign a form
agreeing to the publication actually publishing the paper in question.
The researchers, having little choice, sign it.
5) Finally, the paper is out. It appears, formated exactly as the
researchers did it, in the next 'issue'. The number of 'issues' is equal
to the number of research libraries prepared to pay $5000 or more for
four issues of maybe four or five of these papers a year.
These publications pay nothing for the content (the researchers
sometimes evan pay cash to get content into them), editing (it is done
for free by otherresearchers) or typesetting (as it is done by the
researchers themselves). The total work for these publishers is
maximally in one half-time secretarial position to connect papers with
appropriate editors and reviewers. Yet they charge $5000 per year (or
more - sometimes much more) for four issues - or more than $10 per page -
for the very same results that the univerities, and, in the end, the
public, has paid for being conducted in teh first place.
6) So, even with this gouging, our researcher and her doctoral students
have at least a good publictaion to their name? Well, no. It turns out
that the to publish the rsults, the publishing company actually owns the
text of the paper. The doctoral students can not use the text they have
written as part of their theses. The people that have done the research
- and that want only to spread the results to their colleagues - do no
longer own their own text. Only with permission - and with a great deal
of money - may they actually use their own text in other situations,
like on the web or in their onwn theses.
The end result is that the authors do all the preparatorial work, using the publics' money; the editors and reviewers does their work using the publics money, and som printer somewhere prints a few hundred copies of the publication for a standard (low) fee. Meanwhile the company owning the publication retains the ownership of the papers and $5000 minus the printing cost of one (out of a few hundred (at the max)) printed copies of the journal.
Hell yes, I'd be delighted with being in a business with a 20000% profit margin...
Trust the Computer. The Computer is your friend.
I think (and hope) that this will continue to take off and become more and more complete.
One exists, and is surprisingly very good.
http://www.scirus.com/
At least for CS (and related) papers, citeseer does a very good job. http://citeseer.nj.nec.com/cs
As one of the organizers of Public Library of Science, I'd like to respond.
From the outside, $1500 per article may seem like a lot. If you think of this as individual researchers digging into their own pockets to pay to publish the results of their research, sound a bit unreasonable. But that is not what we are proposing.
The reality is that it costs money to provide the services that authors expect from a top scientific journal: rigorous peer-review, editorial oversight, and high production standards. We (the scientific community and the institutions, funding agencies and taxpayers that support us) are already paying journals to provide this service - total annual expenditures on scientific journals are well in excess of $1 billion per year.
We are asking the funding agencies, universities and research institutions that support our work to recognize that the costs of publication are a fundamental part of the scientific research process. If they committed to directly paying journals to provide peer-review, editorial oversight and production (rather than indirectly as they do now) the latest scientific discoveries could be made freely available online to every scientist and physician or interested citizen in the world in comprehensive, searchable open archives of the scientific literature.
There is a growing consensus in the community that this is a sensible model (it is supported by the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and several major universities including the University of California and Harvard).
The system of giving away the copyrights to the original research reports and then paying to access them is woefully anachronistic. It costs more and it effectively deprives most of the world - including the people whose taxes paid for the research in the first place - from having any meaningful access to the results.
You are right to be concerned that $1500 is a steep price to pay for a student, or a scientist from a small university or poor country. We never want our publication charges to be a barrier to publication, and will publish any paper that our editors and reviewers deem to be appropriate for the journals, either by significantly reducing or waiving the charges. In addition, organization like the Soros Open Society Institute, are providing funds to help offset the costs of publication for scientists from developing countries.
I should also note that we expect the costs to decline significantly over time, as automated methods for peer-review develop, and as authors start to more widely use tools that allow for automatic conversion of documents to XML and properly formatted XML. In the end, the remaining costs will be primarily for editorial oversight, and authors will be able to choose the level that is appropriate for their work.
Your concern about conflicts of interest are unwarranted. There were certainly be journals that will, for a fee, publish anything that is sent to them. These already exist. However, nobody will want to publish their works in these journals since the citation will carry no significance. Why pay to publish in a journal that publishes anything when you can just post the article on the web for free? Many journals will still have a tremendous incentive to maintain high editorial standards, because this is something that scientists value.
Finally, you are correct that in fields like mathematics, computer science and physics, many works are already freely available. This, however, isn't true in biology and medicine, and thus initiatives like this are essential.
In fact, for most reputable journals, researchers have to pay a fee to the journal just to submit a research study for consideration of it being published. Researchers receive no discounts on subscription or money from journals for publishing (it's not like they're submitting jokes to reader's digest...)