Slashdot Mirror
Wellcome Trust to Require Open-Access Publishing
Lars Arvestad writes "The Wellcome Trust, one of the worlds largest research funding agencies, will require results from research funded by the Trust to be available in public repositories six months after publication. The Trust's policy advisor Robert Terry writes in
an article in PLoS Biology that the Trust plans to start its own public access repository where authors are expected to deposit their published works. The repository is modeled after NLM's PubMed Central and is called UKPMC. Terry's article also mentions that a recent Wellcome report found that an author-pays business model has the opportunity for a saving of 30 % on publishing costs alone compared to reader-pays. This contrasts the recent IEEE report (Slashdot story last week) where it was claimed that some universities will face higher costs using author-pays."
I am not sure what is the best answer.
Maybe differtent strokes for different folksis the way to go.
What is undeniably good is that people are trying to do something about access to the information and the cost of accessing it.
The Singularity is closer than you think
Quant
In the last year, I've had several incidents where I needed to access old articles from the Nature, the ACM, and IEEE. (old = 2, 4, and 33 years old respectively). Let me tell you, there is NOTHING more infuriating than not being able to access these when you need them. Bugmenot helps some, but not always.
To make laws that man cannot, and will not obey, serves to bring all law into contempt.
--E.C. Stanton
Depending on what the cost is, this could lock out the less well-funded scientific research.
I can see the 'published research' model being misused by the drug companies in that all they have to do is spam the repository with studies saying the cigarettes and cellphones aren't that bad for you, drowning out the studies which say otherwise.
In Astronomy, all the major US journals are author pays. We also have a preprint server that is free that most astronomers post their articles to (except for Nature articles because Nature won't let them). The one problem I have with author pays is that you have to come up with the grant funding, and a lot of the grant funding is project specific, so if you do a side project that isn't funded (something real common when working with students), you've got to get creative and beg, borrow, or steal the funding to pay for it. For instance, I had a 29 page paper as a grad student that didn't fall under my advisor's grants, and had to beg from department sources (finally getting the $4000 I needed from our observatory budget).
Professor of Astronomy, Author of Spider Star & Star Dragon (Tor)
Ultimately, the best thing that could happen to research publications is to separate the peer review process from the publishing process. This would facilitate "just-in-time" publishing while maintaining the credentials for a peer-accepted work. Then, other interested parties can download the paper and read it from their computers, or print it out to a hardcopy (as school libraries might do).
Yes, it takes the whole aspect of "profit" out of the equation, but this is science, not entertainment.
Things like this are the best way to force open access for scientific publications.
Why is this such an important thing?
Imagine the follwing business plan:
1) Make people PAY to incorporate their computer programs into your project.
2) Make people give you their copyrights to accept their program into your project.
3) Make people contributing code to your project also debug other peoples code. For free.
4) Profit!
Who would put up with such a kwaaazy system? We scientists. Why do we put up with this exploitation? Because we have no other choice if we want to remain competitive.
However, if there is enough external pressure for the system to change, it will.
You think I'm a Krazy Krackpot? I present you with the following:
1) My lab publishes ~ 2-3 papers a year, in journals like Biochemistry and J. Biol. Chem. It costs us ~ $2,000/publication.
2) Although we PAY the pulishers money, we still give them full copyright. (Recall: we formatted, created graphics and edited the documents).
In case you are worrying about the poor publishers, remember the following:
1) Few people read printed journals these days, most download the articles in PDF format. How much can that cost?
2) The process of editing and reviewing papers is done by other scientists, such as myself - for FREE.
Let's hope the trend is towards liberating the information that is paid for by taxpayers.
I think, therefore I thought.
Maybe it's time for the Slashdot editors to learn english! The wellcome trust!? I think it's ti...oh...what? That's how you really spell it? Oops...
(Laugh, because you know it went through your mind too.)
Real programmers can write assembly code in any language. -- Larry Wall
There's been a lot of discussion at Lambda the Ultimate about the relationship of publishing and scientific organsiations like the ACM to the interests of the theoretically switched-on hacker community. See, eg. this thread on Journals and Papers.
= internet?
A shame it's not as organised as a library and so of course this is a good idea.
A blog I run for the wealth
One of the things I really like about PLoS (Public Library of Science) is that they don't just make their articles free to access, they actually release them all under the Creative Commons license. You can do pretty much anything you want with released content, including derivative works and commercial use, so long as you give the original author credit.
Hopefully the new repository that the Wellcome Trust is setting up will use something similar.
Nice Troll... I'll bite.
From their "About Us" page:
The Wellcome Trust is an independent charity funding research to improve human and animal health.
Established in 1936 and with an endowment of around £10 billion, it is the UK's largest non-governmental source of funds for biomedical research.
As a privately endowed charity, we are independent from governments, from industry and from donors.
The governing document of the Wellcome Trust is its constitution. This represents an updated version of the will of Sir Henry Wellcome, through which the Wellcome Trust was established in 1936. Ultimate responsibility for our activities lies with our Board of Governors.
RTFA - The Wellcome Trust is actually spelt that way.
This is an unalloyed Good Thing.
Wellcome do a lot of good medical research and this is the best way to make it useful to us all.
Something along these lines is inevitable. Historically, journals provided certain services to academics that made their lives easier - professional document preparation, distribution, and quality control. To do this they relied on an equal relationship with the community - peer review involves a hell of a lot of work on the part of academics, which is "unpaid" (though certainly part of the job). Technology has completely changed this balance - we can prepare and publish our own documents; we can distribute them amongst our peers for review. The position of journals now is merely brokers of reputation, but we can figure that out for ourselves too. They are basically parasites these days, and while they are fighting all the way, the power does not lie with them. Still, they're being a little more graceful than the entertainment industry, I'm yet to see a scientist sued for distributing pdf's of their work.
Hopefully the author pays thing isn't run like the crooked 'we will publish you' sci fi ripoffs out there.
The big question to ask is, "Who is the customer?" If the customer is the author, rather than the reader, the publisher bends over backward to make sure the author is happy. Want happy authors? Publish any drivel they spew.
I got my Linux laptop at System76.
"Terry's article also mentions that a recent Wellcome report found that an author-pays business model has the opportunity for a saving of 30 % on publishing costs alone compared to reader-pays."
Some papers take it to the ultimate level. The IOVS (and ophthalmology research paper, huge readership) figured out how to mix all models.
- The reader pays, subscription is compulsory if you are a member of the international society of ophthalmic research.
- The paper is full of advertisements
- It's peer revieved, revievers get nothing
- Authors pay for publication (and the paper puts a footnote for each article, indicating that since the author paid, the article legally is paid advertisement), colour pictures are extra.
- Authors also assign copyright to the paper (don't know the exact terms).
So, the best of all worlds: author, reader, advertiser - they all pay!
3: Profit!!!
The scientific publishing industry isn't bending over backwards to make anyone happy (except their accountants of course).
Your idea is cute and all, but they stick it to both authors and readers.
Readers have to pay exhorbitant fees, as much as $40 for 5 days of access to a single article (that's just my discipline). The only way to get affordable access to these discplines is for libraries to band together and get big group package deals.
And authors have to pay to publish their own papers, which are already prepared according to strict formatting guidelines. Their reviewers aren't paid either.
So publishing houses are getting cash from both ends and in this era of paper-less publication have fewer and fewer BrickNMortar costs per issue sold.
For biology, this arcane system is a leftover from the early 70's when this was the only way to make money on biological research (Genentech, the first biotech was founded in '76). Only journals (and a few suppliers) used to earn money on biology research.
It is interesting to note that taxpayers pay for (most) research which is then published in journals. The journals then retain the copyrights to the research. As someone else pointed out, publishing in JBC costs $2000 (I can verify this personally). The best part is, the NIH paid me to do research, and then paid again for someone else to take the copyright to this taxpayer-funded research. Amazing!
There has already been an initiative from the NIH that NIH-supported research be freely accessible after 6 months.
For a directory of Open Access journals go to: http://www.doaj.org/
The inevitable change in scientific peer-reviewed publishing will have a major impact on professional scientific organizations such as The American Chemical Society, American Association of Immunology, Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology - just to name a few.
These non-profit organizations enjoy significant cash flow and influence in their field from the current system.
Many of these organizations are mired in bureaucracy and petty internal politics. I predict history will repeat itself and they will act like the RIAA, the movie industry and other large organizations, and attempt (and fail) to avoid fundamental change when it stares them in the face.
This is sad because if one of the major professional scientific societies led the way, eventually everyone would eventually benefit.
The issue with Author pays type systems are that when you start a lab, you have a small startup budget, from which you pay for equipment, consumables, staff, etc. You are then expected to bootstrap your research programme, go out, and get grants to continue its existance.
,that the paper journal is an anachronism, and we'll just nicely format everything for printing in PDF, and move to virtual journals hosted by a distributed network of NSF funded sites. It would be easy to add to the stipulations in the grant process that a university of > N scientists will host a publication repository built along bittorrent lines. Authors will publish to a 'journal', and you'll receive a notice by email that a new 'issue' is available, but it will exist entirely in the ether, where you can read it there, or print it out later, if you're more traditionally minded.
So far, so good, except that you need publications to get the grants, and it's possible that publishing those papers is going to prevent you from having the resources to actually do the research. A couple $4K papers on a theorist startup budget, and I'm out of business.
It may be time to admit, in an era of cheap desktop publishing
Of course, we could also admit that maybe there are just too many scientists out there, everything we need to know has already been discovered, and downsize the great hordes before they discover something else that's going to challenge some long-cherished, utterly wrong, belief.
the more accurate the calculations became, the more the concepts tended to vanish into thin air. R. S. Mulliken
The way to solve this whole problem is that whoever's name is on the copyright notice is the one that pays the cost of publication. If the magazine wants to own the copyright, it cannot charge the author; it can only charge if the author retains all rights. This will solve the problem nicely.
The lessons of history teach us - if they teach us anything - that nobody learns the lessons that history teaches us.
I say GO to such efforts. The more information is out there, the better.
There's a great description about the Wellcome Trust in The Backroom Boys. They helped ensure that the human genome was sequenced properly and that the information remained in the public domain.
Even in groups like the one I work in, it's sad how few of the protein structures and Open Reading Frames are still unpublished, years after the work was essentially complete.
Those groups committed to publishing all their work still have a hard time depositing half the work done after four years, partially due to constraints in fully documenting the ORF and it's Structure, but the goal is good from my viewpoint.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
Why shouldn't these publishers charge universities, research institutions and corporations for subscriptions? Even if the general public gets free access? Those orgs use the research to make billions of dollars in profits, subsidized by the rest of the system. What's a few thousand bucks a year, atop the millions spent consuming the research? Even the free access for the rest of us comes back to them, in general consciousness raising (which fertilizes the scene for more results) and educating people who those orgs recruit. Follow the money, and get these profitable corporations to kick back some money to sustain the academic environment on which they depend.
--
make install -not war
The costs associated with publication, even for author pays, are still not zero. You need to write and maintain the software. You need to get editors. You need to get peer reviewers. You need secretaries to organise the reviews.
This costs are not insignificant.
Besides which, in many areas, which are conference paper based rather than journal based, you already have this problem. I work on a budget of around $2000 per publication (for costs, not for the research which is obviously much greater).
Phil
---The journals then retain the copyrights to the research---
It depends on where you publish. Many journals, like those in the Nature Publishing Group, leave the copyright with the author.
um, i was being sarcastic...
I posted a story on this to LtU.
Greg's wiki page is at Logic Books at print.google.com page.
Only a tiny fracton of the costs ( less than one tenth) of producing a journal have actually to do with printing and distribution. Most of the cost is in the production and review. That is already paid for by a combination of the researchers, their research grants and their university departments. So journals are getting articles for free, which are then edited and peer reviewed for free. Then the journals collect 10, 15, or even 20 thousand dollars per subscription per year for the finished product.
In some ways, the researchers and their institutions get re-paid for their contributions. The researchers can only advance in their field or career if they publish successful journal articles (no books). The institutions benefit from and gain status from having successful researchers. But that doesn't mean that it's either appropriate or sustainable for journals to gouge prices like they have been. However, there has to be a better way to deal with the money. (Yes there are some journals that don't gouge.)
Maintaining electronic journals costs money. That kind of infrastructure is, compared to paper, expensive and difficult to maintain. And, unlike paper, if you miss a step, it's all gone. I suppose that task and money could be federated to various archives and university libraries.
Beta is broken and the link to classic doesn't work. Stop wasting our time or there won't be anybody left here.