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."
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
I think that author pays will be the dominant model in the future. In addition to the economic benefits, I think this model has the potential to produce higher quality science, or at least stem the tide of mediocre papers which are submitted over and over again to different places. Of course, this model places a lot more importance on the integrity of the participants, but this is not a new problem for scientists. We have disreputable scientists and disreputable journals now.
In Soviet America the banks rob you!
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.
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.
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.
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.
"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 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.