[Insight-developers] OPEN ACCESS: Article in The Guardian

[Luis Ibanez]

http://education.guardian.co.uk/egweekly/story/0,,2011324,00.html


Open season for researchers


Pressure is growing for academic publishers to put the fruits of
publicly funded labour on the web

Jessica Shepherd
Tuesday February 13, 2007
The Guardian

"Ours is the best of businesses: we get our raw material for free and
our customers pay us a year in advance," joked the publisher of an
academic journal to a university researcher.

Perhaps not for much longer. Momentum is growing for publicly funded
published academic research to be available free on the internet.
So-called "open access" would mean anyone could view an article in a
scholarly journal shortly after it was published.

Most academic publishers are not pleased. This would sharply cut their
subscriptions, the "customers who pay a year in advance". Some even fear
it could make them bankrupt.

This week publishers, researchers and research funders from across
Europe will debate the issue in Brussels at a conference hosted by the
European commission.

"We are at tipping point," says Peter Burnhill, director of a national
data centre that serves UK universities and colleges. "There is a
movement towards open access and this conference, 'Scientific publishing
in the European research area', might make the difference."

Up until now, university libraries have subscribed to journals, giving
their academics access either online or in print. But libraries
increasingly do not have the funds or choose not to subscribe to certain
journals. Academics may therefore be unable to see research papers
crucial to their work. The general public, and even some academics, who
are not part of a university cannot see the fruits of publicly funded
published research without subscribing to journals.

Open access would change this. Its advocates propose two models. The
first is a system in which the author of an academic paper pays a
journal publisher for his or her peers to review the research, and for
the publishing team to edit the work and market the research. In
reality, it is not the academic who would pay but the organisation that
funds the research, such as the British Heart Foundation or a research
council. The Public Library of Science, the US-based publisher of
scientific and medical journals, announced it would adopt this model in
2002 to give its scientists more choice and control over the way their
work was published.

The second is a system in which an academic posts his or her research
paper on the university's database - known as a repository - for all
academics and the general public to see via the internet once the paper
has been accepted by a journal. This is known as "author archiving".

Already more than 19,000 scholars have signed a petition to urge the
European commission in favour of open access. They include Nobel
laureates Harold Varmus and Richard Roberts, and the Wellcome Trust, the
world's largest medical research charity.

Wellcome's head of e-strategy, Robert Kiley, says: "We believe that the
dissemination of research is just part of the research process. We give
an academic a grant and pay for their time, accommodation and
test-tubes. It seems strange, then, that after a year or two, the
outcome is an article which the academic gives to a publisher and which
we then have to buy back."

Ian Gibson, chairman of the science and technology select committee,
says the whole idea of research is to engage the public and this is
something that can only be properly done with open access. "We should
never underestimate how much the public wants to know the conclusions of
particular academic research at first hand," he says. "Academics have
got to start engaging with the world, not just 12 or 13 other people
interested in their field."

Professor Nicholas Mann, dean of the School of Advanced Study at the
University of London, has signed the petition. He points out that the
internet has provided the technical means for open access. "The majority
of academics are only too happy to share their research more widely with
the public and each other."

Most also believe it is their duty to help those in developing countries
who cannot afford journal subscriptions to enjoy the fruits of academic
labour.

But traditional journal publishers argue that open access would trigger
a dramatic drop in subscriptions, especially for subject-specific
journals published by learned societies such as the London Mathematical
Society. They say the societies, which rely on revenues from journals,
could collapse in the long-term and haemorrhage readers in the short-term.

The publishers also argue that open access is associated with research
that has not been peer-reviewed and that this could be damage the
reputation of research freely available on the web.

Susan Hezlet, publisher of the London Mathematical Society's journals,
says: "If all publicly funded published research was made available free
on the internet, publishers would all go bust and no one would manage
the peer review, editing and distribution processes. We would be forced
to wind down what we do in terms of supporting and disseminating
mathematics. The losers would be the mathematical community and those
who believe that supporting this culture is important."

Ian Russell, head of the Association of Learned and Professional Society
Publishers, says: "Even open access lobbyists agree that author
archiving will cause subscription cancellations and journals to go out
of business. That's trouble because currently it is the journals that
provide the quality control and give authority to the literature. Some
learned societies would go bankrupt with open access. Others would have
to radically reduce the work they do due to the dent in their income."

Pity for the journals and their publishers has been thin on the ground.
The European Research Council has argued that the high price of
scientific journals was "impeding scientific progress".

And last year the European commission published an independent report
showing the price of scientific journals had risen 200%-300% beyond
inflation between 1975 and 1995. The market, the study said, was worth
up to $11bn (£5.6bn) a year.

Some major commercial publishers are softening to the idea of open
access. Reed Elsevier, the world's largest scientific publisher, has
agreed to allow contributors to post articles on their own websites.

Nick Fowler, director of strategy at Elsevier, says: "Publishers are
open to and are continually exploring different models, together with
the research communities we serve. For example, last year 41 of our
journals began offering authors the option to sponsor unlimited access
to their articles.

So the daggers are drawn for this week's conference. "I think the losers
need to be able to lose gracefully and feel that they have been given
the chance to speak," says Burnhill.