Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 14, No. 824.
Centre for Computing in the Humanities, King's College London
<http://www.princeton.edu/~mccarty/humanist/>
<http://www.kcl.ac.uk/humanities/cch/humanist/>
[1] From: Ross Scaife <scaife@pop.uky.edu> (210)
Subject: [STOA] SciAm: Publish Free or Perish
[2] From: Stevan Harnad <harnad@cogprints.soton.ac.uk> (31)
Subject: Nature piece on self-archiving today (April 26)
--[1]------------------------------------------------------------------
Date: Fri, 27 Apr 2001 07:05:11 +0100
From: Ross Scaife <scaife@pop.uky.edu>
Subject: [STOA] SciAm: Publish Free or Perish
From Scientific American
http://www.scientificamerican.com/explorations/2001/042301publish/
NB: "In the eyes of Michael Eisen, one of the initiators of the Public
Library of Science initiative, the work that publishers do, however, does
not justify that they then own the copyrights to the articles. 'We think of
the publishers as being like a midwife," he says. "They are paid for their
role, and at the end of the day, they give the baby back to the parents.'"
Here's the whole article:
Publish Free or Perish
Life scientists are urging publishers to grant free access to archived
research articles
When a molecular biologist or a biochemist has made a discoveryoften after
many months or even years of tedious experimentsthey tell the rest of the
world by publishing their results in a scientific journal. So far, these
journals have controlled who can read them and who cannotbut maybe not for
much longer.
E-mail, Internet discussion groups, electronic databases and pre- or e-print
servers have already transformed the way scientists openly exchange their
results. And in the life sciences, researchers are now demanding that their
work be included in at least one free central electronic archive of
published literature, challenging the traditional ownership of publishers.
The demand has sparked widespread discussions among scientists, publishers,
scientific societies and librarians about the future of scientific
publishing. The outcome may be nothing short of a revolution in the
scientific publishing world.
It all started last fall, when an advocacy group called the Public Library
of Science distributed an electronic open letter urging scientific
publishers to hand over all research articles from their journals to public
online archives for free within six months of publication. To add weight to
their demands, the authors threatened a boycott starting in September 2001,
pledging to "publish in, edit or review for, and personally subscribe to,
only those scholarly and scientific journals" that agreed. As of April 21,
some 15,817 life scientists from 138 countries had signed the letter, among
them several Nobel laureates.
The authors of the letter feel they have every right to make these demands.
After all, it is the scientists who supply the journals with their
productsthe manuscriptsfor free. Scientists also help journals by
reviewing and judging the quality of each others work, a process called
"peer review," without pay. Publishers, in exchange, edit the articles,
organize the review process and provide news items and other content.
Finally, they produce, market and distribute a printed or electronic
journal.
In the eyes of Michael Eisen, one of the initiators of the Public Library of
Science initiative, the work that publishers do, however, does not justify
that they then own the copyrights to the articles. "We think of the
publishers as being like a midwife," he says. "They are paid for their role,
and at the end of the day, they give the baby back to the parents."
Publishers argue that unless they own the copyright, they cannot protect
articles from misuse. And scientific publishing is big business: like other
scientific societies, the American Association for the Advancement of
Science (AAAS), for example, finances most of its activities with income
from its publication, Science magazine. "I think scientists all over would
be shocked to realize what a phenomenally lucrative business scientific
publishing can be," Nicholas Cozzarelli, editor-in-chief of the Proceedings
of the National Academy of Sciences of the USA (PNAS), says. "There are huge
sums of money to be had in this field."
Journals Don't Play the Game
What urged the authors of the open letter into action was the slow progress
of PubMed Central, a free electronic full-text archive of research articles
started by the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) at the
NIH in early 2000. By storing articles in a common format on a single site,
PubMed Central wants to facilitate sophisticated literature searchesfor
instance, those restricted to certain parts of a paper, such as the figure
legends. Ultimately it also wants to link the literature to other online
databases.
PubMed Central asks journals to contribute their articles voluntarily as
soon as possible after publicationat most after a yeargiving the journals
time to offer exclusive access to make a profit (studies have shown that the
demand for research papers decreases sharply after only a few months). But
so far, only seven journals, including PNAS and a collection of e-journals,
are participating, and a few additional journals have signed up. Even though
some journals make their back issues freely available at their own Web
sites, they are reluctant to give them away elsewhere. "Journals have just
not wanted to play the game," Eisen says.
In physics, free electronic archives are old hat. Scientists have been
submitting their own research papersboth before and after publicationto
the Los Alamos e-print archive since 1991, without the participation of
publishers, which simply had to accept the practice. Yet the American
Physical Society, for example, still sells subscriptions to three journals
that publish 14,000 research articles a year.
Perhaps not surprisingly, though, many publishers, threatened with either
financial losses or a boycott, have been overtly hostile to the open letter.
A number of scientific societies depend on the income from their journals to
support their activities. But some scientists liken this system to a tax on
their papers and think societies should subsidize their activities in other
ways.
Also, some journals worry that outside archives hosting their articles will
introduce errors into the files, lowering the reliability of the
information. What if a g (microgram) suddenly becomes a mg (milligram)?
PubMed Central actually detected errors in some of the papers they were
given, thereby increasing the overall quality. "The more eyes to look at it
and fingers trying to work with it, the more things you can find," says
David Lipman, director of the NCBI.
On another level, some publishers resent a central, NIH-run archive like
PubMed Central because they fear that technical failures would affect all
users at once, and because the government might impose restrictions in the
future, for example, by ruling not to publish certain kinds of research. On
the other hand, PubMed, another NIH-managed database that grants free access
to references and abstracts from 4,300 biomedical journals and links back to
their Web sites, has been extremely successful and popular among both
scientists and publishers.
Moreover, publishers point out that a commercial electronic archive, managed
by HighWirePress and including nearly 250 journals from many scientific
disciplines, already exists and that government money is wasted. Unlike
access to PubMed Central, however, most of the HighWire Press journals are
not free.
As a group, commercial publishers appear unsure about the recent
developments and do not seem to have formulated their policies yet. Elsevier
Science, Nature Publishing Group (a sister company to Scientific American,
which is not a peer-reviewed journal), Cell Press and Academic Press
declined interview requests, and Springer Verlag, as well as Allen Press,
did not return phone calls. In a written statement, Annette Thomas, managing
director of the Nature Publishing Group, commented that "many complex issues
have been raised, and we are currently soliciting feedback from scientists,
librarians, and other interested parties."
Charging Authors, Not Readers
One of the main questions to come from the current controversy is, Who will
pay for publishing original research articles in the future if subscriptions
decline? Only a small fraction of the publication costs of a print
journalsome estimate as little as 10 percentcovers the editorial and peer
review process. Many journals produce a costly print edition and add news,
review articles and other valuable information, for which they have to pay.
To offset their costs, journals derive income largely from subscriptions, as
well as from advertisements, both in print and online, and reprints.
But since subscriber numbers may decrease if the access to journal
information becomes free elsewhere, various publishers are thinking about
changing their business model: instead of billing readers, they plan to bill
authors, a practice that is already common in the form of page charges.
Overall, these submission charges would amount to only a small fraction of a
scientist's total research costs, they say, and could easily be included in
research budgets. Libraries, freed from subscription charges, could also
chip in on behalf of authors at their institutions.
Publishers would make exceptions for researchers from poor countries to
ensure that no one is excluded for economic reasons. "We feel it is probably
a better system to put the charges on the authors than the other way round,"
says Peter Newark, editorial director at BioMed Central, a commercial
publisher from the U.K. But steep submission charges could steer
budget-conscious scientists away from these publications.
Many libraries seem to be in favor of open access archives like PubMed
Central. "I think these are important efforts, and the library community is
very supportive of them," says Joseph Branin, director of the Ohio State
University libraries. In recent years, rapidly rising subscription rates for
scientific journals have forced libraries to cancel many titles. Most of
them now negotiate for electronic access to large sets of journals in
consortia, giving them greater bargaining power.
If journal articles became freely available after a while, some libraries
might stop subscribing to them. But for many scientists, instant access to
the literature is crucial to keep up with current developments, so libraries
will probably keep subscribing to the most important titles. "Because its
available freely over the Internet after the first year of publication does
not necessarily mean we are going to cancel our subscriptions to those,"
Branin remarks. Smaller, specialist journals, however, might be in danger of
going out of business.
Libraries hope that subscription rates for the first few monthsbefore free
access takes holdwill come down. But the opposite might be true: if many
libraries opted out, publishers might try to recover their costs from the
remaining ones. "And for those institutions, my own surely included, this
free information could be very expensive indeed," writes Ann Okerson, a
librarian at Yale University, in a contribution to a Nature Web debate.
Scientists and libraries in developing countries, which often cannot afford
subscriptions, would probably benefit most from free electronic archives.
A Possible Compromise on the Horizon
Come September, will the scientists who signed the open letter really go
through with a boycott? Journals depend on their authors, but equally,
researchers in the life sciencesespecially young investigatorsneed to
publish in "brand name" journals, such as Cell, Nature and Science, to
advance their careers. "I cant afford to boycott these journals because my
career is not established yet," says an assistant professor from a New York
medical school, who asked to remain unnamed. Nobel Prize winners, on the
other hand, may find it easier to divert their papers to less established
publications.
One of the practical problems of a boycott would be providing enough
alternative journals for scientists to publish in. Some are thinking about
starting their own journals. In mathematics, for example, some editorial
boards in Europe have already left their commercial publishers and created
new titles at their own institutions. "They are finding that while it does
cost money, the costs are actually quite minimal," notes Mary Case of the
Association of Research Libraries. BioMed Central also offers to provide the
logistics for scientists who want to start their own journals.
That said, a possible compromise has recently appeared on the horizon: only
two weeks ago, PubMed Central announced it would allow participating
publishers to link back to their own Web sites, rather than insist that they
display full-text articles on the NIH server. PubMed Central would still
obtain a full-text copy for search purposes, but they would hide it from
public view. Many publishers are currently considering this solution. "I
think lots of publishers will grant free access after a period of time on
the basis proposed in this compromise," says Donald Kennedy, editor-in-chief
of Science. He also thinks that "under those circumstances, the threat of a
boycott will vanish."
But for Eisen and many others, such an arrangement doesn't go far enough.
Eisen still wants to see free access to alternative archives as well: "I
remain absolutely convinced that the real future of publishing, five years
out, is one in which nobody controls the literature."
Whatever the outcome, the scientific publishing world is in turmoil. Both
Nature and Science have started e-debates on their Web sites, and
contributions from many sides are pouring in. "It [the open letter] was not
an unreasonable proposal," Kennedy comments. "It has gotten a good
conversation started." In the end, it will probably be the authors who
decide the issue. As Case puts it, "It is the scientists who are going to
have to figure out how they want their work to be available."Julia Karow
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--[2]------------------------------------------------------------------
Date: Fri, 27 Apr 2001 07:04:37 +0100
From: Stevan Harnad <harnad@cogprints.soton.ac.uk>
Subject: Nature piece on self-archiving today (April 26)
Today's (April 26) Nature magazine http://www.nature.com/nature/
contains the following article on the Self-Archiving Initiative:
http://www.cogsci.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Tp/naturenew.htm
(the above is the preprint: official version is at nature.com).
Nature is also currently running an on-line debate on
"Future e-access to the primary literature" at:
http://www.nature.com/nature/debates/e-access/index.html
This includes the following commentary by me:
http://www.cogsci.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Tp/nature3.htm
(the above is the preprint: official version is at nature.com).
Science is also currently running an on-line debate on
the same topic:
http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/eletters/291/5512/2318a
and
http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/eletters/291/5512/2318b
All interested (and informed) parties are encouraged to
participate in both debates.
--------------------------------------------------------------------
Stevan Harnad harnad@cogsci.soton.ac.uk
Professor of Cognitive Science harnad@princeton.edu
Department of Electronics and phone: +44 23-80 592-582
Computer Science fax: +44 23-80 592-865
University of Southampton http://www.cogsci.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/
Highfield, Southampton http://www.princeton.edu/~harnad/
SO17 1BJ UNITED KINGDOM
NOTE: A complete archive of the ongoing discussion of providing free
access to the refereed journal literature online is available at the
American Scientist September Forum (98 & 99 & 00 & 01):
http://amsci-forum.amsci.org/archives/september98-forum.html
You may join the list at the site above.
Discussion can be posted to:
september98-forum@amsci-forum.amsci.org
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