Experiments in publishing Nature's web forum on access to the primary literature has highlighted the risks, as well as the attractions, in enforcing availability without charge to readers.
"Our idea - a rabbit out of the hat - of institutional repositories, will make the university library system sit up and listen." The rabbit described by Ian Gibson, who is a UK member of parliament, is a recommendation that funding bodies require scientists to make their articles more accessible by publishing free copies on their institutions' websites. It came from the House of Commons Science and Technology Committee in July, after a five-month inquiry into journal pricing, chaired by Gibson.
The US National Institutes of Health (NIH) now seeks to do likewise. It plans to ask researchers to copy final versions of their manuscripts onto the US National Library of Medicine's freely accessible PubMed Central repository six months after publication (see page 115). Those who are concerned about such matters have about two months in which to comment (see http://grants1.nih.gov/grants/guide/notice-files/NOT-OD-04-064.html).
But such grand schemes merit serious reality checks. The impact of the NIH plan on the viability of journals and on non-profit learned societies is potentially serious, and questions as to how it might affect the various sorts of journals have been insufficiently explored.
Over the past months, dozens of scientists and publishers have given their views on open access in a web forum at http://www.nature.com/nature/focus/accessdebate. One conclusion of the forum, which wraps up this week, is that societies and publishers must remain financially healthy if they are to be able to maintain the quality of information, launch new journals and innovate electronically.
Contributions also indicate that one-size-fits-all solutions are ill-suited to the huge range of journals and business models, from those with low operating costs, low rejection rates and low added value to more selective journals with high costs and significant added value (see Appendix: "How publishing adds value: a checklist"). Is six months too short for some to sustain subscriber revenues?
The forum reveals that many scientific publishers, in particular learned societies, are already experimenting with ways of increasing access. Some give authors the option of paying for their own articles to be made open access. Many already make articles available from their own websites without charge after a delay. Given the latter, might it not be more sensible to encourage access to free material on publishers' sites, for example, instead of creating a parallel universe of papers on a single US-government-sponsored repository?
Some open-access advocates see open-access archiving as a step that would eventually oblige all journals to adopt a single business model of "author-pays". In this model, instead of covering the costs of publishing primary papers from subscriptions paid by readers, costs are met by charging fees to authors, their institutions or sponsors.
Visionaries predict that free institutional archives will cause libraries to cancel subscriptions, cutting journals' revenues and forcing them to turn to either author-pays or other open-access models, or downsize to become no-frills providers of peer-review services, or both. The author-pays model is being explored by open-access publishers such as the Public Library of Science and BioMed Central, but neither has yet demonstrated that it can break even, let alone that the model is sustainable for the entire literature.
Nature, founded on the traditional publishing model, welcomes alternative models that deliver enhanced access, provided that they also foster added editorial and publishing value. Its publishers are experimenting with new publishing models. The Nature forum indicates that the viability of new models remains far from established.
For politicians or state institutions in effect to support one business model would be risky. Diverse approaches and competition are usually preferable, particularly if investment and deployment of technological and other innovations are to be encouraged.
Appendix
How publishing adds value: a checklist.
In this Internet age, there is often the belief that anyone can be a publisher. But although it is easy to create a web-based journal, it is much less easy to sustain it, and have people read it. Few who have started their own publishing operations, small or large, can have any doubts as to the added value that publishers bring.
Journals vary enormously as to how much, and what, value they add. The more intensive the added-value publishing, the higher the quality that results, whether in selectivity, editing, presentation or in other respects - but also, the greater the costs.
The list below briefly recapitulates on some of the main publishing tasks that need to be considered in discussions about the roles of journals. It is intended to be business model-neutral. It lays out tasks common to all publishing efforts, irrespective of whether these are funded through philanthropy, subscriptions, advertising, commercial sponsorship and/or author fees.
Neither does it make any assumptions about who adds the value. Web servers and author tools abound, and some scientific journals are run as one-man cottage industries, by a dedicated scientist or group of scientists, often running small shoestring peer-review and publishing operations on top of their research work, and using borrowed laboratory computing equipment and other research resources available within their institutions. In many learned society journals, stewardship of the peer-review process is also often directly dependent on researchers, and is largely run by volunteer scientists.
At the other end of the spectrum, some journals have a team of full-time professional editors to implement the peer review process in a hands-on fashion. Science, Cell, Public Library of Science Biology, and Nature and its associated journals, are examples. An organization like the American Physical Society, for example, might receive some 30,000 submitted papers annually, and need to employ over a hundred full-time editors and staff.
Every one of the activities below involves editorial or other publishing staff with relevant skills and training. At every stage of the workflow, each article may take considerable time to process.
1. Editorial added value
This value starts with content filtering, choosing what to publish and what to decline. A successful journal provides its readers with an imprimatur of content which they know is likely to be worth reading, an island of filtered and reliable content in the ocean of information now available.
The value of editing itself, and the time and effort good editing takes, is often underestimated. Scientifically excellent manuscripts submitted by authors whose first language is not English, in particular, can often require extensive rewriting to ensure accuracy and to help authors say what they indeed wished to say. Manuscripts by native English speakers also often need substantial reworking to improve the flow of arguments, to question assertions, to eliminate errors and jargon, and to add sufficient detail and explanation to make them clear and comprehensible to readers. This is particularly the case, where the target audience of a paper goes beyond the authors' own discipline. Leaving aside such editing for scientific content and structure, just copyediting and proofreading a Nature paper and its figures will often take a professional subeditor around seven hours.
The following is a brief bullet-point list of the key elements of editorial added value. Of course as electronic infrastructure is enhanced and research community practices evolve, editors are often developing these procedures. And the process as a whole requires management and planning.
Peer review: awareness of the literature and people; selection of appropriate mix of reviewers, judgement of reviewers’ comments; maintaining standards in peer review insight and constructive contribution.
Selection: development and maintenance of editorial criteria and policies for selection; maintaining standards of quality and impact; communicating decisions and advice.
Improvement: recommendations for improvement based on editorial policy and reviewers’ opinions; copy editing: structural and scientific editing.
Artwork: selection and improvement of diagrams and illustrations to publication quality
Production: sub-editing for language, precision, nomenclature and conciseness; layout and electronic tagging for presentation in print or online; insertion and checking of links and references.
Typesetting and electronic display: proof-reading and processing corrections.
Summaries and highlighting: editors prepare summaries of papers for highlighting in the journal and/or press releases.
News and Views: some journals, including all Nature research journals, commission and edit articles to accompany some papers, putting them in context.
2. Publishing added value
New journals: Investing in the launch of new journals, which may take years to break even, to anticipate and meet emerging community demands.
Journal development: Develop journals’ aims and scope; build sustained relationships with scientists and disciplines; promote author guidelines, licence to publish, press service, submission process; format design for print and online; build reviewer base
Publication and distribution: issue published online; investment in advanced functionality; world-wide distribution of print copies; journals abstracted and indexed; abstracts freely available; author and commercial reprints; reference linking; machine readable text; free access to selected articles; cooperation in HINARI, AGORA etc.; third party deposits (ISI, PubMed); CrossRef and CrossSearch collaboration
Promoting the science: advance online publication; embargoed press releases to world-wide media; press conferences; email alerts; development of multiple summaries (in multiple languages).
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