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Select Committee on Science and Technology Minutes of Evidence


Examination of Witnesses (Questions 380 - 399)

WEDNESDAY 5 MAY 2004

PROFESSOR SIR KEITH O'NIONS, MR RAMA THIRUNAMACHANDRAN AND PROFESSOR JOHN WOOD

  Q380  Chairman: So that is £40 million.

  Mr Thirunamachandran: Around that figure, broadly speaking. This is a UK-wide figure, so it covers more than England.

  Q381  Mr Key: Could I turn to the question on institutional repositories. We have been told that 83% of publishers currently allow authors to archive their papers in a post-print archive but hardly any will publish papers that have been deposited on a pre-print server. The project known as Securing a Hybrid Environment for Research Preservation and Access (SHERPA) has told us that institutional repositories can be set up quite quickly and efficiently. What is the position of the Government and the research councils on this problem of institutional repositories?

  Professor Wood: As far as the RCUK is concerned, we are fully in favour of institutional repositories. Indeed, my own council does have such enthusiasm, but I think this goes back to an earlier question really about what confidence do we have in the whole system and the publishers and those who are upholding these repositories, and also, to an extent, where there is long-term archiving, who is holding the responsibility 100 years hence. These are issues, but the RCUK are very much in favour of institutional repositories.

  Q382  Mr Key: Are you prepared to help fund them? Is the Government and the DTI prepared to help fund these repository systems?

  Professor Wood: We fund ours.

  Professor Sir Keith O'Nions: In effect, it does. SHERPA is the one you were talking about, CURL is another one.[1] In effect, they are funded by use of government funds. I agree with my colleague, I think they are a very welcome development.

  Q383  Mr Key: Am I right to assume that you would encourage interconnection? Would you be prepared to help fund it specifically? Rather than just as we have been talking, Sir Keith, in terms of general grant provision, would you be prepared to ring-fence some funding for this project?

  Professor Sir Keith O'Nions: I think that is a very important suggestion. It is not one that I personally have given a lot of thought to, but I think it does call for some real clarity of what sort of policy we should have. If I think there is a very strong argument in favour of putting some ring-fencing for that, we should entertain the possibility. I am not aware that we have been pressured from the outside for it, but I think it is a very important point.

  Q384  Mr Key: Could I ask, finally: What effect do you think self-archiving on either pre- or post-print repositories might have on the publishing industry? They are very interested in this, clearly, but what do you think?

  Professor Sir Keith O'Nions: Self-archiving at an institutional level, do you mean?

  Q385  Mr Key: Absolutely.

  Professor Sir Keith O'Nions: I do not have an analysis of what effect that would have on the commercial publishing industry.

  Q386  Mr Key: Does anybody else have strong views?

  Professor Wood: I cannot comment on the effect it would have on the commercial side, but I am concerned that the long-term archiving is taken forward very seriously. We archive a lot of our data, for instance, and we find the software backup and things you need just to be able to access that after 10 years is very difficult to support. I am very concerned that there is a policy on this. We are in discussions with the British Library and we fully support their role in perhaps taking an active part.

  Q387  Mr Key: Who would be responsible for developing such a policy? Would it be the DTI?

  Professor Sir Keith O'Nions: I think it would have to be developed jointly with the DCMS because of the legal deposit aspect of the British Library. So DCMS, DTI/OST and the DfES.

  Q388  Mr Key: Who gets the ball rolling between those departments in an environment of joined-up government?

  Professor Sir Keith O'Nions: The ball is actually rolling. We have had numerous discussions. And, as I say, being quite frank, I think the interest of this Committee has stimulated that considerably.

  Q389  Mr Key: Do you have in mind a timescale for this before something actually happens as opposed to letting the ball roll?

  Professor Sir Keith O'Nions: I sense, from the conversations we have had this morning, that the timescale may be shortening quite rapidly!

  Q390  Mr Key: Years? Months?

  Professor Sir Keith O'Nions: Well, you can measure anything in any unit of time, but I would say months.

  Chairman: Let's help get that ball in the goal-mouth.

  Q391  Kate Hoey: I am interested in "quality" journals. We hear about quality journals a lot and we know that the RAE uses, in terms of their assessment, what kind of publication it has been in. Could you define for us what "quality" means? Who has decided what a quality journal is and how do you judge it?

  Professor Sir Keith O'Nions: I shall probably get pulled up immediately by one of your colleagues, but the assessment of quality is purely qualitative, unfortunately.

  Q392  Dr Turner: Do you mean subjective?

  Professor Sir Keith O'Nions: It is subjective.

  Q393  Kate Hoey: If Joe Bloggs wants to go and buy a quality journal, how does he know it is a quality journal?

  Professor Sir Keith O'Nions: In a particular field of endeavour, there are particular journals that are sought after for individuals to publish in, and this will be some function of how tough it is to publish there; confidence they have in the peer review; journals that anecdotally they know all of their colleagues whom they hold in esteem will pick up immediately it comes onto the internet or comes into their library. It is that sort of judgment that establishes journals very high esteem. Nature is one of these journals that, even in a full-time job in Whitehall, I almost sort of snatch off the table when it arrives on Thursday, because I know there will probably be things in there of great scientific importance week after week. It is that sort of subjective judgment.

  Q394  Kate Hoey: So you just assume that if something is in a good quality journal it is a very, very important piece of work. Do you think sometimes that what something is published in is more important than the content?

  Professor Sir Keith O'Nions: No, I mean the importance of a piece of work sometimes takes many, many years to establish, but people can feel assured that that piece of work will have been rigorously peer reviewed, and therefore has a high chance of being free of error, and will be timely and will not be just a repetitive piece of research. It is that sort of assurance that people feel. What its real impact is on science may be minimal or may take another 30 years to discover.

  Professor Wood: I have been in this game for some time and, like Keith, I have been referee on many, many journals. It is quite interesting to see how their impact is really assessed. As you say, there are some very top-flight ones but in individual subject areas there are ones which anecdotally rise to the top of the pile. I actually believe that this does need looking at quite seriously because there are important articles which have come out in journals that are less highly regarded. I know in my own sector, in the research assessment exercise, the panel actually read all the papers. That, I understand, is not always the case, but that is an anecdote that I cannot confirm. Certainly I know that when one looks at people's CVs one looks at the list of publications and one looks at the journal titles.

  Q395  Kate Hoey: Is there not a problem for people working in narrow or niche types of research? We heard from Professor Fry how difficult it was in, say, applied ecology to get published.

  Professor Wood: As I say, I think this needs actively looking at in terms of standards and how the judgments are made. That is my personal view, I am not speaking on behalf of the RCUK at this point. In the long-term, with a move towards open access the whole area of peer review status should be openly debated.

  Q396  Kate Hoey: So there would be more opportunity for new journals to come on to the market?

  Professor Wood: Certainly there need to be kite marks of certain types in order to allow people to assess what the quality of that output would be, whether it is a journal or just an e-form in some form, it needs to have a quality standard attached to it.

  Q397  Dr Iddon: I am particularly concerned about the Research Assessment Exercise scores which universities get and the journals which people publish in. I just put it to you that by academics seeking to publish in high impact journals, that discriminates against the new and open access journals and, therefore, academics in a way are helping to maintain the high cost journals rather than encouraging the development of new and cheaper methods of publication.

  Mr Thirunamachandran: Let us just address the RAE issue head on. The motivation for people to publish in different journals to do with prestige and status in a sense is unrelated to the RAE. If you look at other countries which do not have an RAE, people still want to publish in Nature or the various prestigious journals that Sir Keith has referred to. That is a personal promotional dimension which exists within the system. RAE's job is to asses the quality of the research and, as Professor Wood has already mentioned anecdotally, their job is to look at the research output which is submitted. Of course, the form of output and where it is published is one factor. Fundamentally, RAE and any peer review is about looking at the quality of the output.

  Q398  Chairman: Given that there is interdisciplinary research going on now, is there a difficulty in knowing which journal to put it in? Like grants being passed from one Research Council to another, you can get an article being passed from one journal to another. Is that now beginning to emerge which will make it very difficult?

  Professor Sir Keith O'Nions: I can give you a personal view on that. There is always a difficulty when you get strong interdisciplinarity. Journals obviously grow up and develop to capture some sector which is reasonably well-defined and people understand and as science evolves things happen in-between. I think many scientists at various times in their careers are faced with the dilemma of where quite to put their article. Your experience may be similar to mine, that when there are enough people around that area usually a new publication appears or the emphasis of an existing publication changes to meet it. That is an ongoing issue. I do believe the system that we have overall does respond reasonably well to it.

  Professor Wood: I believe journals effectively catch up with the field when they will see a market opportunity. There is now a plethora of these journals. When I started publishing some of these between the cracks—

  Q399  Chairman: They may become the places to publish actually.

  Professor Wood: To start with they have a low impact factor, which goes back to the earlier point, and that is where you come into conflict.


1   Note by the Witness: CURL (The Consortium of Universities Libraries) is actually one of the funders of SHERPA. Back


 
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