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Select Committee on Science and Technology Minutes of Evidence


Examination of Witnesses (Questions 300 - 319)

WEDNESDAY, 21 APRIL 2004

MRS JANE CARR, PROFESSOR M JAMES C CRABBE, PROFESSOR JOHN C FRY, PROFESSOR NIGEL J HITCHIN AND PROFESSOR DAVID F WILLIAMS

  Q300  Dr Turner: Do you find publishers helpful in terms of copyright and protecting your work?

  Professor Williams: Yes.

  Professor Crabbe: Yes.

  Mrs Carr: Could I come in here because, clearly, as a collective organisation we will tend to see authors when things go wrong, and so we do indeed see things going wrong and going wrong in a fairly serious way. The practice of assignment by some publishers takes away all the rights of an author, if I can quote: "Without limitation, any form of electronic exploitation, distribution or transmission, not known or invented in the future, all other intellectual property rights in such contributions . . ." and so on. In other words, there is nothing left of an author's original copyright; all rights are required to be assigned and we do have authors who come to us from the academic sector who are concerned. For example, we have surveyed our members recently—earlier this year—and we have also looked at a learned society professional publisher survey. Authors in the academic sector are concerned about their copyright. They are concerned about assignment. We have evidence from individuals who, for example, report to us in a response "The only journal I challenged over assigning copyright agreed to assign it to me as long as I understood they would not publish me again. Academic publishing is, from an author's perspective, a complete rip-off."

  Q301  Chairman: Who said that?

  Ms Carr: I have not actually got a name here.

  Q302  Chairman: You have just made that up!

  Mrs Carr: No, absolutely not. I cannot, in data protection terms, give you that name without the permission of that person. I can assure you it is an exact quote from a response to a survey earlier this year.

  Q303  Dr Turner: Do you suffer any impediment from copyright assignment in using your published material for teaching purposes? Is there any difference between printed journals and digital material?

  Professor Williams: I see no impediment at all. In fact, I am a little concerned as to why anybody publishing an original piece of research wants to print that somewhere else. It is different if you are publishing books or monographs, which has a different intellectual input. There one can see the need for embellishing that somewhere else. As an editor, one of my concerns is people trying to publish it twice with slight modifications, but I have no problem with the copyright issue there and it does not impede me in my teaching at all.

  Q304  Dr Turner: Does it worry you that once you have assigned copyright you have no control over the material, which might be tampered with or misused?

  Professor Williams: I personally have never seen any evidence of misuse of material which has been copyrighted by the publisher. I have never seen any evidence it happens. If it did and it was a serious misuse then I agree that would be a concern, but I have no evidence that that happens.

  Q305  Dr Turner: Mrs Carr, a lot of articles are submitted by a large number of authors on one paper. How does multiple ownership of the original copyright and its assignment affect this situation?

  Mrs Carr: I agree that there is difficulty and this is, perhaps, a place where collective societies such as ourselves can help. We, for example, will make payments to all authors who contribute to an article, where their secondary rights are mandated to us, and we do go to some considerable lengths to identify them and pay them even when they are relatively small sums, because we believe it is very important for those authors each to be recognised as having been a contributor. I suppose that is behind what I am trying to say. There are individuals here—and I am absolutely sure that those who sit beside me are in positions where perhaps they have not had to fight for their rights and they have been supported fully through the current system and may be less aware than perhaps I am of some of the difficulties that other colleagues encounter on their way through the system.

  Chairman: Dr Harris, do you want to talk to me about fraud, please?

  Q306  Dr Harris: It is a very big subject, but one of the key issues, and there are so many here—and I direct this initially to Professor Crabbe because he is an advocate of the open access model—is that when the author pays there will be pressure, direct, indirect, perceived or otherwise, on the journal to publish, with less stress on the quality, and, secondly, to speed up, possibly to the detriment of quality, the process of review and publication, because in order to maintain a large number of submissions one, therefore, wants quality or wants to offer what is perceived by the authors as a good service. How do you respond to those concerns as an advocate of open access?

  Professor Crabbe: Firstly I would say that if that happened no one would publish in a journal who would be interested in high quality science. They just would not go for that.

  Q307  Dr Harris: It would be self-policing?

  Professor Crabbe: It would certainly be self-policing.

  Q308  Dr Harris: Instantaneously self-policing, or would there be five years—

  Professor Crabbe: It only takes one journal, one paper, one bad paper in a journal for that journal to get a very bad reputation. So self-policing is very important. One of the problems with open access journals is persuading colleagues that it is actually a rigorous peer review system, and that is not the sort of system that we have discussed that was introduced by Professor Hitchin. I think that if colleagues are persuadable that this is high quality, good science, highly rigorously peer reviewed, then the problems you mention will not happen.

  Q309  Dr Harris: If anyone else who is a supporter has anything else to add, please feel free. What about the concern that those with generous grant systems, for example industry, for example the pharmaceutical industry—where there are already other issues—will find it easier to publish in the most prestigious journals which, by definition, will have a higher price because they have a higher rejection rate and, therefore, have to do more reviews per article published, and that will squeeze out both those researchers who do not have industry backing and those subjects where there are less generous grants, for example in mathematics?

  Professor Crabbe: I quite agree that is an important issue to address and I think it is an issue that needs to be discussed between the publishers, between the research councils, between the charities who provide grants, possibly the pharmaceutical firms, and the authors themselves. It is a problem, and right at the very beginning I did say that one of the reasons I did not publish in journals that had page charges was that it did seem to me, perhaps, not acceptable from the scientific point of view. However, things have moved on now and I will actually give money to my colleagues to publish in high quality journals as long as I am satisfied that they are high quality journals.

  Q310  Chairman: Where do you get that money from? Do you take it from another budget?

  Professor Crabbe: I have a budget that I created within my institution, in my school, yes.

  Q311  Chairman: That is public money, is it?

  Professor Crabbe: That is indeed public money.

  Q312  Chairman: Meant for something else?

  Professor Crabbe: No, it comes from the overheads, it comes from the grant that we get for research.

  Q313  Chairman: How much is that a year? How much do you use?

  Professor Crabbe: How much do I use? I do not actually use a tremendous amount. It is certainly in the hundreds, possibly the very low thousands and something per year.

  Q314  Chairman: Would you do it for a PhD student who has done something academic, to encourage them to publish—to get them on the ladder of fame?

  Professor Crabbe: I am extremely keen on career development, and I have a number of systems of promoting PhD students and post-doc. In my areas it would be almost impossible for a PhD student to publish on their own without their supervisor, without their research group, but in other areas—in languages and sociology—then that could well happen.

  Q315  Dr Harris: It is not very satisfactory either way, is it, because for those researchers without a sugar daddy (if I can describe you as that) with a pot of money to solve the problem in open access terms then it is not satisfactory? Indeed for those where there is this source of funding it proves the point that money talks in terms of publication. So I think we do have an issue here, as you have acknowledged yourself, and I think this equity issue is a genuine barrier towards wholesale support for open access.

  Professor Crabbe: I think that is right, but I would say that whether it is an open access journal or a print journal is not a question in my mind when I am providing that money. What is more important is what one of my colleagues said, that in some universities the overheads actually go back to the group, back to the school, and in other universities they do not. There is certainly an inequity there.

  Professor Williams: As you say, it is a factor but only a very small factor, bearing in mind that research is expensive, it takes a lot of time, a lot of people and a lot of money. You have that inequity in all other parts, in access to laboratories, access to top quality equipment and so on. That is built into the research system.

  Q316  Dr Harris: Professor Williams, now you have waded in here, you said in answer to the Chairman's first question that you were not conservative minded in these areas, but you then said that come what may you are damn well going to seek to publish in prestigious journals, regardless of the merits of your work—in other words, that if it is good enough it should be recognised in any journal—and you are prepared to just seek out those prestigious journals and keep on this problem, which many people perceive as a problem, that if you cannot get published in those because you are in an area which they do not publish then you are going to suffer. Surely, to break this problem of the RAE looking at where you publish, which you I think accepted, do you not have to break out from this mindset?

  Professor Williams: I do not recognise that as a definition of conservatism and I really do not believe that is the case.

  Q317  Dr Harris: You do not believe there is a need to change, because the dictionary definition would suggest that might be perceived as conservative with a small "c".

  Professor Williams: I do not see the need for substantial change, no. I think there has been a very, very good evolution; it has been quite rapid over the last few years but I do not see any reason for substantial change, no.

  Q318  Dr Harris: There is this issue in medicine—in bioscience anyway—that unpublished studies, studies that are negative and not interesting, do not get published, and you therefore get this publication bias. That is already a problem, and I happen to think it is a major problem, particularly in the biosciences even if, maybe, not in some of your areas. It is also the case that those areas that have interesting results, shall we say, for pharmaceutical companies get extra funding in terms of money, which may or may not happen in an analogous way with the physical sciences. That is an issue that has come to light. Looking at open access as an example, in this situation anyway, is that improved or probably made worse by the fact that you have to pay to publish a negative result under open access? How do you solve that problem in the existing business model? Any of you?

  Professor Fry: I think, in medical areas, it is probably very different because it is important there to have absolutely all the information. In other branches of biosciences, which I am heavily involved with, we have negative results all the time. The only way in which you are going to, in fact, bring science forward is to be working at the edges and if you are going to be working at the edges you are going to have some things that work and some things that do not work. Those things that are working will produce good, interesting stories and will help science move forward further. Those which are not working, often for methodological reasons and experimental design reasons which we should have anticipated but have not, are not nearly as interesting as far as carrying science forward. Often, you have to wait for the technology to develop to be able to ask those sorts of questions which, at one point in time, have not produced any results, and in the future they can produce results.

  Q319  Dr Harris: Those negative results are vital to stop people falling into the same traps. They have to be published to show that it is not—even if methodologically it is okay—a reasonable way to go. If the open access model had practically compulsory—because otherwise it would be a misuse of the grant funds—publication because there is a specific element that is for publication at least of some papers from the grant, would that not solve what I think is a problem (and you do not think it is so big a problem), even in your field, of the failure to publish uninteresting or negative results?

  Professor Williams: I do not think this is an open access issue; this is faced by all types of journals. My own journal covers both clinical and non-clinical, and I think there are differences. On the clinical side if you have carried out a clinical trial or a clinical study and your protocol is well-defined, then it is essential you publish the results whatever they are—I totally agree. If it is a pre-clinical or scientific trial, publishing negative results is not always necessary; it depends on the hypothesis which you started with. I see many papers where the results are clearly negative just because they asked the wrong question and did the wrong methodology and it is not worth publishing. There are significant differences.

  Professor Fry: Perhaps I can give you an example of where we have, in fact, recently published negative results? We were trying to look at bacteria in very deep marine sediment, and it is extremely hard to do this, and we are forging the methodology forward. At the point it was all working we were then able to publish a paper, not in a very high impact journal because it would not have got in but in a lower impact journal, which described how to make it work and, also, described all the problems on the way and, hence, would help other researchers avoid falling into the problems which we had. However, if we had only published when we were having problems it would have been pretty uninteresting. Often, also, you have a community of workers all working on a similar topic, all competing and describing their results in conferences who are often talking about how they are trying to move things forward—perhaps a PhD student will give an oral paper—and, in fact, those are pretty negative or inconclusive. So we have this variety of ways of communicating our information.


 
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