Examination of Witnesses (Questions 280
- 299)
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
Q280 Dr Harris: What problems?
Professor Hitchin: Problems of
independent researchers who are not supported by grants, possibly.
Professor Fry: I think that there
are tremendous problems with the proposed models for open access.
As an example, in fact, a journal published by the learned societies
would have to charge as much as journals for commercial publishers,
as it actually costs almost as much to produce a journal for internet
dispersal as it does to produce a printed journal, because all
you are actually, in fact, saving is the printing and the distribution
of the journal afterwards, which is a very small part of the overall
cost. It is absolutely vital for science in Britain and the world
today to have strong learned societies. Strong learned societies,
largely from their profits from publications, support in fact
the majority of congresses and conferences; they are the major
form of oral communication at work before it is published in print,
they are allowing scientists to interact together to get fresh
ideas. Conferences, which are largely supported by the learned
societies, are absolutely vital and so in an open access model
we have to find a way of making it work as far as the learned
societies are concerned. That is crucial.
Mrs Carr: I would only add the
view that our perception is that a mixed economy at least in the
medium term has to be a more appropriate option. We have not tested
the open access financial models. Certainly our members who are
academic writers want, above all, to have their research made
available as widely as possible but, equally, they want to ensure
that it is appropriately available and that their rights and interests
are appropriately managed and protected in that environment. We
feel, therefore, that there are two issues here: the financial
model needs to be tested more fully and that the rights of those
authors need to be assured in that environment.
Q281 Chairman: You might be persuaded
in order to change the current model of the ship if some evidence
came forward that open access achieved something along the lines
you have just indicated?
Mrs Carr: From the authors' perspective,
their concern isand I speak here about authors more widely
and my colleagues here will be able to speak specifically much
more appropriately than I canabout the protection of rights.
There is a concern that the practice, for example, of assignment
of rights and the way in which authors' rights are taken away
from them in that transaction could be carried through into an
open access model, and we need to be sure in developing that model
that not only is financial stability provided to ensure that the
access is long-term but, also the rightsand that is the
moral rights in terms of the integrity and the paternity of the
workas well as their copyright.
Q282 Chairman: But the door is open?
Mrs Carr: I think the door is
open but I do not think any of us yet can say that the model is
effectively tested.
Professor Williams: Chairman,
can I just say that obviously those points are valid but I have
not yet seen, however, any groundswell of opinion in my own sector
that open access is going to improve any situation. I should say,
and you are correct, there are different aspects to this; there
is the financial model and there are other aspects. It has been
said, I notice in some of the evidence before you, that open access
allows and facilitates the greater introduction of technology
into publishing. That is not the case. In my own journal we have
equal access to all the technology we publish, we use the internet
totally in terms of submission for the peer review process and
we can have video clips in our online version.
Q283 Chairman: What about bundling?
What is your view about bundling? We have heard in the last session
it may be on the way out so it may not be a major problem, but
what do you feel about it at this moment?
Professor Williams: I take no
strong view. Whether it is going or not, I accept that may well
happen. From my point of view, wearing all my different hats,
I can see the need for commercial publishers to go down the route
of bundling. I am fairly neutral. I do not see any significant
advantage or disadvantage to editors or to authors. I should say
that I am editor-in-chief of a journal published by Elsevier.
Q284 Chairman: Not that that biases
you in any way!
Professor Williams: Not at all.
Professor Fry: Bundling has been
extremely valuable for the users of journals because it has increased
their access to journals enormously, particularly within groups
of subject areas. You have heard previous evidence that Elsevier
offer a subject group bundle as well. That has improved access
in my laboratory and amongst my students too, and in an enormous
range of journals, particularly journals which specialise in publishing
concise and cohesive reviews in subject areas. These have been
extremely valuable to undergraduate students, particularly in
their final yearthe MSc students, to researchers changing
subject areas and PhD students, etc. As far as groups of societies
are concerned, in fact I am publication manager for FEMS, the
Federation of European Microbiology Societies, and all our journals
at the moment are owned and published by Elsevier as well. However,
if, for instance, we were to choose to publish them ourselves,
I think in the marketplace at the moment it would be extremely
difficult to understand how we could actually produce income for
our organisation and hence, in fact, promote microbiology in Europe
in a whole variety of ways. The problem is that print subscriptions
are decreasing and online income for us, through Elsevier, is
increasing enormously, so a small publisher has to have a model
for making money out of online access. I have talked to a few
societies and, at the moment, they are still relying very heavily
on print subscriptions; fewer are actually making a large amount
of money from online access.
Q285 Dr Iddon: In a word or a sentence
can each of you tell us why you publish in journals?
Professor Crabbe: The key is to
get a wide audience, to get one's science recognised and for it
to be recognised not just for what it is but, also, to benefit
the institution from which it comes. Of course, the Research Assessment
Exercise is a key factor here. Certainly I give money to my colleagues
within my school to ensure that they are not disadvantaged in
publishing in high-impact factor journals where there are publication
costsbe these open access journals or be they printed journals.
Professor Fry: I completely agree.
I think it has been extremely well summarised. I think we all
try and choose the journals which will provide a particular scope
of wide access. In fact, in my subject area it is extremely important
I publish about half of my work in American journals and about
half of my work in European journals because Americans are not
very good at reading European journals. We are also aiming to
publish in high profile journals and it is high profile journal
publication which helps us enormously as far as the RAE is concerned,
for example.
Professor Williams: I agree with
those points. I think one has to accept there are two factors
here. One is your professional responsibility, and the other is
your own personal ambition. They both end up in the same, that
is publishing in the highest quality journal. As head of a very
large research group I have responsibility for myself and my staff
to publish in the best journals. That is how I am measured every
three years or every five years; RAE or a review, it is the quality
of the journals on that list. So from the point of view of my
research centre all my staff are encouraged to publish in the
highest quality journals. My personal ambition is that I want
to have my reputation based upon the quality of my papers, and
therefore, again, I choose the highest quality journals available
in my area.
Professor Hitchin: I choose a
journal because of its readership. With the type of mathematics
I write I think of an individual paper and I think, "Who
would benefit from reading this?" and I choose the appropriate
journal that way. Of course, some have a higher reputation than
others according to other regards but basically my reason for
choosing it is: "Is this the right journal for this particular
paper?"
Mrs Carr: What I would add to
that is that we believe that authors should be able to choose
freely where they wish to publish and, also, that that has an
impact, if I may say, going back to the open access model, because
if they do not have access to the funding that might secure them
that freedom then, I suppose, that is another area we need to
look at carefully.
Q286 Dr Iddon: Can I put it to you
that it seems to me sometimes that academics are their own worst
enemies for two reasonsand you have hinted at one. Right
along the road you seem to be suggesting that you want to publish
in the high impact journals, the ones that are the most prestigious
for your subject. Can I put it to you that you are driving up
the cost of those journals by doing that, particularly journals
like Nature where the rejection rates are tremendously
high? Would it not benefit the academic community if you changed
your policy?
Professor Crabbe: Perhaps I could
come in and say that from what Professor Hitchin has said obviously
we want to get a wide readership. With the access that is available
at the moment, theoretically it should not matter which journal
we publish in at all; if the material is available over the web
it can be accessed by anybody. So what is the other driver? The
driver is finance. The driver is the Research Assessment Exercise.
Impact factors, the half-life of journals are what drives us,
I am afraid.
Q287 Chairman: If there was no Research
Assessment Exercise you could not live, could you? You could publish
anywhere.
Professor Williams: No, I do not
accept that.
Q288 Chairman: You want to keep the
Research Assessment Exercise?
Professor Williams: No, not at
all, no. I do not think it has any impact on the editorial process
in publishing.
Professor Hitchin: I should also
point out that this question about which journal to publish in
and the RAE is a discipline-dependent one. My own RAE panel, in
pure mathematics, quite specifically said that "mathematicians
publish in a wide variety of different formats and that output
of high quality may appear in any of these."[3]
So we definitely distanced ourselves from the idea that only certain
journals contain good science.
Q289 Dr Iddon: When I started my
career as a chemist there were very few journals and they were
published, on the whole, by learned societies. Then the commercial
houses came in, and once the commercial houses came in it seemed
to me that academicsevery academicseemed to want
to be an editor of his or her new journal. I also put it to you
that down the last few decades academics have been their own worst
enemies in following that trend with every academic seeming to
want to be an editor of a journal. Would anyone like to contradict
that statement?
Professor Fry: I think it is almost
completely the opposite, in fact, because being an editor of a
journal involves a fantastic amount of work. I know plenty of
academics who do not feel absolutely committed to providing this
sort of journal service.
Q290 Chairman: But they review papersthat
is part of the jobunpaid.
Professor Williams: That is one
of the most difficult aspects of being editor-in-chief.
Professor Fry: Finding good, strong
people to review papers is difficult. Perhaps I could quickly
return to the question before last, which asked has the Research
Assessment Exercise changed our publishing? I think it has changed
our publishing enormously because we are all scurrying to get
into the highest quality journals where previously, in fact, most
academics had a much broader range of publishing profiles. Now
publishing profiles are becoming focused. Also, if you are doing
work which is hard to publish in high profile journalsfor
instance, for a proportion of applied ecology work it is extremely
hard to get papers in high quality journalsthese academics
are being pretty well sidelined as far as research goes in departments
because we cannot afford to support staff whose articles are not
regularly published in these high quality journals, for RAE reasons.
Q291 Dr Iddon: Finally, can I look
at the "author pays" trendthe author pays for
the publication of the paper, trend? We have heard that it can
cost anything from $500 to as high as $30,000 to publish an article,
depending on the nature of the journal. The more prestigious,
obviously, the higher the cost. Is that a realistic amount, in
your view? Do you think the academic community would be prepared
to pay such costs if that trend grows?
Professor Williams: I think publishing
is expensive anyway and it is just a question of which business
model you are going to use. Ultimately that is not going to be
the deciding factor. If that is the way it goes then I suspect,
because this is a very small part of the cost of doing research
anyway, the system will find a method for allowing that price
to be paid. My one concern is that once you do move down that
system where the author or the institution is paying I think that
is probably open to a little more interference than the way we
do it at the present time. In medicine, for example, are the pharmaceutical
companies going to be paying for the publication and those who
do not have large grants from these drug companies may not be
able to do so. There is greater scope for that interference through
that route than at the present time.
Professor Crabbe: I would like
to say that when I started my career as a biochemist the reason
I never published in a journal on biological chemistry was because
they had page charges and I thought this was not acceptable for
a science. Now, of course, the whole question has been changed,
the whole answer system has been changed and I now provide money
for my colleagues to publish in those journals. I think there
is obviously a balance for who pays and that balance can come
partly from research councils, partly from the universities and
partly from the publishers themselves.
Professor Fry: Quite a few American
journals charge page charges and, for instance, to publish in
American journals I have publishing costs of about £400 a
paper. I do not ever put a colour figure in these journals, I
put all my colour figures in journals which publish colour free,
and hence it means targeting work in different ways according
to the journal. I think if I had to pay £3,000, for example,
to publish an article it would present a considerable obstacle.
One of the arguments which has been made is that, in fact, research
grants could include an element for that. Okay, it is not an enormous
amount, it might be 10% of the research grant, but there are in
fact minor practical problems. For instance, we have to spend
our money during a research grant; we are not allowed to spend
any after the end of it. In fact, most publications come in the
latter half of the research grant and a few years afterwards,
so where do we get the money from? In, for instance, a few universities
a proportion of the overheads which come from the research council
grants are returned to investigators and so it would be possible
to save these for other expenses. Not all universities do that,
however, and so this whole host, in fact, of minor practical problems
makes it all very difficult to see how it is going to work without
our current academic model as it operates in Britain at the moment.
Q292 Dr Iddon: Finally, in this section,
what incentives or disincentives are in place for authors to publish
in digital-only journals?
Professor Crabbe: I think the
main incentive has to be rigorous peer review. Whatever you publish
that has to be top. Why go to a particular journal when readership
depends on the access? Obviously, with the open access journals
that instant access is a clear incentive.
Professor Hitchin: The point I
made in my written evidence was that there are and there do exist
unrefereed open access journalswell, not journals, they
are resources.
Q293 Chairman: ArXiv is one. You
are rather keen on it, are you not?
Professor Hitchin: I am indeed,
and I am a relatively recent convert. It was originally started
by a physicist putting a pre-existing pre-print exchange system
into an electronic form about 10 or 12 years ago, and it has gradually
grown and then also acquired mathematics and quite recently quantitative
biology as subjects. What it does is to provide instant access
to unrefereed material. So there is a risk involved in taking
it down and taking it as true, but, on the other hand, the people
who are doing it are the same people who will be refereeing papers
anyway and it is up to them to evaluate it. Eventually, of course,
when it gets accepted by a journal then it has this mark of quality
placed against it and one can see what the quality is. My point
is that here the author, the researcher, gets instant access to
researchers around the world. It is a point that has been made
to me by, for example, a physicist in Calcutta who said "You
do not know the difference that it makes now that I can get the
same pre-print on the same day in Calcutta as somebody in Princeton".
Q294 Chairman: Good, but it is not
refereed, is it, and it does not really induce you to want to
get it published in a high-flying journal, does it? "It is
out there, the world sees it, great, I have done it."
Professor Hitchin: It is out there
but the refereeing process takes time, and science sometimes cannot
wait for that. So that the refereeing process gives a validation
and a check, but if you
Q295 Chairman: Are you really saying
that any old scientific garbage should be allowed to go out there
on an ArXiv site?
Professor Hitchin: No, and in
fact it does not.
Q296 Chairman: Yet people are confused
by MMR jabs and stuff. Why not have a press conference instead
of self-archiving?
Professor Hitchin: It is not "any
old garbage", it is screened, moderated and any inappropriate
material is removed. Obviously, anything that you put on the internet
is going to attract all sorts of rubbish; we know that every time
we look at our e-mails. There are teams of eminent mathematicians
who actually screen this material. They do not referee it but
they screen it so that it is appropriate for the audience that
it is intended for.
Q297 Bob Spink: While we are on this
subject, looking at it from the user's viewpoint, we have had
a lot of enthusiasm from the witnesses today for online access
but there is another possible view, and that is are these young
researchers, who are children of the internet, who you now work
with, finding it too easy to search the body of material using
the sort of well-known search engines like Yahoo and Google and
going straight to the documents without actually getting into
the body of available material and learning and picking up leads,
and what-have-you? Is this just too efficient, too much of a short-cut
and preventing them going through the full research-rich experience
that colleagues round here had to go through?
Professor Crabbe: I will say that
it is tremendously important that the whole paper be made available
and not just the abstract, otherwise what you say is all too likely.
Professor Fry: It is a real problem,
what you are explaining. We all have to spend considerable effort
on retraining students because in schools they are encouraged
to use the internet for everything; they tend to use the internet
for everything and I am constantly having to remind students that,
in fact, in science we use the primary literature. You can use
the internet to gain access to that literature and have a certain
degree of overview but you should always read the primary literature,
whether it is reviews which are refereed or if it is written papers
which are refereed. Refereeing, I think, is absolutely vital.
It is of key importance.
Professor Williams: Can I agree
with that? I think in the direction you are going I totally agree.
Whilst we all embrace the internet as best we can, I think there
is a danger: that it is not just access to the papers it is the
ability to understand and interpret that information which is
so important. In answer to previous questions, I respectfully
disagree here. I have great concern about this open refereeing
of papers. Peer review in good quality papers is the most important
issue. I do not think science is moving so fast we cannot make
the peer review. In my own journal I am as fast as I can but I
wait for the peer review before making decisions. Science never
goes so fast that we say "Let's forget peer review".
I am very much against having discussion pages on the internet
to determine how good a paper is, it is not a substitute for a
good quality peer review.
Professor Hitchin: I would agree
with that but I do not subscribe to that model.
Professor Crabbe: Some of my colleagues,
particularly in statistics, have a real problem with the length
of publication time. I work in statistics, or statistical computation
biology, and I just refuse to publish in that area, in those journals,
because they are just so slow. So I publish on computational biology
in biochemistry journals. So some colleagues have a real problem,
if they are learned journals from learned societies, in that they
do take a long time. That is where something like Professor Hitchin's
model could perhaps be useful, but in general peer review has
to be vital.
Q298 Bob Spink: The point I was making
is if the internet search engines can take you straight to the
final point it can avoid you seeing the options that you would
normally find if you were going along the more traditional route
of research literature. The learning process just is not there.
Professor Crabbe: You have to
have infinite trust in Google to make sure you end up at the right
spot.
Q299 Dr Turner: Can I ask you how
you feel about the copyright issue? On what proportion of papers
do you sign away their copyright? Does this worry you? What are
the sort of terms of the copyright agreements that you have to
sign?
Professor Williams: In the vast
majority of papers which I publish I have to sign copyright for
the publisher. It has never been a concern to me. As editor-in-chief
I have never had a concern raised by any author at any time about
the copyright issue.
Professor Crabbe: I would agree
with that.
3 RAE UoA 22 Assessment Panel's Criteria 3.15.18 Back
|