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Select Committee on Science and Technology Minutes of Evidence


Examination of Witnesses (Questions 360 - 379)

WEDNESDAY 5 MAY 2004

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

  Q360  Dr Harris: Why are you in a position where you think it is between £300 and £3,000? That is a huge range, clearly. Is there a lack of research?

  Professor Sir Keith O'Nions: Yes.

  Q361  Dr Harris: Are false figures being put in there? I am astonished that there has not been a clearer view about what the costs would be on average, particularly in a particular field.

  Professor Sir Keith O'Nions: That is the range that is as good as I have access to at the moment, and I would agree with you immediately that this is a subject that needs a lot more investigation. I can understand why the range may be large—and let me just quote two things that would intuitively suggest that it is going to be a big range. The vast majority of things submitted to Nature, go out for referring with all the costs associated with that. But many get rejected and do not get published. Its prestige comes of publishing a very small proportion of what it receives, so the costs are obviously going to be quite high per article. There are other journals which scientists have somewhat less respect for, as it were, which may publish 80 or 90% of what they are receiving. The cost per article there is going to be different. You could conceive of some sort of open access without peer review that published everything, and then the costs would be exceedingly low but the respect for them as publications will be proportionately lower as well.

  Q362  Dr Harris: John says that his council is providing money for this sort of research, and RCUK in their evidence say, "Research councils will have to provide funds to meet publications costs within reasonable limits." That begs the question, firstly, what are the limits? At what level, at the £300 end or the £3,000 end, are you pitching it? If you pitch it at less than the Nature costs, then you are basically saying, "Feel free within limits to publish in open access" but obviously you will continue to publish prestigious high-impact stuff through the normal business model, which is a little unfair on those people who want a level playing field and not loaded dice, if I may use those terms.

  Professor Wood: I think this is a very valid point actually to bring up. At one extreme we hear that the journal Science is even thinking of $10,000—I am sorry, £7,000 or so—and some learned societies are a few hundred pounds. At the moment there is only one research council that actually allows grant-holders to bid specifically for publication and open access, but they do have the ability to use the overhead that is there at the moment—but, again, with the discussion with dual funding that may actually change. It is a very difficult subject this, because the area of confidence in the journal and its status is the key issue here. It might actually reduce the number but may it actually improve the quality? These are the sort of issues. I fully concur with Keith here: I do not think we know enough about it to realise what the impact would mean.

  Q363  Dr Harris: At some point you are going to recognise a significant double payment, because money is going into libraries, and some money, within reasonable limits—and I would be interested to know what those limits are—is going to authors to fund. I am not sure that the public would want to be paying twice and sooner or later there has to be some virement to keep pace with the organic (the term you used—an interesting term) growth in open access if that is what there is going to be. Could anyone explain how that is going to be tackled?

  Professor Sir Keith O'Nions: Could I just make a comment on that. To my knowledge that has been happening in a small way for about 30 years in the United States. I will give you a very specific example. There is a thing called the American Geophysical Union, which is obviously a not-for-profit organisation, which for the last 30 years, for those who can afford to pay from their grants in the US, they charge $75 to $100 per printed page. That is quite normal, so the author is paying through the grants system, but at the same time the printed and electronic versions of that journal are sold back to the author and more broadly, just as other journals are, and the profits they are making from that enterprise are used to support student activities, conference grants and so on. So there are examples already where you have this mixture of author paying twice. That really just supports what John says. It is a deeply complex subject, and that is a practice that has been going on for 30 years.

  Q364  Dr Harris: Overall, let's say, £10 million or a reasonable limit of money is being spent, presumably libraries are not having a cut in their budget—and they would say they were under-funded anyway—but is there a conscious effort, in order to avoid double payment through the public purse at least, to shift money when this grows?

  Mr Thirunamachandran: I think the issue of potential double payment is a slightly hypothetical one. For the foreseeable future there is going to be a hybrid model, when both systems are going to be running in parallel: libraries will be continuing to subscribe for a range of journals, whilst open-access publishing will also grow, as it is indeed growing at present. Whilst a hybrid model is in place, I think the notion of double funding is probably a hypothetical rather than real issue.

  Paul Farrelly: Clearly not a great deal of work has gone on down in the bowels of the DTI. This is not so far up the list of priorities.

  Chairman: Is it in the DTI or the OST that the work is not going on?

  Q365  Paul Farrelly: Reid Elsevier, clearly the biggest company, a British-based company, said to us that a move to an author-pays model would be costly to the UK because we publish more than we read. Has sufficient work gone on to try to estimate the potential economic impact of the different models on the UK?

  Professor Sir Keith O'Nions: Not to my knowledge, but there are some DTI people sitting behind me that may pass me some information. In those sorts of broader economic terms, I do not believe there has been, but I think our analysis is absolutely correct.

  Q366  Paul Farrelly: The OFT has clearly looked at the market and has concluded that the market for STM publications is not working well at the moment. I wondered in what respects the panel share that view, if at all.

  Professor Sir Keith O'Nions: Could you be more specific?

  Q367  Paul Farrelly: Let us take the example of Reed Elsevier which has 18% of the market. Following a look at the market by the OFT, has the DTI taken the issue seriously enough to consider whether, for example, a company like Reed Elsevier has what might be called a complex monopoly?

  Professor Sir Keith O'Nions: I cannot give you an answer to that. I will pass you the formal DTI position on that, if I may.

  Q368  Paul Farrelly: We would be very interested in that.

  Professor Sir Keith O'Nions: I am very happy to do that but I have had no involvement in any discussions that have taken place in that, if at all.

  Q369  Dr Turner: The World Summit on the Information Society, a summit of the UN, has published a declaration of principles and a plan of action that are committed to the principle of "universal access with equal opportunities for all to scientific knowledge." How much influence has this summit had on government policy in the UK? How committed is the UK to its stated principles? Indeed, are we in a position to implement it even if we wanted to or is it a complete waste of time?

  Mr Thirunamachandran: I cannot respond for the Government other than to say what HEFCE has already started to do by way of the funding we provide through JISC in terms of exploring new models of publication.

  Dr Iddon: The transition period, where we are operating more than one publishing model, Sir Keith, is going to be extremely costly. I think everybody would agree on that. We have raised a few questions with you this morning about whether academia and the UK generally will cope with this hybrid transition period, but are you able to tell the Committee whether any branch of the Government has thought about offering publishers some money to allow them to travel through this transition period, whether the publishers be commercial, who are probably less likely to need help, or the learned societies, which I am particularly thinking of, who obviously are going to find it extremely difficult to survive against the commercial publishers during the transition period?

  Q370  Chairman: I believe you did say there was money available for open access that they could put that into. Did you say that?

  Professor Sir Keith O'Nions: This is a research council responsibility but I believe one of the research councils at least is making money available.

  Q371  Chairman: How much?

  Professor Sir Keith O'Nions: I do not know the number.

  Professor Wood: That I cannot answer. It is EPSRC.

  Q372  Chairman: They know, do they?

  Professor Sir Keith O'Nions: They will know what has been bid for. I am not sure they have a number they agree to but individual proposals can say that is how much they believe they want.

  Q373  Chairman: Perhaps you could try to answer Brian Iddon's question.

  Professor Wood: I will try to get that information to you.

  Q374  Dr Turner: Professor Wood, you have made reference to the particle physics archive. How much does that cost to run and where does the funding come from?

  Professor Sir Keith O'Nions: I can answer that. This is broadened from particle physics archive and it is broader science now in the US. It is currently, I believe, run through the Cornell and its source of funds certainly includes the National Science Foundation; so federal US funds are used in a university environment to support that. Again, whether that is a sustainable model into the future . . .. ArXiv.org I believe is the name of the site.

  Q375  Dr Turner: Paul Farrelly has already referred to the possibility of double payment, but a clear possibility that has been raised by Research Council UK is that research councils can end up paying at both ends; both paying for open-ended access publication and paying for the cost of journal subscriptions. How does this affect your grant allocation policy in terms of giving people money?

  Professor Sir Keith O'Nions: The research councils and OST are not generally paying for subscriptions within universities. That is a responsibility of my colleague.

  Q376  Dr Turner: It is partly infrastructure costs.

  Professor Sir Keith O'Nions: Yes, but they are infrastructure costs that are coming from higher education. But you are right, in as much as, if this business model succeeds and develops as one expects it will develop, then there will be upfront costs to OST for supporting that. I do not think at the moment we know how big those are going to be. We know how big they could be, but how much money will need to be made available we do not know. Obviously it will start off being really very small because the percentage usage is small.

  Q377  Dr Turner: Do you want to comment on your support for the subscriber?

  Mr Thirunamachandran: At the moment in the UK we provide a significant amount of funding to universities for the basic infrastructure, but ultimately HEFCE funds are less than half of what the totality of the university sector's general income is; so it is difficult to specify exactly how much of HEFCE's money might be going to libraries, but UK university libraries spend about £400 million, of which probably 10% is on general subscriptions.

  Q378  Chairman: Did universities not have an exercise in the last few years where they were told to chase the money? It seems to me I remember the Chancellor was quite adamant about making sure you knew where the money went in universities.

  Professor Sir Keith O'Nions: The TRAC methodology.

  Q379  Chairman: Yes.

  Mr Thirunamachandran: Around £400 million is spent by universities on libraries, of which around 10% is on general subscriptions at present.


 
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