Examination of Witnesses (Questions 325
- 339)
WEDNESDAY 5 MAY 2004
PROFESSOR SIR
KEITH O'NIONS,
MR RAMA
THIRUNAMACHANDRAN AND
PROFESSOR JOHN
WOOD
Q325 Chairman: Thank you all very
much for coming to help us in this inquiry. Bringing your expertise
into this area I am sure will help us. Professor O'Nions, you
have been with us before; Professor Wood, you too; but Mr Rama
Thirunamachandran thank you very much for coming. We look forward
to your answers along the table. Let me first ask you, Keith O'Nions,
you are representing the DTI and OST. You are a man of great parts
and ability, I know, but is there no conflict of interest there
really, in terms of this inquiry or any inquiry?
Professor Sir Keith O'Nions: Surely
not. I am representing really OST but, inevitably, there have
been and should be wider discussions between OST and other parts
of DTI and those have been going on, so I think I can reflect
some of those discussions to you in a frank way. I should say
that my employment is through the Department of Trade and Industry.
Q326 Chairman: There is a conflict,
is there not? It is quite clear that the questions would be for
you, the multi-billion pound publishing industry, or the academic
community who are wanting open access as you have read from the
minutes. There is a conflict there. How do you handle that conflict
in terms of your position?
Professor Sir Keith O'Nions: I
will quite clearly give you my view from an OST perspective and
from a research perspective, but I will also reflect to you the
sorts of conversations that have gone on more broadly with ministers
and other parts of the DTI in as much as we have discussed these.
Q327 Chairman: Let's take a couple
of minutes to do that. Just tell me how you bring these two groups
together.
Professor Sir Keith O'Nions: Maybe
in terms of how I personally look at this issue.
Q328 Chairman: Yes.
Professor Sir Keith O'Nions: I
will be very brief on that. I look at open access and the arguments
for and against open-access publishing within the broader context
of the very rapid developments that have taken place with electronic
publishing and electronic access to data and archiving of science
and technology and medical information in general. Both commercial
and not-for-profit organisations have made huge changes and developments
over the last years, as you know. Open-access publishing is still,
from my understanding, quite small, probably less than 5% of the
total, and I think much of what we understand about the scientific
and research community's reaction to it is largely anecdotal.
I do not think we have a very deep analysis of it but, anecdotally,
and in my own experience, reactions differ quite a lot from area
to area. In the biological sciences I think there is a greater
interest and a higher take-up. You can go to other areas of research
where the development is quite small. On an individual basis,
one encounters people who have very strong views about open access,
either for it or against it, and many very senior scientists in
some areas know rather little about it and are focused on the
normal commercial and non-profit organisations. In terms of perception
of a conflict of interest, I do not think I have one. Conversations
that we have had in the DTI are leading probably towards a broader
formulation of policy across government. That is the way we have
been discussing it. And we have considered and talked about various
options and reactions that there might be. One reaction is to
do nothing and completely ignore the situation, for which there
is little support. Another option may be to give extremely strong
support to open-access publishing. Just by way of introductionand
I am happy to go into this with colleagues more deeply and hear
their points of viewI think the feeling in DTI and OST
at the moment is probably that a middle-ground level playing field
is the right position for us to be: not to load the dice heavily
in favour of one business model of publishing rather than another
and to facilitate open-access publishing, and permit that to develop
within a market and the competition of commercial and not-for-profit
publishing on something approaching a level playing field.
Q329 Chairman: What does that mean,
"a level playing field"? I am getting used to government
speak again.
Professor Sir Keith O'Nions: I
agree, it is a very convenient phrase, but let me be a little
more specific.
Q330 Chairman: Yes.
Professor Sir Keith O'Nions: At
present we have commercial not-for-profit publication and with
a few exceptions the author pays nothing to submit his paper.
There are exceptions. There are some not-for-profit organisations
which do have page charges for authors and use that money within
the charitable organisation for other research and scientific
purposes, but, generally, mostly the author does not pay. With
open access it shifts the charging; so the author pays and then
the results of that research are available globally free of charge.
The level playing fieldand apologies for using such a loose
termis that we are considering the possibility of making
funds available to those authors that wish to go the open-access
route, so they are in no sense penalised against other routes,
so it would be shifting funding
Q331 Chairman: You have not made
any observations about the industry itself, the multi-million
pound industry. What are your thoughts about that? Has it been
fleecing people for too long, frankly?
Professor Sir Keith O'Nions: My
view on that is that commercial publishers and the not-for-profit
organisations have made huge investments and the world has changed
enormously. I am well aware of the strength of feelings in some
sectors of the community, that profits are considered to be too
large and so on; I have no strong personal view on that.
Q332 Chairman: Do the Department
have a view on this?
Professor Sir Keith O'Nions: The
Department have a view that they should not be emphasising one
type of business model or practice over another and I think are
homing in on the view that they should move to facilitate open-access
publishing and allow these things to compete and change or progress.
Q333 Paul Farrelly: As well as "level
playing field" you have twice used another very broad term
"facilitate". You started to be more precise about what
you meant by that but stopped mid-sentence when you started talking
about shifting funding. Could you be a little bit more precise:
shifting funding from where to where?
Professor Sir Keith O'Nions: Let
me be necessarily cautiousand I accept your point. At the
moment we are having discussions about these issues. My sense
is that a good outcomefollowing your inquiry which has
stimulated a lot of discussion across departmentsis that
we should evolve a policy. When I move beyond the word "facilitate"
and say this may involve using money from DTI/OST to enable individual
authors to pay for open-access publishing, I am not making a policy
statement; I am merely relating what is the nature of the discussion
at the present time, and I am in no position at the moment to
say that this is something ministers have signed up to and so
on, so I am being rather open.
Q334 Paul Farrelly: Shifting fund,
or possibly shifting funding, from where to where?
Professor Sir Keith O'Nions: Very
little OST money goes to authors to support the publication of
their materials. If a policy emerged that we did not wish to hinder
open-access publishing and authors having the funds from their
research grants to publish in that way, then some portion of OST
money would need to be made available in that way. If the whole
business model shifted in some organic and progressive way such
that the open access model became the norm in the future, then,
in effect, the money would be shifting towards author pays rather
than subscriber pays.
Q335 Dr Turner: It seems to me the
Government cannot just take the bystander's view of this because,
one way or another, through many different routes and different
departments, an awful lot of government money is finding its way
into publishing houses. Only a small amount of it may come from
the OST at present, for open access publishing, but then an awful
lot of HEFCE money, DfES money, etcetera, is going into the universities
to buy the journals. There are two issues here. One is the cost-effectiveness
of the use of government moneywhich if it was withdrawn
from the publishing industry would cause it to collapse, I imagine.
The other is: Is it associated with equality of access to the
material? Two points of effectiveness.
Professor Sir Keith O'Nions: Could
you just give me that question again.
Q336 Dr Turner: I first have to remember
it!
Professor Sir Keith O'Nions: You
made the point that a lot of government money is going into the
publishing industry.
Q337 Dr Turner: A lot of government
money. We have no idea, but it must be many, many millions, hundreds
of millions probably, one way or another, going into the publishing
houses, whether it is through the money that libraries spend on
journals or whether it is paying authors to pay, open access or
whatever. The two issues are: Is there good value for money there,
is it effective use of the money? and: Is it also effective in
the sense that researchers have free access to all the material?
Professor Sir Keith O'Nions: I
will make a response and do the honourable thing and let my colleagues
from other places make their comment. In terms of money going
in, yes a lot of money obviously goes to publishing, and commercial
publishing in the UK is a very big, significant enterprise. But
there is no such thing as moving information from an author and
making it available to the wider community in the world being
done free. I mean, there is always going to be a cost associated
with the peer-review process, with the preparation of either paper
or electronic material, costs involved with archiving for the
longer term and costs associated with multi-publisher access and
so onof which there are many enterprises going onand
the costs per article can differ quite significantly. We do not
know really what the costs are but they are probably somewhere
between $500 and even $5,000 per authored article, depending on
the rate of rejection of journals; that is, the amount of peer
review that has not gone to the published article and so on. The
question is whether the amounts of money going into the commercial
sector are value for money. I am not going to express a view on
whether their profits are reasonable or unreasonable. It is a
matter for government, to decide whether it is an industry it
chooses to regulate or not regulate, but I do know that the costs
involved in the changes that have been made are very high: I mean,
one company alone investing something around 100 million in archiving.
So, I think, to get to depth with your question as to whether
it represents value for money is quite a complicated issue. Value
for money has to be defined with some care and I would say overall
the research community is probably getting better value for money
than ever because we are getting better and better access to research
material online, to databases and to archive material. In that
regard, value for money is increasing, given the total volume
of published material is increasing.
Q338 Dr Turner: You are satisfied
access is improving.
Professor Sir Keith O'Nions: Very
much so. Enormously so.
Q339 Dr Iddon: Surely the majority
of publications comes from academia. Probably at least equal use
or maybe more use is made of those publications by industry. If
we go towards author pays, academia is going to bear most of the
brunt of the cost of publishing whilst industry benefits more
at no cost.
Professor Sir Keith O'Nions: This
is a very important point in the broader debate that is going
on. Some have taken the view that, if we strongly promote open-access
publishing and force the issue, and the costs of publishing an
article are in the range $500 to $5,000and remembering
that open access enterprises at the moment are often subsidised
by the not-for-profit organisations
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