The United Kingdom ParliamentThe United Kingdom ParliamentAbout ParliamentMembers and StaffBusinessPublications & Recordsline imagesA-Z IndexGlossaryContact UsHelp
 HansardArchivesResearchHOC PublicationsHOL PublicationsCommittees
Advanced
search
Select Committee on Science and Technology Minutes of Evidence


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 introduction—and I am happy to go into this with colleagues more deeply and hear their points of view—I 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 field—and apologies for using such a loose term—is 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 cautious—and I accept your point. At the moment we are having discussions about these issues. My sense is that a good outcome—following your inquiry which has stimulated a lot of discussion across departments—is 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 money—which 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 on—of which there are many enterprises going on—and 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 $5,000—and remembering that open access enterprises at the moment are often subsidised by the not-for-profit organisations—


 
previous page contents next page

House of Commons home page Parliament home page House of Lords home page search page enquiries index

© Parliamentary copyright 2004
Prepared 20 July 2004