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Select Committee on Science and Technology Minutes of Evidence


Examination of Witnesses (Questions 160 - 179)

MONDAY 8 MARCH 2004

DR NIGEL GODDARD, MR VITEK TRACZ AND DR HAROLD E VARMUS

  Q160  Chairman: Wiley claims that only 10% of potential users have not been able to gain access to its journals. Is this enough to justify all the whirly girly stuff that is going around?

  Mr Tracz: This is a problematic number. It depends very much on how you define who your users are and how you calculate their ability to access. For example, many people said at the last hearing that everyone can go to a public library, ask for papers and get them. Try it. I do not advise you to try it.

  Q161  Chairman: I have tried.

  Dr Varmus: I would advise you to go to a public library, go onto the computers which are sitting in public libraries, and type in www.plos.org and you will see our papers immediately.

  Q162  Chairman: As long as somebody has plugged it in, of course.

  Dr Varmus: We try to maintain electricity.

  Q163  Dr Harris: If we were minded to be keen on open access in the purist sense and really give it a push, what sort of recommendations do you feel we should be making to government? Generally we recommend to government. We can say it is a good thing and we encourage publishers and the scientific community to experiment more. Is there a role for government, both in this country and multinationally?

  Dr Varmus: Yes, there is. Much of science is publicly funded and I believe that all science funders are interested in having their findings as widely disseminated as possible. It is important for the funder to do the following things. First of all, to ensure that investigators understand and the public understands that the cost of publishing is part of the cost of doing research. Research is meaningless if it is not published so we ought to consider the roughly one% of total costs in biomedical research, for example, which are required for publishing are part of the agreement which is made when you support someone to do research. Secondly, it is important not just to encourage but even to require that the publicly funded scientists, in particular, recognise an obligation to ensure that everyone has immediate and open access to published information. Thirdly, you want to ensure the durability of the information through archives, both paper and digital, and the creation of public digital libraries, like PubMed Central at the NIH, which allow this very important function. Access is not just access. There is access to a literature which can be searched. That is where the power comes for scientists who want to work with the world's information and try to understand, by amalgamating information and comparing it, the meaning of findings which are generated all over the world.

  Dr Goddard: It is also important that these things apply to publication of data. The scientific publication is in some ways the most refined form of the information which has been gathered. With the technologies we have available now, it is possible to get the underlying data as well, which means you can go and do studies later and can build on the raw data. Many of the same issues apply to publication of data: the requirement that scientists do that, the funding for them to do it.

  Mr Tracz: May I just say, especially in the context of advice to government, that it is worth remembering that this whole discussion, the whole issue of open access and the way science publishing works, is not really about business models or what is more profitable, but about a fundamental change in the way findings, especially in the biomedical field, which is where all three of us work, are recorded and used. The changing technology has now both made it possible and in time it will become a requirement, it will become necessary, for scientists to have access to findings. It will be hard to do science without being able easily to access, to search and to use the information which is found.

  Q164  Dr Harris: What about the issue of publication bias? Is that an argument for or against? Let us say that someone was concerned that negative studies in the biomedical field were not published, causing the problem of publication bias. Can you recruit that argument to an open access model, or does it work against an open access model. Forcing authors to pay for things they really do not want to bother having to publish makes them less likely to publish arguably than if they did not have to pay to publish and they could score up a paper and meet the moral commitment, particularly when human subjects have been involved in clinical research, to publish that data even if it is not a positive finding.

  Dr Varmus: You have raised an incredibly important issue, which is one of the motivations for my several-year engagement in this topic. I believe there is a lot of information which is not currently being made available, even though the data may be important, paid for by public funds, and the result of a lot of hard work. Publishing such information is a complicated argument for the following reasons. At the same time as we are trying to show that open access works, we have to make a deep cultural change in the community of scholars which publishes scientific findings. There is an inherent conservatism in that community because publication, amongst other things I mentioned earlier, is frequently the basis on which people are recruited and promoted within the profession. They know that they must publish in the most outstanding journals, the journals with the higher credibility, whether because of impact factors or a kind of accepted hierarchy which places some journals on the top; if required to publish in the traditional, outstanding journals, frequently they will not publish the kinds of negative findings you are talking about. That creates a number of issues which come into play in answer to your question. I personally believe that the way we should begin is by changing the culture, the attitude toward open access digital publishing, by publishing journals like PLoS Biology . Our plans, and I know Vitek's plans at BioMed Central as well, are to have a much broader range of journals which will include journals which specifically deal with the kind of information you are talking about.

  Mr Tracz: I should like to correct a certain type of logical mistake we are making when we discuss open access and the payment for it. Commonly people imagine that the situation is that we suddenly ask authors to take some money from their petty cash, or away from their children and give it to some publisher who is going to publish them. That is not at all the situation. The situation in a sense is that we have a closed system to some extent, where most of the authors are also most of the consumers and where a certain amount of money is spent on some scheme to make findings visible. We are now proposing some alternative scheme of how the thing has to be financed. It has to be financed. There are many arguments that it open access seems cheaper. The problem of how that financing is organised is not fully solved. Like many new structures that is not fully solved but it needs to be solved for the good of science and society. They will be solved and they can be solved. Here is an example in England. We now have an agreement that every single scientist in England[2] does not need to ask anybody's permission and can publish in open access without paying any additional costs. Various universities, other structures, funding bodies have all already agreed. It is not that dissimilar from the same bodies buying subscriptions and scientists basically using this information without having to subscribe. Just as, most commonly, scientists do not have to subscribe, so most commonly scientists do not have to pay personally.


  Q165  Geraldine Smith: Last week we heard that the open access publishing model introduced patronage into the system and compromised the impartiality of the publishing process. How would you respond to those claims?

  Dr Varmus: I think this is a false argument; rubbish, if I may use that word. Our journals, like every other journal, want to be of the highest possible quality. We have reviewers who make the determinations about what we are going to accept, who have no direct interest in the fate of our journal, but the most important thing is that we, as publishers of open access journals, want our journals to be high quality. It is the only way we are going to succeed.

  Mr Tracz: May I make another point which is related to the way the thing is paid for? Some of the patronage argument will come from saying "Will the people who pay for the publication have some influence on the content?" I have just said that in reality the solution to the problem will be such that it will be somewhat similar to the structure in which subscriptions are now organised, that the individual scientist makes an independent decision to publish, he does not need to ask journals in the UK, for example, and many, many organisations throughout the world have now participated in the membership scheme we operate and the US operates. Basically the agreement to publish has been made in advance and every scientist publishes in whichever structure he wants to without permission.

  Q166  Geraldine Smith: What measures do open access publishers have in place to protect the integrity of the peer review process?

  Dr Varmus: We operate very much the way any journal would with respect to peer review. I would just say that at PLoS we have made a special effort with our flagship journals, which we have just launched, to ensure that we have a member of a distinguished editorial board, a professional editor and someone who is not affiliated with the board, review every paper. It is very much in our interest, as I have been stressing, to ensure that we have the highest quality of peer review, because we are trying to establish a journal which has the esteem of the scientific community. It is the only way we are going to make this cultural change, make this revolution work.

  Mr Tracz: We now publish 130 or 140 journals and many more as time goes by at various levels and we completely strictly peer review every paper properly, in the same way as a traditional publisher does, if not better. Our editorial staff is primarily ex Nature and similar journals and they take peer review very seriously and we do and we have to do so to survive because authors will not want to publish if we do not.

  The Committee suspended from 5.34pm to 5.44 pm for a division in the House

  Q167  Geraldine Smith: Why should paying authors subsidise the costs of rejected papers? If you have a high percentage of rejected papers, the authors will be subsidising those costs.

  Dr Varmus: At PLoS we do not charge for articles unless they have been accepted. There is an interest in charging a submission fee, but we have not done that. I do not know whether Vitek has considered that.

  Mr Tracz: No. This is a very good question and a perfectly reasonably question. It would in a sense be reasonable to have some charge for submission and some charge for publication and the reason we do not do it, is because we are still a young industry and we worry that if we start charging for submission it will be harder for us to persuade authors to do it. At this point it is a reasonable question and may require a solution. It is a bigger [problem] in journals which reject a lot and it is a smaller problem for journals which do not reject so many. A top quality journal like PLoS and our journal, Journal of Biology, reject 90% or so of papers, but for many journals which reject 30 or 40% of papers the problem is smaller.

  Dr Goddard: This also goes back to the point which has already been made that it is a closed system. This is already happening; the cost is already incurred. The journals which reject a lot of papers are more expensive or have a wider readership and somehow it ends up getting paid for. It is not actually the scientists who are paying this themselves, it is coming from their research grants, it is coming from the research component of the Higher Education Funding Council, funding for the universities. It is not as though the scientists are digging into their own pockets; it is coming out of the money the country is putting in to scientific publication, whatever way it is done.

  Dr Varmus: There are two economic arguments here. One is the macro-economic argument: what does it cost to run the scientific publishing enterprise? There is no doubt that when you create one copy in digital form which can be used by everybody, you have a simpler and less expensive system than if you require the trucks to carry printed copies; every copy costs an additional fee to the system. The other side of the argument is the micro-economic argument for each publishing house, that is: what mechanisms do they use to raise the money to cover the real costs of the publishing effort? Do they make a little extra, either because they are for-profit publishers or because they want to innovate and advocate for open access publishing and make the systems work better? That requires a little extra money for investment.

  Q168  Geraldine Smith: But the more prestigious journals which reject a lot of papers are surely going to charge more than the ones which have lower rejection rates.

  Dr Varmus: They will have higher costs, but there are various ways to generate the money. Remember that authors' fees play an important role in all of our concepts of open access publishing, but they are not the only source of revenue. There are various kinds of advertising, and there are other ways to raise money through memberships, subscriptions, sponsorships, philanthropy; all of us are making use of all those forms.

  Mr Tracz: There is another point to make here. The macro-economic thing is important. Once the structure exists in the UK that everybody can publish for free[3], it does not really matter how the thing is distributed. Also there is another argument which says that the author who gets the service of being published in a high impact, very important journal, does get more valuable service. There may be some argument to say it is worth it for him to pay the extra for the extra value which he or his funding institutions or his lab or the university get out of it.

  Dr Goddard: Another thing on this macro-economic side is that if you imagine we move to a situation where the country is still spending the same amount of money on scientific publication as it always has, it is quite obviously going to be much more scientifically productive if all of that information is available, whether it is data or publications, if it is all available, than if it is restricted. We just need to make that transition and the reason we can do it now and we could not before is because the technology has changed.

  Q169  Geraldine Smith: Will open access publishers have to create financial reserve by retaining a portion of the authors' payments against the possibility of fluctuation in the number of publishable articles being submitted?

  Dr Varmus: All of us are aware that what we do costs money, and we will go away as a publishing house if we do not have an appropriate business plan. Are we going to hold a reserve? We try to envisage ourselves operating in the black in the long run, and we will do everything we can to have some funds we can invest in other things than publishing, like improving technology and advancing the case for open access. One of the things you need to understand is that it is not as though we envisage a world in which a couple of us are open access publishers and the others are in a different mode. That may be true now, but the Public Library of Science began five years ago as an advocacy group; then we became a publisher, because we felt we were not moving the world in the open access direction quickly enough. Our goal now is not to take over the world. Our goal is to make other publishers see the virtue of open access and begin experiments with one article at a time and become open access publishers themselves.

  Mr Tracz: I would like to make an important point which is relevant to this situation. Of course I am a commercial publisher and one day everyone else will be open access publishers but they have not committed themselves to working on how to become open access publishers. They think it may happen and like any commercial organisation, if it starts being a success, they will do it. As a commercial publisher I try to make as much profit as I can, just like any other publisher and I cannot genetically change the basic failings of a capitalist system. However, there is one major difference which is important and a difference of which you are probably aware from the various submissions. The difference is that open access is much more open to competition and closed access is much less. In the closed traditional access in effect every journal and publisher who owns a journal has a monopoly on the papers it has. You cannot go and say you will not buy this journal because it is expensive, you will buy another because it is cheaper, because what you are really buying is not the journals. The coin of exchange in science is not journals, it is the papers you read and you cannot get those papers from any other source than the publisher who publishes them. In that sense you have no choice. If you want those papers you have to pay the price the publisher charges. Open access is not like that, the papers are free to everybody. What the open access publisher offers is a service and service is inherently more open to competition. The author will be able to say he will not use the service and have his paper published by this one because that one gives a better service for less money. The open access system is more open to competition, inherently more open to competition and therefore it has its own internal standard control which most capitalist systems have. The competition keeps the prices down. The greed of all us publishers keeps them down.

  Q170  Chairman: May I ask you quite humbly to keep the answers a bit shorter and answer the question? I understand the enthusiasm and determination, but I do not want to be here at midnight and I am sure you do not either and we should like to get some more information from you. Vitek, you publish paid-for journals too, do you not?

  Mr Tracz: Yes, we publish many things. In fact that is another thing. I will keep it short. We publish paid-for journals, but the only things for which we ask payment are reviews, commentaries, news.

  Q171  Chairman: Why do you not make them open access?

  Mr Tracz: Because we commission them and pay for them and think about them and spend much more time on them. The primary paper is a record of scientific findings. We have very little to do with it. We do not really need to do that much to it. The scientists themselves carry the whole process. We offer a little bit of a service where it is hard for scientists to do it themselves.

  Q172  Chairman: How do you answer claims that the "pay to publish" model just shifts the benefits of the system from richer readers to richer authors, from libraries to research funders?

  Dr Varmus: It does not really matter that much who actually pays. This is a closed system. Where do the libraries get their money? The research libraries in America get their money from indirect costs and grants. So now the institutions and the funders will be paying through the authors. There will be some cost shifting here, but it all comes ultimately from the same pot of money. I just do not believe that the question of where the costs are shifted and how they are shifted is nearly as important as the question of how the information is delivered, used and advantage is taken, to the benefit of the public, of the information the public pays to generate.

  Q173  Chairman: You say it is not nearly as important, but it is important, is it not? What can you do to rectify it?

  Dr Goddard: The kind of things you can do is change, if you need to, how rich the authors are. If every research grant included a component for publication, which you just use to publish, that would take care of people who have research grants. For people who do not have research grants there would need to be, if the Science Councils deemed it the right thing to do, a component which is devoted to publication.

  Q174  Chairman: Is this happening in the United States? Is there an emphasis on the research grant having a component for this?

  Dr Varmus: It has always been assumed. We should not forget that most journals charge page charges now. If they do not have page charges, they have charges for colour photographs. My last three papers each cost me more than $3,000 to publish. The US system expects the investigator to spend money on page charges, and expects the research institution to buy subscriptions for our local libraries; indirect costs come out of our grants, so the system is already paying through the grant agency quite hefty sums to support the publishing industry. There is an incentive to bring the total cost down.

  Dr Goddard: Also in the United States there is actually a precedent for this now, that the National Institute of Health requires large grant holders to publish their research data and they specifically expect authors to put a line item in the budget for the costs of doing that.

  Q175  Chairman: What do they put in the budget? How much?

  Dr Varmus: There has always been a place for publications under other miscellaneous charges. Let me make another point, concerning the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, which is one of the major funders of medical research; it is a private funder, but it spends about $300 million a year to cover 350 or so investigators. The HHHI have said that they encourage publication in open access journals and that they will give their investors up to an additional $3,000 a year to cover the charges of publishing in open access journals. They are providing incentives which are very important.

  Q176  Chairman: $3,000 does not sound very much, does it?

  Dr Varmus: It is two papers a year beyond what costs would have been incurred anyway. So it is an encouragement. I want to get back to this important question of evaluation. Having the Howard Hughes Institute, which evaluates its investigators regularly, encourage their investigators to publish in these journals, is a clarion call to some of the best biomedical scientists in the country that publishing in open access journals is going to enhance their standing with the institute.

  Q177  Dr Iddon: I understand that some of you are using the argument that we should shift the cost of publishing from the individual author to the people who fund the research.

  Dr Varmus: The individual authors are not paying out of their pockets for this.

  Q178  Dr Iddon: Can I put the point of view that universities are being expected in future to fund the whole cost of their research. If the people who support the research are the European Union through the framework programme, for example, they are not at present funding the total cost of the research carried out and if the cost of publications is going to go up and in particular is going to shift the cost to the funder entirely, there is a real problem there.

  Dr Varmus: The cost of publication will not go up overall. Secondly, the payment will usually be made by the funding agency, not by the institution. Right now the institution actually has a larger degree of cost sharing because they are responsible for paying the subscription costs which in my view are often intolerably high.

  Q179  Dr Iddon: I just make the point that charities will be hard hit too with that set-up. May I just put another point to you? Academics do the vast majority of research and the vast majority of publishing, but they are not the only readers of the research. There are public institutions, companies throughout the world. How do you bring them into the picture of paying for the cost of publications which they are the users of and prime users of? Why should academics mainly carry the total cost of the publishing?

  Dr Varmus: There are several answers. One of course is that the average corporation which uses such journals does have authors who pay. Secondly, they would argue that they pay their taxes, the taxes go to government, the government agencies pay for publication and want the industries to see the results of research because one of the reasons we do medical research is to support industrial efforts in making new products which help to improve the health of the nation. Finally, we also have a corporate sponsor programme at the PLoS in which we give our corporate friends a chance to help support the activity.


2   Note by the witness: meaning the UK, at UK universities covered by JISC, and the NHS. Back

3   Note by the witness: meaning "free" to the author, the fees being paid by the institutional or funding `structure'. Back


 
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