Examination of Witnesses (Questions 400
- 419)
WEDNESDAY 5 MAY 2004
PROFESSOR SIR
KEITH O'NIONS,
MR RAMA
THIRUNAMACHANDRAN AND
PROFESSOR JOHN
WOOD
Q400 Chairman: The point is that
the RAE preserves the status quo of high price journals. How do
you break that circle?
Professor Wood: I see where you
are coming from. I have my own personal views.
Q401 Chairman: Tell me, please.
Professor Wood: The thing here
is do you put it into a high prestige journal and nobody is going
to read your article or are you going to put it into a low prestige
journal where you know it is going to be read but is not going
to give you the impact? That is always the dilemma when you get
to this situation. There is another dilemma because my research
is with industry as well and industry wants you to publish in
a very low prestige journal in order to get to their customers
and you want to publish in some obscure journal that nobody is
going to read because of the impact factor. There is always this
dichotomy.
Q402 Chairman: So any decisions you
make in the Department after your consultation could break this
status quo system, could it not? You could encourage other journals
to become upfront and the place to publish given that interdisciplinary
is the flavour.
Professor Wood: That is why I
made the point that I think there needs to be some quality standards
on what these journals are standing for. There are the very big
impact ones, and Nature has been mentioned, Science
is another one
Q403 Chairman: Nature can get passé
after a bit. Once you have three papers published in it you are
finished, to hell with it.
Professor Wood: I do not grab
Nature each week as Keith does, I have my own journals
that I grab. There are journals lower down where the impact is
relatively low and those are the ones where it is important to
get the articles in.
Dr Iddon: As a Fellow of the Royal Society
of Chemistry I felt very loyal to the Society as a learned society
and, therefore, the vast majority of my research was published
in the journals published by the learned society. I also knew
that my younger colleagues who were perhaps ahead of the field
were not publishing in those journals, they were going elsewhere
to high impact journals because they were very conscious of the
RAE research scores that we have just been discussing and, therefore,
people who are loyal to their learned societies might lose out
by taking that action.
Q404 Chairman: And there is the promotional
aspect.
Professor Wood: As a fellow Fellow,
yes, I agree with you. I have done exactly the same.
Q405 Dr Turner: Can we change tack
a little. Lots of publishers require authors to hand over full
rights of the copyright to their research papers. Are you content
for so much intellectual property to be handed from the public
to the commercial sector? If so, why?
Professor Sir Keith O'Nions: On
a personal level, personally as a researcher, I have never found
this a big issue. It has not troubled me massively in terms of
getting access to those data and so on. Broadly, amongst the UK
community it is not an enormous issue but that does not mean to
say it is not something that requires great consideration. I do
not think it is a great bubbling issue in the UK.
Mr Thirunamachandran: One has
to draw a distinction between ownership of intellectual property,
of copyright, and exploitation of intellectual property, copyright.
In a sense, ownership is not so important as long as the rights
to exploit and licensing and other arrangements are in place so
that knowledge can be disseminated and transferred.
Q406 Dr Turner: That distinction
is kept clearly by the publishers and they do not try to get involved
in exploitation of any kind, do they? Have there been any cases
where they have abused their position?
Mr Thirunamachandran: I am not
in a position to answer that. I do not know.
Q407 Dr Turner: It could not be that
one of the reasons why you are less worried about this hand over
of the intellectual property rights is that there are not any
systems in place to help authors manage it properly so it would
entail more work. Is that an issue?
Mr Thirunamachandran: Institutions,
as part of their knowledge transfer activities, are supported
to have experts who in other areas support patents and licensing
arrangements and so on. Many of the larger institutions would
have some in-house expertise which could be used to support authors
on copyright and related licensing issues.
Professor Sir Keith O'Nions: I
sense we are in a territory here which is quite complicated when
you talk of intellectual property because if you think of intellectual
property that may give rise to a patent then obviously that would
not be published in any manner whatsoever until the patent application
had been made. If we are talking about intellectual property that
may not have any clear short-term exploitation then we are using
intellectual property in a somewhat different way. I am slightly
confused as to where your questioning is taking us.
Q408 Dr Turner: The main point at
issue, the publishing rights, is the question of the further use
of the material, whether for teaching purposes or whatever.
Professor Sir Keith O'Nions: There
is a variable but somewhat improved situation in my own personal
experience, and again I do not have all the detailed analysis
of using that stuff for teaching, personal use and getting permission
to use it in other publications and reviews. I think mostly it
is satisfactory, again I do not have the statistics. I am sure
there will be situations where there are still pockets of annoyance,
but my sense is that situation is reasonably satisfactory.
Professor Wood: I was just going
to continue the answer to that question. I understand that about
65% of publishers now allow institutional self-archiving anyway
and that is how we go ahead, although we do 100% and that was
really because of this potential IPR, it started off with the
patentable area where we obviously protect ourselves first of
all. We have not noticed any major problem there, we just do it.
Q409 Paul Farrelly: I am speaking
not as a scientist but a former journalist. I am quite baffled,
Professor O'Nions, at your bafflement at the questioning on copyright.
You have previously talked about facilitating a level playing
field and we tied you down to one specific, which was about shifting
pots of money around, but if you were really taking a serious
look at facilitating a level playing field you could not have
done that without looking at the issue of copyright.
Professor Sir Keith O'Nions: I
fully accept your point. I am not pretending that we have analysed
all the ins and outs of it. When you look at open access and start
getting into it you, are immediately impressed with how complex
the issues are. When you look at archiving you realise that the
open access issue is far less complex than the issues involved
with copyright. I completely accept your implied criticism. I
do not think we have fully researched and understood all the implications
of these changing models.
Q410 Paul Farrelly: If you put some
hard questions about the importance of copyright in such a review
to the industry you would test how important current practices
on copyright are to the industry, how integral they are, rather
than it just being "Well, somebody else is doing it, therefore
it has not come up, we are going to take all copyright away".
Copyright also has value, do you believe, in a different sense
because it can facilitate a level playing field?
Professor Sir Keith O'Nions: It
has to be part of that balance.
Q411 Mr Key: The Government has told
us in written evidence to the Committee that there is a need for
the Government and other public bodies to collaborate to keep
down purchasing costs. What actual measures has the Government
taken to achieve that?
Mr Thirunamachandran: I do not
know in detail.
Q412 Mr Key: It was the Government's
evidence so presumably the Government said it and they had something
in mind.
Professor Sir Keith O'Nions: I
am waiting for a scribbled note.
Q413 Mr Key: Any help from the back
benches? Could you very kindly write to us then to say what you
meant in the evidence you gave that you cannot remember.
Professor Sir Keith O'Nions: The
observation is that a great deal has happened with universities
starting to get together to collectively buy bundles of publications
and so on and reduce costs in that way. There is quite a lot of
evidence on what has happened. You are asking the particular question
is there an item of Government policy that has pushed that.
Q414 Mr Key: Yes. The Government
said that: "overall, Government needs to organise effectively
to reduce the total purchasing costs and should actively ensure
that other public bodies do so as well". So nothing has happened,
it did not actually mean anything?
Professor Sir Keith O'Nions: We
will give you written advice on any specifics.
Mr Key: I would be grateful. Thank you
very much.
Q415 Chairman: Let us have three
questions to take us up to the end. Do you believe in publicly
funded research being available to all the public? Do you believe
in that principle? If the Government believes in it would it fund
it, do you think? Should it fund it?
Professor Wood: It is RCUK's principle
that it should be publicly available.
Q416 Chairman: So you would rather
leave it to the Government to do it than commercial publishers?
Professor Wood: I do not think
we have a view as a collective group on that.
Q417 Chairman: What I am finding
very difficult here is that you do not have the answers we really
need to advance things, and I think you feel that yourselves.
What I do not understand is why, Sir Keith, you are representing
the DTI. Why did they not send somebody else in? Is that because
they have got nothing to say, they have done nothing or are they
hiding and putting you up as the best they can get?
Professor Sir Keith O'Nions: I
do not think there is anything sinister like that. I happen to
be the one who has come along.
Q418 Dr Turner: You drew the short
straw.
Professor Sir Keith O'Nions: I
do not thinkI will be quite openI can fully represent
all the wider views of the DTI and I said that at the beginning.
Clearly the view is that the OST has a very strong involvement
and that is where a great deal of the public funding for research
goes on and I think that is why I am here rather than anybody
else.
Q419 Chairman: But is there somebody
else who has got responsibility in the DTI? Those sitting behind
you presumably.
Professor Sir Keith O'Nions: There
are other parts of the DTI that are responsible for looking at
the business models, commercial practice and value to the UK and
the impact of other sorts of models on the UK economy and so on.
That is certainly way outside of my remit.
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