Examination of Witnesses (Questions 380
- 399)
WEDNESDAY 5 MAY 2004
PROFESSOR SIR
KEITH O'NIONS,
MR RAMA
THIRUNAMACHANDRAN AND
PROFESSOR JOHN
WOOD
Q380 Chairman: So that is £40
million.
Mr Thirunamachandran: Around that
figure, broadly speaking. This is a UK-wide figure, so it covers
more than England.
Q381 Mr Key: Could I turn to the
question on institutional repositories. We have been told that
83% of publishers currently allow authors to archive their papers
in a post-print archive but hardly any will publish papers that
have been deposited on a pre-print server. The project known as
Securing a Hybrid Environment for Research Preservation and Access
(SHERPA) has told us that institutional repositories can be set
up quite quickly and efficiently. What is the position of the
Government and the research councils on this problem of institutional
repositories?
Professor Wood: As far as the
RCUK is concerned, we are fully in favour of institutional repositories.
Indeed, my own council does have such enthusiasm, but I think
this goes back to an earlier question really about what confidence
do we have in the whole system and the publishers and those who
are upholding these repositories, and also, to an extent, where
there is long-term archiving, who is holding the responsibility
100 years hence. These are issues, but the RCUK are very much
in favour of institutional repositories.
Q382 Mr Key: Are you prepared to
help fund them? Is the Government and the DTI prepared to help
fund these repository systems?
Professor Wood: We fund ours.
Professor Sir Keith O'Nions: In
effect, it does. SHERPA is the one you were talking about, CURL
is another one.[1]
In effect, they are funded by use of government funds. I agree
with my colleague, I think they are a very welcome development.
Q383 Mr Key: Am I right to assume
that you would encourage interconnection? Would you be prepared
to help fund it specifically? Rather than just as we have been
talking, Sir Keith, in terms of general grant provision, would
you be prepared to ring-fence some funding for this project?
Professor Sir Keith O'Nions: I
think that is a very important suggestion. It is not one that
I personally have given a lot of thought to, but I think it does
call for some real clarity of what sort of policy we should have.
If I think there is a very strong argument in favour of putting
some ring-fencing for that, we should entertain the possibility.
I am not aware that we have been pressured from the outside for
it, but I think it is a very important point.
Q384 Mr Key: Could I ask, finally:
What effect do you think self-archiving on either pre- or post-print
repositories might have on the publishing industry? They are very
interested in this, clearly, but what do you think?
Professor Sir Keith O'Nions: Self-archiving
at an institutional level, do you mean?
Q385 Mr Key: Absolutely.
Professor Sir Keith O'Nions: I
do not have an analysis of what effect that would have on the
commercial publishing industry.
Q386 Mr Key: Does anybody else have
strong views?
Professor Wood: I cannot comment
on the effect it would have on the commercial side, but I am concerned
that the long-term archiving is taken forward very seriously.
We archive a lot of our data, for instance, and we find the software
backup and things you need just to be able to access that after
10 years is very difficult to support. I am very concerned that
there is a policy on this. We are in discussions with the British
Library and we fully support their role in perhaps taking an active
part.
Q387 Mr Key: Who would be responsible
for developing such a policy? Would it be the DTI?
Professor Sir Keith O'Nions: I
think it would have to be developed jointly with the DCMS because
of the legal deposit aspect of the British Library. So DCMS, DTI/OST
and the DfES.
Q388 Mr Key: Who gets the ball rolling
between those departments in an environment of joined-up government?
Professor Sir Keith O'Nions: The
ball is actually rolling. We have had numerous discussions. And,
as I say, being quite frank, I think the interest of this Committee
has stimulated that considerably.
Q389 Mr Key: Do you have in mind
a timescale for this before something actually happens as opposed
to letting the ball roll?
Professor Sir Keith O'Nions: I
sense, from the conversations we have had this morning, that the
timescale may be shortening quite rapidly!
Q390 Mr Key: Years? Months?
Professor Sir Keith O'Nions: Well,
you can measure anything in any unit of time, but I would say
months.
Chairman: Let's help get that ball in
the goal-mouth.
Q391 Kate Hoey: I am interested in
"quality" journals. We hear about quality journals a
lot and we know that the RAE uses, in terms of their assessment,
what kind of publication it has been in. Could you define for
us what "quality" means? Who has decided what a quality
journal is and how do you judge it?
Professor Sir Keith O'Nions: I
shall probably get pulled up immediately by one of your colleagues,
but the assessment of quality is purely qualitative, unfortunately.
Q392 Dr Turner: Do you mean subjective?
Professor Sir Keith O'Nions: It
is subjective.
Q393 Kate Hoey: If Joe Bloggs wants
to go and buy a quality journal, how does he know it is a quality
journal?
Professor Sir Keith O'Nions: In
a particular field of endeavour, there are particular journals
that are sought after for individuals to publish in, and this
will be some function of how tough it is to publish there; confidence
they have in the peer review; journals that anecdotally they know
all of their colleagues whom they hold in esteem will pick up
immediately it comes onto the internet or comes into their library.
It is that sort of judgment that establishes journals very high
esteem. Nature is one of these journals that, even in a
full-time job in Whitehall, I almost sort of snatch off the table
when it arrives on Thursday, because I know there will probably
be things in there of great scientific importance week after week.
It is that sort of subjective judgment.
Q394 Kate Hoey: So you just assume
that if something is in a good quality journal it is a very, very
important piece of work. Do you think sometimes that what something
is published in is more important than the content?
Professor Sir Keith O'Nions: No,
I mean the importance of a piece of work sometimes takes many,
many years to establish, but people can feel assured that that
piece of work will have been rigorously peer reviewed, and therefore
has a high chance of being free of error, and will be timely and
will not be just a repetitive piece of research. It is that sort
of assurance that people feel. What its real impact is on science
may be minimal or may take another 30 years to discover.
Professor Wood: I have been in
this game for some time and, like Keith, I have been referee on
many, many journals. It is quite interesting to see how their
impact is really assessed. As you say, there are some very top-flight
ones but in individual subject areas there are ones which anecdotally
rise to the top of the pile. I actually believe that this does
need looking at quite seriously because there are important articles
which have come out in journals that are less highly regarded.
I know in my own sector, in the research assessment exercise,
the panel actually read all the papers. That, I understand, is
not always the case, but that is an anecdote that I cannot confirm.
Certainly I know that when one looks at people's CVs one looks
at the list of publications and one looks at the journal titles.
Q395 Kate Hoey: Is there not a problem
for people working in narrow or niche types of research? We heard
from Professor Fry how difficult it was in, say, applied ecology
to get published.
Professor Wood: As I say, I think
this needs actively looking at in terms of standards and how the
judgments are made. That is my personal view, I am not speaking
on behalf of the RCUK at this point. In the long-term, with a
move towards open access the whole area of peer review status
should be openly debated.
Q396 Kate Hoey: So there would be
more opportunity for new journals to come on to the market?
Professor Wood: Certainly there
need to be kite marks of certain types in order to allow people
to assess what the quality of that output would be, whether it
is a journal or just an e-form in some form, it needs to have
a quality standard attached to it.
Q397 Dr Iddon: I am particularly
concerned about the Research Assessment Exercise scores which
universities get and the journals which people publish in. I just
put it to you that by academics seeking to publish in high impact
journals, that discriminates against the new and open access journals
and, therefore, academics in a way are helping to maintain the
high cost journals rather than encouraging the development of
new and cheaper methods of publication.
Mr Thirunamachandran: Let us just
address the RAE issue head on. The motivation for people to publish
in different journals to do with prestige and status in a sense
is unrelated to the RAE. If you look at other countries which
do not have an RAE, people still want to publish in Nature
or the various prestigious journals that Sir Keith has referred
to. That is a personal promotional dimension which exists within
the system. RAE's job is to asses the quality of the research
and, as Professor Wood has already mentioned anecdotally, their
job is to look at the research output which is submitted. Of course,
the form of output and where it is published is one factor. Fundamentally,
RAE and any peer review is about looking at the quality of the
output.
Q398 Chairman: Given that there is
interdisciplinary research going on now, is there a difficulty
in knowing which journal to put it in? Like grants being passed
from one Research Council to another, you can get an article being
passed from one journal to another. Is that now beginning to emerge
which will make it very difficult?
Professor Sir Keith O'Nions: I
can give you a personal view on that. There is always a difficulty
when you get strong interdisciplinarity. Journals obviously grow
up and develop to capture some sector which is reasonably well-defined
and people understand and as science evolves things happen in-between.
I think many scientists at various times in their careers are
faced with the dilemma of where quite to put their article. Your
experience may be similar to mine, that when there are enough
people around that area usually a new publication appears or the
emphasis of an existing publication changes to meet it. That is
an ongoing issue. I do believe the system that we have overall
does respond reasonably well to it.
Professor Wood: I believe journals
effectively catch up with the field when they will see a market
opportunity. There is now a plethora of these journals. When I
started publishing some of these between the cracks
Q399 Chairman: They may become the
places to publish actually.
Professor Wood: To start with
they have a low impact factor, which goes back to the earlier
point, and that is where you come into conflict.
1 Note by the Witness: CURL (The Consortium
of Universities Libraries) is actually one of the funders of SHERPA. Back
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