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Select Committee on Science and Technology Minutes of Evidence


Examination of Witnesses (Questions 280 - 299)

WEDNESDAY, 21 APRIL 2004

MRS JANE CARR, PROFESSOR M JAMES C CRABBE, PROFESSOR JOHN C FRY, PROFESSOR NIGEL J HITCHIN AND PROFESSOR DAVID F WILLIAMS

  Q280  Dr Harris: What problems?

  Professor Hitchin: Problems of independent researchers who are not supported by grants, possibly.

  Professor Fry: I think that there are tremendous problems with the proposed models for open access. As an example, in fact, a journal published by the learned societies would have to charge as much as journals for commercial publishers, as it actually costs almost as much to produce a journal for internet dispersal as it does to produce a printed journal, because all you are actually, in fact, saving is the printing and the distribution of the journal afterwards, which is a very small part of the overall cost. It is absolutely vital for science in Britain and the world today to have strong learned societies. Strong learned societies, largely from their profits from publications, support in fact the majority of congresses and conferences; they are the major form of oral communication at work before it is published in print, they are allowing scientists to interact together to get fresh ideas. Conferences, which are largely supported by the learned societies, are absolutely vital and so in an open access model we have to find a way of making it work as far as the learned societies are concerned. That is crucial.

  Mrs Carr: I would only add the view that our perception is that a mixed economy at least in the medium term has to be a more appropriate option. We have not tested the open access financial models. Certainly our members who are academic writers want, above all, to have their research made available as widely as possible but, equally, they want to ensure that it is appropriately available and that their rights and interests are appropriately managed and protected in that environment. We feel, therefore, that there are two issues here: the financial model needs to be tested more fully and that the rights of those authors need to be assured in that environment.

  Q281  Chairman: You might be persuaded in order to change the current model of the ship if some evidence came forward that open access achieved something along the lines you have just indicated?

  Mrs Carr: From the authors' perspective, their concern is—and I speak here about authors more widely and my colleagues here will be able to speak specifically much more appropriately than I can—about the protection of rights. There is a concern that the practice, for example, of assignment of rights and the way in which authors' rights are taken away from them in that transaction could be carried through into an open access model, and we need to be sure in developing that model that not only is financial stability provided to ensure that the access is long-term but, also the rights—and that is the moral rights in terms of the integrity and the paternity of the work—as well as their copyright.

  Q282  Chairman: But the door is open?

  Mrs Carr: I think the door is open but I do not think any of us yet can say that the model is effectively tested.

  Professor Williams: Chairman, can I just say that obviously those points are valid but I have not yet seen, however, any groundswell of opinion in my own sector that open access is going to improve any situation. I should say, and you are correct, there are different aspects to this; there is the financial model and there are other aspects. It has been said, I notice in some of the evidence before you, that open access allows and facilitates the greater introduction of technology into publishing. That is not the case. In my own journal we have equal access to all the technology we publish, we use the internet totally in terms of submission for the peer review process and we can have video clips in our online version.

  Q283  Chairman: What about bundling? What is your view about bundling? We have heard in the last session it may be on the way out so it may not be a major problem, but what do you feel about it at this moment?

  Professor Williams: I take no strong view. Whether it is going or not, I accept that may well happen. From my point of view, wearing all my different hats, I can see the need for commercial publishers to go down the route of bundling. I am fairly neutral. I do not see any significant advantage or disadvantage to editors or to authors. I should say that I am editor-in-chief of a journal published by Elsevier.

  Q284  Chairman: Not that that biases you in any way!

  Professor Williams: Not at all.

  Professor Fry: Bundling has been extremely valuable for the users of journals because it has increased their access to journals enormously, particularly within groups of subject areas. You have heard previous evidence that Elsevier offer a subject group bundle as well. That has improved access in my laboratory and amongst my students too, and in an enormous range of journals, particularly journals which specialise in publishing concise and cohesive reviews in subject areas. These have been extremely valuable to undergraduate students, particularly in their final year—the MSc students, to researchers changing subject areas and PhD students, etc. As far as groups of societies are concerned, in fact I am publication manager for FEMS, the Federation of European Microbiology Societies, and all our journals at the moment are owned and published by Elsevier as well. However, if, for instance, we were to choose to publish them ourselves, I think in the marketplace at the moment it would be extremely difficult to understand how we could actually produce income for our organisation and hence, in fact, promote microbiology in Europe in a whole variety of ways. The problem is that print subscriptions are decreasing and online income for us, through Elsevier, is increasing enormously, so a small publisher has to have a model for making money out of online access. I have talked to a few societies and, at the moment, they are still relying very heavily on print subscriptions; fewer are actually making a large amount of money from online access.

  Q285  Dr Iddon: In a word or a sentence can each of you tell us why you publish in journals?

  Professor Crabbe: The key is to get a wide audience, to get one's science recognised and for it to be recognised not just for what it is but, also, to benefit the institution from which it comes. Of course, the Research Assessment Exercise is a key factor here. Certainly I give money to my colleagues within my school to ensure that they are not disadvantaged in publishing in high-impact factor journals where there are publication costs—be these open access journals or be they printed journals.

  Professor Fry: I completely agree. I think it has been extremely well summarised. I think we all try and choose the journals which will provide a particular scope of wide access. In fact, in my subject area it is extremely important I publish about half of my work in American journals and about half of my work in European journals because Americans are not very good at reading European journals. We are also aiming to publish in high profile journals and it is high profile journal publication which helps us enormously as far as the RAE is concerned, for example.

  Professor Williams: I agree with those points. I think one has to accept there are two factors here. One is your professional responsibility, and the other is your own personal ambition. They both end up in the same, that is publishing in the highest quality journal. As head of a very large research group I have responsibility for myself and my staff to publish in the best journals. That is how I am measured every three years or every five years; RAE or a review, it is the quality of the journals on that list. So from the point of view of my research centre all my staff are encouraged to publish in the highest quality journals. My personal ambition is that I want to have my reputation based upon the quality of my papers, and therefore, again, I choose the highest quality journals available in my area.

  Professor Hitchin: I choose a journal because of its readership. With the type of mathematics I write I think of an individual paper and I think, "Who would benefit from reading this?" and I choose the appropriate journal that way. Of course, some have a higher reputation than others according to other regards but basically my reason for choosing it is: "Is this the right journal for this particular paper?"

  Mrs Carr: What I would add to that is that we believe that authors should be able to choose freely where they wish to publish and, also, that that has an impact, if I may say, going back to the open access model, because if they do not have access to the funding that might secure them that freedom then, I suppose, that is another area we need to look at carefully.

  Q286  Dr Iddon: Can I put it to you that it seems to me sometimes that academics are their own worst enemies for two reasons—and you have hinted at one. Right along the road you seem to be suggesting that you want to publish in the high impact journals, the ones that are the most prestigious for your subject. Can I put it to you that you are driving up the cost of those journals by doing that, particularly journals like Nature where the rejection rates are tremendously high? Would it not benefit the academic community if you changed your policy?

  Professor Crabbe: Perhaps I could come in and say that from what Professor Hitchin has said obviously we want to get a wide readership. With the access that is available at the moment, theoretically it should not matter which journal we publish in at all; if the material is available over the web it can be accessed by anybody. So what is the other driver? The driver is finance. The driver is the Research Assessment Exercise. Impact factors, the half-life of journals are what drives us, I am afraid.

  Q287  Chairman: If there was no Research Assessment Exercise you could not live, could you? You could publish anywhere.

  Professor Williams: No, I do not accept that.

  Q288  Chairman: You want to keep the Research Assessment Exercise?

  Professor Williams: No, not at all, no. I do not think it has any impact on the editorial process in publishing.

  Professor Hitchin: I should also point out that this question about which journal to publish in and the RAE is a discipline-dependent one. My own RAE panel, in pure mathematics, quite specifically said that "mathematicians publish in a wide variety of different formats and that output of high quality may appear in any of these."[3] So we definitely distanced ourselves from the idea that only certain journals contain good science.


  Q289  Dr Iddon: When I started my career as a chemist there were very few journals and they were published, on the whole, by learned societies. Then the commercial houses came in, and once the commercial houses came in it seemed to me that academics—every academic—seemed to want to be an editor of his or her new journal. I also put it to you that down the last few decades academics have been their own worst enemies in following that trend with every academic seeming to want to be an editor of a journal. Would anyone like to contradict that statement?

  Professor Fry: I think it is almost completely the opposite, in fact, because being an editor of a journal involves a fantastic amount of work. I know plenty of academics who do not feel absolutely committed to providing this sort of journal service.

  Q290  Chairman: But they review papers—that is part of the job—unpaid.

  Professor Williams: That is one of the most difficult aspects of being editor-in-chief.

  Professor Fry: Finding good, strong people to review papers is difficult. Perhaps I could quickly return to the question before last, which asked has the Research Assessment Exercise changed our publishing? I think it has changed our publishing enormously because we are all scurrying to get into the highest quality journals where previously, in fact, most academics had a much broader range of publishing profiles. Now publishing profiles are becoming focused. Also, if you are doing work which is hard to publish in high profile journals—for instance, for a proportion of applied ecology work it is extremely hard to get papers in high quality journals—these academics are being pretty well sidelined as far as research goes in departments because we cannot afford to support staff whose articles are not regularly published in these high quality journals, for RAE reasons.

  Q291  Dr Iddon: Finally, can I look at the "author pays" trend—the author pays for the publication of the paper, trend? We have heard that it can cost anything from $500 to as high as $30,000 to publish an article, depending on the nature of the journal. The more prestigious, obviously, the higher the cost. Is that a realistic amount, in your view? Do you think the academic community would be prepared to pay such costs if that trend grows?

  Professor Williams: I think publishing is expensive anyway and it is just a question of which business model you are going to use. Ultimately that is not going to be the deciding factor. If that is the way it goes then I suspect, because this is a very small part of the cost of doing research anyway, the system will find a method for allowing that price to be paid. My one concern is that once you do move down that system where the author or the institution is paying I think that is probably open to a little more interference than the way we do it at the present time. In medicine, for example, are the pharmaceutical companies going to be paying for the publication and those who do not have large grants from these drug companies may not be able to do so. There is greater scope for that interference through that route than at the present time.

  Professor Crabbe: I would like to say that when I started my career as a biochemist the reason I never published in a journal on biological chemistry was because they had page charges and I thought this was not acceptable for a science. Now, of course, the whole question has been changed, the whole answer system has been changed and I now provide money for my colleagues to publish in those journals. I think there is obviously a balance for who pays and that balance can come partly from research councils, partly from the universities and partly from the publishers themselves.

  Professor Fry: Quite a few American journals charge page charges and, for instance, to publish in American journals I have publishing costs of about £400 a paper. I do not ever put a colour figure in these journals, I put all my colour figures in journals which publish colour free, and hence it means targeting work in different ways according to the journal. I think if I had to pay £3,000, for example, to publish an article it would present a considerable obstacle. One of the arguments which has been made is that, in fact, research grants could include an element for that. Okay, it is not an enormous amount, it might be 10% of the research grant, but there are in fact minor practical problems. For instance, we have to spend our money during a research grant; we are not allowed to spend any after the end of it. In fact, most publications come in the latter half of the research grant and a few years afterwards, so where do we get the money from? In, for instance, a few universities a proportion of the overheads which come from the research council grants are returned to investigators and so it would be possible to save these for other expenses. Not all universities do that, however, and so this whole host, in fact, of minor practical problems makes it all very difficult to see how it is going to work without our current academic model as it operates in Britain at the moment.

  Q292  Dr Iddon: Finally, in this section, what incentives or disincentives are in place for authors to publish in digital-only journals?

  Professor Crabbe: I think the main incentive has to be rigorous peer review. Whatever you publish that has to be top. Why go to a particular journal when readership depends on the access? Obviously, with the open access journals that instant access is a clear incentive.

  Professor Hitchin: The point I made in my written evidence was that there are and there do exist unrefereed open access journals—well, not journals, they are resources.

  Q293  Chairman: ArXiv is one. You are rather keen on it, are you not?

  Professor Hitchin: I am indeed, and I am a relatively recent convert. It was originally started by a physicist putting a pre-existing pre-print exchange system into an electronic form about 10 or 12 years ago, and it has gradually grown and then also acquired mathematics and quite recently quantitative biology as subjects. What it does is to provide instant access to unrefereed material. So there is a risk involved in taking it down and taking it as true, but, on the other hand, the people who are doing it are the same people who will be refereeing papers anyway and it is up to them to evaluate it. Eventually, of course, when it gets accepted by a journal then it has this mark of quality placed against it and one can see what the quality is. My point is that here the author, the researcher, gets instant access to researchers around the world. It is a point that has been made to me by, for example, a physicist in Calcutta who said "You do not know the difference that it makes now that I can get the same pre-print on the same day in Calcutta as somebody in Princeton".

  Q294  Chairman: Good, but it is not refereed, is it, and it does not really induce you to want to get it published in a high-flying journal, does it? "It is out there, the world sees it, great, I have done it."

  Professor Hitchin: It is out there but the refereeing process takes time, and science sometimes cannot wait for that. So that the refereeing process gives a validation and a check, but if you—

  Q295  Chairman: Are you really saying that any old scientific garbage should be allowed to go out there on an ArXiv site?

  Professor Hitchin: No, and in fact it does not.

  Q296  Chairman: Yet people are confused by MMR jabs and stuff. Why not have a press conference instead of self-archiving?

  Professor Hitchin: It is not "any old garbage", it is screened, moderated and any inappropriate material is removed. Obviously, anything that you put on the internet is going to attract all sorts of rubbish; we know that every time we look at our e-mails. There are teams of eminent mathematicians who actually screen this material. They do not referee it but they screen it so that it is appropriate for the audience that it is intended for.

  Q297  Bob Spink: While we are on this subject, looking at it from the user's viewpoint, we have had a lot of enthusiasm from the witnesses today for online access but there is another possible view, and that is are these young researchers, who are children of the internet, who you now work with, finding it too easy to search the body of material using the sort of well-known search engines like Yahoo and Google and going straight to the documents without actually getting into the body of available material and learning and picking up leads, and what-have-you? Is this just too efficient, too much of a short-cut and preventing them going through the full research-rich experience that colleagues round here had to go through?

  Professor Crabbe: I will say that it is tremendously important that the whole paper be made available and not just the abstract, otherwise what you say is all too likely.

  Professor Fry: It is a real problem, what you are explaining. We all have to spend considerable effort on retraining students because in schools they are encouraged to use the internet for everything; they tend to use the internet for everything and I am constantly having to remind students that, in fact, in science we use the primary literature. You can use the internet to gain access to that literature and have a certain degree of overview but you should always read the primary literature, whether it is reviews which are refereed or if it is written papers which are refereed. Refereeing, I think, is absolutely vital. It is of key importance.

  Professor Williams: Can I agree with that? I think in the direction you are going I totally agree. Whilst we all embrace the internet as best we can, I think there is a danger: that it is not just access to the papers it is the ability to understand and interpret that information which is so important. In answer to previous questions, I respectfully disagree here. I have great concern about this open refereeing of papers. Peer review in good quality papers is the most important issue. I do not think science is moving so fast we cannot make the peer review. In my own journal I am as fast as I can but I wait for the peer review before making decisions. Science never goes so fast that we say "Let's forget peer review". I am very much against having discussion pages on the internet to determine how good a paper is, it is not a substitute for a good quality peer review.

  Professor Hitchin: I would agree with that but I do not subscribe to that model.

  Professor Crabbe: Some of my colleagues, particularly in statistics, have a real problem with the length of publication time. I work in statistics, or statistical computation biology, and I just refuse to publish in that area, in those journals, because they are just so slow. So I publish on computational biology in biochemistry journals. So some colleagues have a real problem, if they are learned journals from learned societies, in that they do take a long time. That is where something like Professor Hitchin's model could perhaps be useful, but in general peer review has to be vital.

  Q298  Bob Spink: The point I was making is if the internet search engines can take you straight to the final point it can avoid you seeing the options that you would normally find if you were going along the more traditional route of research literature. The learning process just is not there.

  Professor Crabbe: You have to have infinite trust in Google to make sure you end up at the right spot.

  Q299  Dr Turner: Can I ask you how you feel about the copyright issue? On what proportion of papers do you sign away their copyright? Does this worry you? What are the sort of terms of the copyright agreements that you have to sign?

  Professor Williams: In the vast majority of papers which I publish I have to sign copyright for the publisher. It has never been a concern to me. As editor-in-chief I have never had a concern raised by any author at any time about the copyright issue.

  Professor Crabbe: I would agree with that.


3   RAE UoA 22 Assessment Panel's Criteria 3.15.18 Back


 
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