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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