Examination of Witnesses (Questions 300
- 319)
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
Q300 Dr Turner: Do you find publishers
helpful in terms of copyright and protecting your work?
Professor Williams: Yes.
Professor Crabbe: Yes.
Mrs Carr: Could I come in here
because, clearly, as a collective organisation we will tend to
see authors when things go wrong, and so we do indeed see things
going wrong and going wrong in a fairly serious way. The practice
of assignment by some publishers takes away all the rights of
an author, if I can quote: "Without limitation, any form
of electronic exploitation, distribution or transmission, not
known or invented in the future, all other intellectual property
rights in such contributions . . ." and so on. In other words,
there is nothing left of an author's original copyright; all rights
are required to be assigned and we do have authors who come to
us from the academic sector who are concerned. For example, we
have surveyed our members recentlyearlier this yearand
we have also looked at a learned society professional publisher
survey. Authors in the academic sector are concerned about their
copyright. They are concerned about assignment. We have evidence
from individuals who, for example, report to us in a response
"The only journal I challenged over assigning copyright agreed
to assign it to me as long as I understood they would not publish
me again. Academic publishing is, from an author's perspective,
a complete rip-off."
Q301 Chairman: Who said that?
Ms Carr: I have not actually got
a name here.
Q302 Chairman: You have just made
that up!
Mrs Carr: No, absolutely not.
I cannot, in data protection terms, give you that name without
the permission of that person. I can assure you it is an exact
quote from a response to a survey earlier this year.
Q303 Dr Turner: Do you suffer any
impediment from copyright assignment in using your published material
for teaching purposes? Is there any difference between printed
journals and digital material?
Professor Williams: I see no impediment
at all. In fact, I am a little concerned as to why anybody publishing
an original piece of research wants to print that somewhere else.
It is different if you are publishing books or monographs, which
has a different intellectual input. There one can see the need
for embellishing that somewhere else. As an editor, one of my
concerns is people trying to publish it twice with slight modifications,
but I have no problem with the copyright issue there and it does
not impede me in my teaching at all.
Q304 Dr Turner: Does it worry you
that once you have assigned copyright you have no control over
the material, which might be tampered with or misused?
Professor Williams: I personally
have never seen any evidence of misuse of material which has been
copyrighted by the publisher. I have never seen any evidence it
happens. If it did and it was a serious misuse then I agree that
would be a concern, but I have no evidence that that happens.
Q305 Dr Turner: Mrs Carr, a lot of
articles are submitted by a large number of authors on one paper.
How does multiple ownership of the original copyright and its
assignment affect this situation?
Mrs Carr: I agree that there is
difficulty and this is, perhaps, a place where collective societies
such as ourselves can help. We, for example, will make payments
to all authors who contribute to an article, where their secondary
rights are mandated to us, and we do go to some considerable lengths
to identify them and pay them even when they are relatively small
sums, because we believe it is very important for those authors
each to be recognised as having been a contributor. I suppose
that is behind what I am trying to say. There are individuals
hereand I am absolutely sure that those who sit beside
me are in positions where perhaps they have not had to fight for
their rights and they have been supported fully through the current
system and may be less aware than perhaps I am of some of the
difficulties that other colleagues encounter on their way through
the system.
Chairman: Dr Harris, do you want to talk
to me about fraud, please?
Q306 Dr Harris: It is a very big
subject, but one of the key issues, and there are so many hereand
I direct this initially to Professor Crabbe because he is an advocate
of the open access modelis that when the author pays there
will be pressure, direct, indirect, perceived or otherwise, on
the journal to publish, with less stress on the quality, and,
secondly, to speed up, possibly to the detriment of quality, the
process of review and publication, because in order to maintain
a large number of submissions one, therefore, wants quality or
wants to offer what is perceived by the authors as a good service.
How do you respond to those concerns as an advocate of open access?
Professor Crabbe: Firstly I would
say that if that happened no one would publish in a journal who
would be interested in high quality science. They just would not
go for that.
Q307 Dr Harris: It would be self-policing?
Professor Crabbe: It would certainly
be self-policing.
Q308 Dr Harris: Instantaneously self-policing,
or would there be five years
Professor Crabbe: It only takes
one journal, one paper, one bad paper in a journal for that journal
to get a very bad reputation. So self-policing is very important.
One of the problems with open access journals is persuading colleagues
that it is actually a rigorous peer review system, and that is
not the sort of system that we have discussed that was introduced
by Professor Hitchin. I think that if colleagues are persuadable
that this is high quality, good science, highly rigorously peer
reviewed, then the problems you mention will not happen.
Q309 Dr Harris: If anyone else who
is a supporter has anything else to add, please feel free. What
about the concern that those with generous grant systems, for
example industry, for example the pharmaceutical industrywhere
there are already other issueswill find it easier to publish
in the most prestigious journals which, by definition, will have
a higher price because they have a higher rejection rate and,
therefore, have to do more reviews per article published, and
that will squeeze out both those researchers who do not have industry
backing and those subjects where there are less generous grants,
for example in mathematics?
Professor Crabbe: I quite agree
that is an important issue to address and I think it is an issue
that needs to be discussed between the publishers, between the
research councils, between the charities who provide grants, possibly
the pharmaceutical firms, and the authors themselves. It is a
problem, and right at the very beginning I did say that one of
the reasons I did not publish in journals that had page charges
was that it did seem to me, perhaps, not acceptable from the scientific
point of view. However, things have moved on now and I will actually
give money to my colleagues to publish in high quality journals
as long as I am satisfied that they are high quality journals.
Q310 Chairman: Where do you get that
money from? Do you take it from another budget?
Professor Crabbe: I have a budget
that I created within my institution, in my school, yes.
Q311 Chairman: That is public money,
is it?
Professor Crabbe: That is indeed
public money.
Q312 Chairman: Meant for something
else?
Professor Crabbe: No, it comes
from the overheads, it comes from the grant that we get for research.
Q313 Chairman: How much is that a
year? How much do you use?
Professor Crabbe: How much do
I use? I do not actually use a tremendous amount. It is certainly
in the hundreds, possibly the very low thousands and something
per year.
Q314 Chairman: Would you do it for
a PhD student who has done something academic, to encourage them
to publishto get them on the ladder of fame?
Professor Crabbe: I am extremely
keen on career development, and I have a number of systems of
promoting PhD students and post-doc. In my areas it would be almost
impossible for a PhD student to publish on their own without their
supervisor, without their research group, but in other areasin
languages and sociologythen that could well happen.
Q315 Dr Harris: It is not very satisfactory
either way, is it, because for those researchers without a sugar
daddy (if I can describe you as that) with a pot of money to solve
the problem in open access terms then it is not satisfactory?
Indeed for those where there is this source of funding it proves
the point that money talks in terms of publication. So I think
we do have an issue here, as you have acknowledged yourself, and
I think this equity issue is a genuine barrier towards wholesale
support for open access.
Professor Crabbe: I think that
is right, but I would say that whether it is an open access journal
or a print journal is not a question in my mind when I am providing
that money. What is more important is what one of my colleagues
said, that in some universities the overheads actually go back
to the group, back to the school, and in other universities they
do not. There is certainly an inequity there.
Professor Williams: As you say,
it is a factor but only a very small factor, bearing in mind that
research is expensive, it takes a lot of time, a lot of people
and a lot of money. You have that inequity in all other parts,
in access to laboratories, access to top quality equipment and
so on. That is built into the research system.
Q316 Dr Harris: Professor Williams,
now you have waded in here, you said in answer to the Chairman's
first question that you were not conservative minded in these
areas, but you then said that come what may you are damn well
going to seek to publish in prestigious journals, regardless of
the merits of your workin other words, that if it is good
enough it should be recognised in any journaland you are
prepared to just seek out those prestigious journals and keep
on this problem, which many people perceive as a problem, that
if you cannot get published in those because you are in an area
which they do not publish then you are going to suffer. Surely,
to break this problem of the RAE looking at where you publish,
which you I think accepted, do you not have to break out from
this mindset?
Professor Williams: I do not recognise
that as a definition of conservatism and I really do not believe
that is the case.
Q317 Dr Harris: You do not believe
there is a need to change, because the dictionary definition would
suggest that might be perceived as conservative with a small "c".
Professor Williams: I do not see
the need for substantial change, no. I think there has been a
very, very good evolution; it has been quite rapid over the last
few years but I do not see any reason for substantial change,
no.
Q318 Dr Harris: There is this issue
in medicinein bioscience anywaythat unpublished
studies, studies that are negative and not interesting, do not
get published, and you therefore get this publication bias. That
is already a problem, and I happen to think it is a major problem,
particularly in the biosciences even if, maybe, not in some of
your areas. It is also the case that those areas that have interesting
results, shall we say, for pharmaceutical companies get extra
funding in terms of money, which may or may not happen in an analogous
way with the physical sciences. That is an issue that has come
to light. Looking at open access as an example, in this situation
anyway, is that improved or probably made worse by the fact that
you have to pay to publish a negative result under open access?
How do you solve that problem in the existing business model?
Any of you?
Professor Fry: I think, in medical
areas, it is probably very different because it is important there
to have absolutely all the information. In other branches of biosciences,
which I am heavily involved with, we have negative results all
the time. The only way in which you are going to, in fact, bring
science forward is to be working at the edges and if you are going
to be working at the edges you are going to have some things that
work and some things that do not work. Those things that are working
will produce good, interesting stories and will help science move
forward further. Those which are not working, often for methodological
reasons and experimental design reasons which we should have anticipated
but have not, are not nearly as interesting as far as carrying
science forward. Often, you have to wait for the technology to
develop to be able to ask those sorts of questions which, at one
point in time, have not produced any results, and in the future
they can produce results.
Q319 Dr Harris: Those negative results
are vital to stop people falling into the same traps. They have
to be published to show that it is noteven if methodologically
it is okaya reasonable way to go. If the open access model
had practically compulsorybecause otherwise it would be
a misuse of the grant fundspublication because there is
a specific element that is for publication at least of some papers
from the grant, would that not solve what I think is a problem
(and you do not think it is so big a problem), even in your field,
of the failure to publish uninteresting or negative results?
Professor Williams: I do not think
this is an open access issue; this is faced by all types of journals.
My own journal covers both clinical and non-clinical, and I think
there are differences. On the clinical side if you have carried
out a clinical trial or a clinical study and your protocol is
well-defined, then it is essential you publish the results whatever
they areI totally agree. If it is a pre-clinical or scientific
trial, publishing negative results is not always necessary; it
depends on the hypothesis which you started with. I see many papers
where the results are clearly negative just because they asked
the wrong question and did the wrong methodology and it is not
worth publishing. There are significant differences.
Professor Fry: Perhaps I can give
you an example of where we have, in fact, recently published negative
results? We were trying to look at bacteria in very deep marine
sediment, and it is extremely hard to do this, and we are forging
the methodology forward. At the point it was all working we were
then able to publish a paper, not in a very high impact journal
because it would not have got in but in a lower impact journal,
which described how to make it work and, also, described all the
problems on the way and, hence, would help other researchers avoid
falling into the problems which we had. However, if we had only
published when we were having problems it would have been pretty
uninteresting. Often, also, you have a community of workers all
working on a similar topic, all competing and describing their
results in conferences who are often talking about how they are
trying to move things forwardperhaps a PhD student will
give an oral paperand, in fact, those are pretty negative
or inconclusive. So we have this variety of ways of communicating
our information.
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