APPENDIX 101
Memorandum from the Save British Science
Society
1. Save British Science is pleased to submit
this response to the committee's inquiry into scientific publications.
SBS is a voluntary organisation campaigning for the health of
science and technology throughout UK society, and is supported
by over 1,500 individual members, and some 70 institutional members,
including universities, learned societies, venture capitalists,
financiers, industrial companies and publishers.
COMPETITIVE MARKETS
2. Although the committee asks about the
need for a competitive market in scientific publications, the
market that really matters is the market in ideas. Science moves
forward by the generating and testing of competing ideas.
3. Competitive markets only work if good
information exists about what is available where and at what cost.
Likewise, the market in scientific ideas only works well if researchers
have access to good information about what others are thinking
and doing.
4. The market in scientific publications
should not therefore be looked at in terms of what is cheapest
for researchers or what makes most money for publishers, but at
what makes gives the widest range of researchers access to the
widest range of scientific ideas, coupled with appropriate information
about the degree to which those ideas have been tested (such as
whether they have been peer reviewed or checked by professional
copyeditors for mistakes).
5. Whether or not individual libraries are
hampered by "big deals" and whether or not publishing
companies are making big profits are not therefore the most appropriate
questions.
6. The key question is whether the research
community has access to the material it needs for an optimum market
in ideas.
7. While a general notion of "open
access" may seem to be the answer, questions remain about
how such access can be sustained in the long term. For example,
scientists continue to need access to old material. As a random
example, in the issue of Nature published on 29 January 2004,
some 13 per cent of the references cited by the original scientific
research papers were published more than twenty years ago. Five
per cent were published before 1970 and about 1 per cent were
published more than half a century ago; there is even one citation
from the 1920s. [333]
A similar pattern is found in the issue of Science published in
the same week, which also includes at least one citation to work
published more than 80 years ago. [334]
8. As the format of electronic publications
continues to change, existing formats will become less universally
accessible. This has, for example, already happened with the floppy
disk technology used to store the BBC's Domesday survey of the
United Kingdom, created less than 20 years ago[335]
(after approximately 17 per cent of the papers used by researchers
publishing in the world's leading scientific journals). Although
this particular example may not be of prime importance to modern
science, it illustrates the potential difficulties of maintaining
access to a huge archive of different kinds of publications, which
will be a crucial part of "open access".
9. Someone will have to continue to pay
for this access, and it remains unclear how these costs are to
be met in a sustainable way.
10. It seems entirely possible that the
costs associated with the ever-changing technological interfaces
that will be necessary to provide access to the huge archive of
material (as well as up-to-the-minute publications) could be at
least as great as those of the traditional storage of hard copies.
11. Given the stagnation of the British
Library's budget and the huge strains on university budgets, it
is obviously foolhardy to assume that these costs will be met
by the public purse.
LEGAL DEPOSIT
LIBRARIES
12. The Legal Deposit Libraries do a superb
job within what must be extremely difficult circumstances. Several
are part of universities, which even the Government admits are
under-funded to the tune of billions of pounds per annum. [336]
The British Library has not seen an inflationary rise in its Grant-in-Aid
in recent years. Indeed, in the financial year 2002-03, its grant
of £85.19 million was almost 4% lower than it had been in
the previous year. [337]
This is particularly bizarre given that the Library generates
£4.40 of economic gain in the UK for every £1 that the
taxpayer invests through it. [338]
13. Although the libraries receive some
material free of charge, they must still bear the costs of material
published outside the UK and of cataloguing and making material
accessible to researchers. With the burgeoning growth in material,
there is both a quantitative and a qualitative shift in the work
associated with this provision.
14. It seems hard to believe that the Legal
Deposit Libraries will be able to continue to do such a good job
of giving researchers access to a whole world of material as they
have in the past, unless their income streams can be enhanced.
Funds are under pressure from the trends (a) simply for more material
to be published year on year, (b) for that material to appear
in an increasing number of different formats (some of which must
remain accessible when the original technology has been superseded),
and (c) for more publications to deal with the interfaces between
existing disciplines, requiring more complicated cataloguing and
indexing.
February 2004
333 Nature, 29 January 2004, pp.419-468. Back
334
Science, 30 January 2004, pp.643-692. Back
335
Digital Domesday Book unlocked, BBC News Online, 2 December 2002. Back
336
Hansard [House of Commons] 27 January 2004, column 167. Back
337
Annual Report of the British Library, 2002-03. Back
338
Measuring Our Value, British Library, 2004. Back
|