The United Kingdom ParliamentThe United Kingdom ParliamentAbout ParliamentMembers and StaffBusinessPublications & Recordsline imagesA-Z IndexGlossaryContact UsHelp
 HansardArchivesResearchHOC PublicationsHOL PublicationsCommittees
Advanced
search
Select Committee on Science and Technology Minutes of Evidence


Examination of Witnesses (Questions 400 - 419)

WEDNESDAY 5 MAY 2004

PROFESSOR SIR KEITH O'NIONS, MR RAMA THIRUNAMACHANDRAN AND PROFESSOR JOHN WOOD

  Q400  Chairman: The point is that the RAE preserves the status quo of high price journals. How do you break that circle?

  Professor Wood: I see where you are coming from. I have my own personal views.

  Q401  Chairman: Tell me, please.

  Professor Wood: The thing here is do you put it into a high prestige journal and nobody is going to read your article or are you going to put it into a low prestige journal where you know it is going to be read but is not going to give you the impact? That is always the dilemma when you get to this situation. There is another dilemma because my research is with industry as well and industry wants you to publish in a very low prestige journal in order to get to their customers and you want to publish in some obscure journal that nobody is going to read because of the impact factor. There is always this dichotomy.

  Q402  Chairman: So any decisions you make in the Department after your consultation could break this status quo system, could it not? You could encourage other journals to become upfront and the place to publish given that interdisciplinary is the flavour.

  Professor Wood: That is why I made the point that I think there needs to be some quality standards on what these journals are standing for. There are the very big impact ones, and Nature has been mentioned, Science is another one—

  Q403  Chairman: Nature can get passé after a bit. Once you have three papers published in it you are finished, to hell with it.

  Professor Wood: I do not grab Nature each week as Keith does, I have my own journals that I grab. There are journals lower down where the impact is relatively low and those are the ones where it is important to get the articles in.

  Dr Iddon: As a Fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry I felt very loyal to the Society as a learned society and, therefore, the vast majority of my research was published in the journals published by the learned society. I also knew that my younger colleagues who were perhaps ahead of the field were not publishing in those journals, they were going elsewhere to high impact journals because they were very conscious of the RAE research scores that we have just been discussing and, therefore, people who are loyal to their learned societies might lose out by taking that action.

  Q404  Chairman: And there is the promotional aspect.

  Professor Wood: As a fellow Fellow, yes, I agree with you. I have done exactly the same.

  Q405  Dr Turner: Can we change tack a little. Lots of publishers require authors to hand over full rights of the copyright to their research papers. Are you content for so much intellectual property to be handed from the public to the commercial sector? If so, why?

  Professor Sir Keith O'Nions: On a personal level, personally as a researcher, I have never found this a big issue. It has not troubled me massively in terms of getting access to those data and so on. Broadly, amongst the UK community it is not an enormous issue but that does not mean to say it is not something that requires great consideration. I do not think it is a great bubbling issue in the UK.

  Mr Thirunamachandran: One has to draw a distinction between ownership of intellectual property, of copyright, and exploitation of intellectual property, copyright. In a sense, ownership is not so important as long as the rights to exploit and licensing and other arrangements are in place so that knowledge can be disseminated and transferred.

  Q406  Dr Turner: That distinction is kept clearly by the publishers and they do not try to get involved in exploitation of any kind, do they? Have there been any cases where they have abused their position?

  Mr Thirunamachandran: I am not in a position to answer that. I do not know.

  Q407  Dr Turner: It could not be that one of the reasons why you are less worried about this hand over of the intellectual property rights is that there are not any systems in place to help authors manage it properly so it would entail more work. Is that an issue?

  Mr Thirunamachandran: Institutions, as part of their knowledge transfer activities, are supported to have experts who in other areas support patents and licensing arrangements and so on. Many of the larger institutions would have some in-house expertise which could be used to support authors on copyright and related licensing issues.

  Professor Sir Keith O'Nions: I sense we are in a territory here which is quite complicated when you talk of intellectual property because if you think of intellectual property that may give rise to a patent then obviously that would not be published in any manner whatsoever until the patent application had been made. If we are talking about intellectual property that may not have any clear short-term exploitation then we are using intellectual property in a somewhat different way. I am slightly confused as to where your questioning is taking us.

  Q408  Dr Turner: The main point at issue, the publishing rights, is the question of the further use of the material, whether for teaching purposes or whatever.

  Professor Sir Keith O'Nions: There is a variable but somewhat improved situation in my own personal experience, and again I do not have all the detailed analysis of using that stuff for teaching, personal use and getting permission to use it in other publications and reviews. I think mostly it is satisfactory, again I do not have the statistics. I am sure there will be situations where there are still pockets of annoyance, but my sense is that situation is reasonably satisfactory.

  Professor Wood: I was just going to continue the answer to that question. I understand that about 65% of publishers now allow institutional self-archiving anyway and that is how we go ahead, although we do 100% and that was really because of this potential IPR, it started off with the patentable area where we obviously protect ourselves first of all. We have not noticed any major problem there, we just do it.

  Q409  Paul Farrelly: I am speaking not as a scientist but a former journalist. I am quite baffled, Professor O'Nions, at your bafflement at the questioning on copyright. You have previously talked about facilitating a level playing field and we tied you down to one specific, which was about shifting pots of money around, but if you were really taking a serious look at facilitating a level playing field you could not have done that without looking at the issue of copyright.

  Professor Sir Keith O'Nions: I fully accept your point. I am not pretending that we have analysed all the ins and outs of it. When you look at open access and start getting into it you, are immediately impressed with how complex the issues are. When you look at archiving you realise that the open access issue is far less complex than the issues involved with copyright. I completely accept your implied criticism. I do not think we have fully researched and understood all the implications of these changing models.

  Q410  Paul Farrelly: If you put some hard questions about the importance of copyright in such a review to the industry you would test how important current practices on copyright are to the industry, how integral they are, rather than it just being "Well, somebody else is doing it, therefore it has not come up, we are going to take all copyright away". Copyright also has value, do you believe, in a different sense because it can facilitate a level playing field?

  Professor Sir Keith O'Nions: It has to be part of that balance.

  Q411  Mr Key: The Government has told us in written evidence to the Committee that there is a need for the Government and other public bodies to collaborate to keep down purchasing costs. What actual measures has the Government taken to achieve that?

  Mr Thirunamachandran: I do not know in detail.

  Q412  Mr Key: It was the Government's evidence so presumably the Government said it and they had something in mind.

  Professor Sir Keith O'Nions: I am waiting for a scribbled note.

  Q413  Mr Key: Any help from the back benches? Could you very kindly write to us then to say what you meant in the evidence you gave that you cannot remember.

  Professor Sir Keith O'Nions: The observation is that a great deal has happened with universities starting to get together to collectively buy bundles of publications and so on and reduce costs in that way. There is quite a lot of evidence on what has happened. You are asking the particular question is there an item of Government policy that has pushed that.

  Q414  Mr Key: Yes. The Government said that: "overall, Government needs to organise effectively to reduce the total purchasing costs and should actively ensure that other public bodies do so as well". So nothing has happened, it did not actually mean anything?

  Professor Sir Keith O'Nions: We will give you written advice on any specifics.

  Mr Key: I would be grateful. Thank you very much.

  Q415  Chairman: Let us have three questions to take us up to the end. Do you believe in publicly funded research being available to all the public? Do you believe in that principle? If the Government believes in it would it fund it, do you think? Should it fund it?

  Professor Wood: It is RCUK's principle that it should be publicly available.

  Q416  Chairman: So you would rather leave it to the Government to do it than commercial publishers?

  Professor Wood: I do not think we have a view as a collective group on that.

  Q417  Chairman: What I am finding very difficult here is that you do not have the answers we really need to advance things, and I think you feel that yourselves. What I do not understand is why, Sir Keith, you are representing the DTI. Why did they not send somebody else in? Is that because they have got nothing to say, they have done nothing or are they hiding and putting you up as the best they can get?

  Professor Sir Keith O'Nions: I do not think there is anything sinister like that. I happen to be the one who has come along.

  Q418  Dr Turner: You drew the short straw.

  Professor Sir Keith O'Nions: I do not think—I will be quite open—I can fully represent all the wider views of the DTI and I said that at the beginning. Clearly the view is that the OST has a very strong involvement and that is where a great deal of the public funding for research goes on and I think that is why I am here rather than anybody else.

  Q419  Chairman: But is there somebody else who has got responsibility in the DTI? Those sitting behind you presumably.

  Professor Sir Keith O'Nions: There are other parts of the DTI that are responsible for looking at the business models, commercial practice and value to the UK and the impact of other sorts of models on the UK economy and so on. That is certainly way outside of my remit.


 
previous page contents next page

House of Commons home page Parliament home page House of Lords home page search page enquiries index

© Parliamentary copyright 2004
Prepared 20 July 2004