Boston Globe Article About Open Access

[Ann Okerson <aokerson@pantheon.yale.edu>]

Article below is of possible interest.  Exploring new varieties of
business models for electronic journal publishing, including open access,
seems very important and desirable, for various reasons.  (It's somewhat
puzzling, though, that a key argument made for the public's needing access
to medical journals is that people will then use the information in those
articles to get better medical treatment or get the right, latest
treatment for their kids.  This particular argument is, I think, one of
the less compelling, as -- in my experience in glancing through numerous
medical journals -- the information is very technical and not particularly
decipherable for those not in that field.  It would be very hard to apply
intelligently the content of such articles to one's own health care.) Ann
Okerson/moderator

*******

http://www.boston.com/news/nation/articles/2003/08/14/scientists_seek_open_acces
s_to_medical_research_boston_globe

Scientists seek open access to medical research
By Carey Goldberg, Globe Staff, 8/14/2003

Their argument goes like this: Your federal tax dollars pay for some $50
billion a year in medical and scientific research. But if your daughter
falls ill and you want to see the latest findings on her disease, you'll
often have to pay again, to get access to the powerful journals that
publish them.

Now, a vanguard of rebellious scientists, Nobel laureates among them, are
challenging the entrenched journals, such as the New England Journal of
Medicine and Nature, that have long dominated the flow of research news.

Under the banner of the "Public Library of Science," they are pushing for
"open access" to scientific journals, arguing that findings should be
freely and immediately available online for researchers and regular
citizens alike.

"The point is that your tax dollars support research," said Harold Varmus,
president of the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York and
former head of the National Institutes of Health. "You may not want to
follow research day by day, but if you're ill, or one of your relatives is
ill, or you have a son doing a high school science project and you want to
see what the latest information is, you have a right to see those papers."

Varmus's group is about to begin publishing two peer-reviewed journals
online meant to compete with the established journals directly and show
that open access can work with top-level scientific results.

"We're up against the status quo," he said, referring to journals that
generally charge hundreds or thousands of dollars a year for subscriptions
and between $15 and $50 to non-subscribers for access to each article
online. Some barely scrape by, but others make healthy profits.

In their defense, some journal editors warn that their journals will not
be able to make ends meet without subscriptions and per-article charges,
and if they fold, that will only hurt the cause of spreading scientific
knowledge.

Some editors also counter that they have already expanded free online
access to their research, and question whether there is really unfilled
demand for information. The New England Journal of Medicine, for example,
makes its material available on its website six months after publication,
and Science does so after a year.

"Of course, anybody can walk into a public library and request an
inter-library loan copy of an article and get it for free," said Jayne
Marks, publishing director at Nature Publishing Group, which puts out 50
journals, including Nature.

That is not the same, however, as being able to do an efficient, sweeping,
online search for all relevant findings on a scientific or medical topic,
open-access advocates say.

The open access battle taps into longstanding frustration among
scientists, many of whom feel that they do all the work of the research,
but then it is the journals that make money from it. As Patrick Brown,
another scientist leading the open-access movement, put it, "They're given
publicly funded free stuff to own and control and make money off of."

Underway for months, the battle is now reaching a higher pitch. Advocates
plan to release a preview of the first of its online journals, PLoS
Biology, next week. PLoS Medicine is expected to follow next year.

Congress, too, is getting involved. In June, a Minnesota congressman
submitted a bill that would make research "substantially funded" by public
money no longer eligible for copyright protection."

"It is wrong when the family whose child has a rare disease must pay again
for research data their tax dollars already paid for," the congressman,
Martin Olav Sabo, a Democrat, said in a statement when he introduced the
bill, the Public Access to Science Act.

Fueled by a $9 million grant they got this winter from the Gordon and
Betty Moore Foundation, the open-access crusaders have also begun a
publicity campaign in the media and among scientists: The likes of Nobel
Prize winner James Watson of double-helix renown and
Pulitzer-prize-winning Harvard University ant man E.O. Wilson lend their
famous faces to posters backing the PLoS.

Whether the open-access advocates will succeed, however, seems to hinge
largely on whether their online journals can quickly build the prestige
and following to prove that an open-access journal can stay afloat and
provide top-tier quality. And that depends on whether scientists will
submit top research papers to it.

Under the PLoS model, researchers pay about $1,500 to get their work
published, presumably out of their grant money. In contrast, existing
journals generally levy some minor charges on scientists, but depend
mainly on subscription and ad revenue.

That added $1,500 cost to scientists may be a deterrent, but a greater
challenge is the task of convincing researchers to take the career risk of
publishing their work in an unproven journal instead of a traditional one.

Nagi Ayad, a post-doctoral fellow in cell biology at Harvard who is ready
to publish the fruits of two years of hard work on cell processes related
to cancer, is caught in the middle of just such a publishing dilemma right
now.

Until recently, his path would have been clear: Go for the most
prestigious scientific journal possible, preferably Science, Nature or
Cell, the Harvard-Yale-Princeton of the journal world for biologists and
the flashiest place to be published when applying for scarce faculty jobs.

But with PLoS-Biology, "I'm definitely torn," he said.

Ayad said he remains uncertain about submitting his paper to PLoS,
"because I do want to see this kind of enterprise succeed. At the same
time, if it doesn't succeed, I've sort of wasted my efforts" since
journals seldom reprint material published elsewhere. It is a bit, he
said, like deciding whether to give money to a new charity: If the charity
fails to get off the ground, your money will help no one.

The journal world is divided into for-profit publishers like Nature and
the international giant Elsevier, and non-profit publishers run by
scientific societies that often depend on income from their journals.

In the open-access debate, the for-profit publishers tend to argue that
they deserve their profits because they add value to the papers they get
for free, whether through formatting, additional news stories, or
distribution.

The nonprofits tend to sound like Alan Leshner, president of the American
Association for the Advancement of Science, which publishes the journal
Science.

"The notion of trying to increase access is a good one," he said.

He and other nonprofit publishers are saying, ` "Gee, I wonder if that
will work,' " he said. " `Just don't force me into it before we've tested
it.' They have a hypothesis, so they should test the hypothesis, and if it
works, it will become our theory, too."

Such caution also came through in an essay in last month's Journal of Cell
Biology by Michael J. Held, the executive editor of the Rockefeller
University Press. Models for open access, whether by PLoS or other
publishers like BioMed Central, are "honorable, noble experiments," but it
would be premature to kill off the current model for publishing journals,
he wrote.

For now, he wrote, "It is far better for all of us to work together
cooperatively for the good of disseminating science, rather than be in
constant discord, thereby creating animosity among researchers,
publishers, and librarians, delaying progress."

--