Re: Berkeley faculty statement on scholarly publishing

[Jan Velterop <velteropvonleyden@btinternet.com>]

One of the reasons that Congress and journalists find that re-routing the
money spent on science publishing (from subscriptions to upfront article
charges and the resulting open access) is so highly plausible, may just be
because it is. The idea that spending a small percentage of grant money on
publishing research results should be diverting money from research and a
loss to science is only correct if the following statement is correct,
too: spending grant money (i.e. overheads) on library subscriptions is
diverting money from research. And that's not even counting the additional
drawback that research results are not universally accessible that way. To
see the cost of publishing as money taken away from research isn't very
helpful. Publishing just costs money, one way or the other. The sensible
thing then is to look for ways to get the most benefits for science and
society out of the money spent.

Wouldn't it be interesting if major public policy initiatives were all
taken on the basis of 'evidence' rather than on 'faith' (perhaps we should
call it 'political will' in this case). I wonder for instance what the
evidence was that led to the Freedom of Information Act. Probably naively,
I always thought that it was just a belief in the benefits of open
government. I'm ready to admit I'm wrong if somebody points me to the
evidence. If we need the evidence Peter craves for the benefits of open
access, that can only be gathered if experiments are done on a large
enough scale. Early results already show that open access leads to more,
and earlier, usage and citations for articles published with immediate
open access. This is an interesting article in that regard: Kristin
Antelman in College & Research Libraries 65(5):pp. 372-382
(http://www.lib.ncsu.edu/staff/ kantelman/do_open_access_CRL.pdf)

Jan Velterop

On 13 May 2005, at 05:41, Peter Banks wrote:

[SNIP]

> Except it isn't chump change, it's a diversion of research funding and a
> net loss for science. Anyone who thinks that the "few percent" will be
> added to, rather than taken from, Federal research funding hasn't looked
> at the federal budget lately. From now into the forseeable future,
> prospects for increased support for scientific research are bleak.
>
> Here are the figures for NIH:
>
>   FY 2004 Actual  $28,036 M
>   FY 2005 Appropriation  $28,594 M   (1.9%)
>   FY 2006 Program Level  $28,845 M  (0.7%)
>   Total Number of RPGs   38,746 (402 under FY 2005)
>
> For every 1% of RPG funding diverted to Open Access, there is a loss of
> about $15.5 M in RPG funding.
>
> Conducting less research to support open access might make sense were
> there strong evidence to support the contention that OA will
> "dramatically increase the effectiveness of scientific communication,
> and therefore will help the progress of science." So far, however, that
> proposition rests on faith, not evidence. Effective communication does
> not consist in shoveling out reams and reams of manuscripts; it consists
> in devilvering information in a way and at a time that empowers crtical
> decision making, whether in patient care or research. Just as we now
> insist upon evidence-based medicine, we need to insist on evidence based
> informatics. A major public policy initative like OA needs more evidence
> behind it that has so far been presented.
>
> Peter Banks
> American Diabetes Association
> Email: pbanks@diabetes.org