UK Inquiry: PLoS response

["Andy Gass" <agass@plos.org>]

A Response from the Public Library of Science [PLoS] to the July 20, 2004,
report from the Science and Technology Committee of the United Kingdom
House of Commons, "Scientific Publications: Free For All?"

Also available through http://www.plos.org/about/openaccess.html 

July 22, 2004 -- The report released by the House of Commons Science and
Technology Committee represents an important step forward in the global
movement for open access to scientific and medical literature. The
Committee outlines a plan to store the entire "published output" from UK
institutions of higher education such that "it can be read, free of
charge, online" -- a watershed recommendation for its recognition that
open access to government-funded scientific works is both desirable and
achievable.

The report carefully details a litany of deficiencies in the prevailing,
subscription-based system by which most scientific and medical articles
are published. "'[T]he output from publicly funded research is handed free
of charge to commercial organizations that appear increasingly to make it
more difficult to gain access to publications derived from the same
research,'" the analysis notes, citing evidence from Research Councils UK.
This state of affairs, the report concludes, is "unsatisfactory" and in
need of "urgent" change -- a view that PLoS certainly shares.

One mechanism the Committee proposes for making scientific articles freely
available is a network of "institutional repositories," or
locally-operated online archives, into which authors would be required to
deposit their works. These repositories, the Committee suggests, "will
enable readers to gain free access to journal articles whilst the
publishing industry experiments with new publishing models, such as the
[open access publication charge] model."

It is worth noting that an Appropriations Committee of the United States
House of Representatives recently passed a provision that would provide
free access to works funded by the National Institutes of Health by a
slightly different mechanism -- their mandatory deposition in PubMed
Central, a single, centralized, free-to-use archive managed by the
National Library of Medicine. While a centralized repository may offer
several technological advantages over dispersed, locally managed
repositories, at present, we are confident that any concerted effort by
governments to make the results of publicly funded research freely
available will ultimately have profound benefits for the general public,
for scientists, and for science itself.

The House of Commons report also acknowledges that open access publishing
is "a phenomenon that has already arrived" and addresses a number of
common criticisms of the open access model. On the issue of global
participation in the publishing enterprise, the report concludes that the
open access model "would be extremely advantageous to researchers in
developing countries, enabling them to keep abreast of research conducted
elsewhere" and that "by scaling publication with research costs, the [open
access] publishing model would ensure a fairer global distribution of the
costs of publishing research findings." On the issue of quality control
and peer review, the Committee notes that "[i]n order to succeed, most
author-pays publishers, like everyone else, will have to publish articles
of high quality," echoing PLoS' view that a journal's economic model is
largely independent of the stringency of its peer-review. On the issue of
who should own the rights to publications resulting from government-funded
projects, the report recommends that "higher education institutions are
funded to enable them to assume control of copyright arising from their
research." On virtually all of these points, the Committee concludes that
the various practices and policies of open-access publishers like PLoS are
preferable to the practices and policies of more restrictive publishers.

The report specifically calls for actions from a number of organizations,
governmental and otherwise. Two particularly notable recommendations are
that the UK's Research Councils "establish a fund to which their funded
researchers can apply should they wish to publish their articles using the
[open access publication charge] model"; and that the Government "provide
limited financial assistance to encourage publishers and institutions" to
conduct "further experimentation" with the open access publication model.

PLoS is extremely pleased with the Committee's conclusions. The report
accounts well for the wide spectrum of views that various stakeholders in
scientific research expressed in the course of the comprehensive inquiry.
Should the Committee's recommendations be implemented, it will simply be a
matter of time and fine-tuning before open access to the UK's -- and
likely the world's -- scientific and medical literature becomes a reality.

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