BioMed Central's open letter to the UK Science Minister, responding to inaccurate comments about open access.

["Grace Baynes" <Grace@biomedcentral.com>]

***Apologies for cross-posting***

On October 27th 2005, BioMed Central sent the following open letter to the
UK's Science Minister, Lord Sainsbury of Turville:

Lord Sainsbury of Turville
Science Minister
House of Lords
London
SW1A 0PW 

Dear Lord Sainsbury,

Last week, when giving testimony1 to the House of Commons Science &
Technology Committee, you were asked for your opinion of the proposed
position statement on open access from Research Councils UK2, a document
that expresses strong support for a move towards open access.

In your response, you repeated your call for "a level playing field"
between open access and subscriber-only publishing models, a sentiment
with which BioMed Central very much agrees. But you then went on suggest
that open access was in decline, saying: "I think we have seen a peak in
the enthusiasm for open access publishing and a fall-off in people putting
forward proposals for it because some of the difficulties and costs are
now becoming clear."

This suggestion of a decline in interest in open access publishing is not
at all supported by the available evidence, and simply does not reflect
what is happening in scientific publishing. BioMed Central Limited is the
world's leading open access publisher. In the third quarter of 2005,
BioMed Central's manuscript submissions were up 56% compared to the
previous year, a growth rate far exceeding that of the science publishing
industry as a whole. Public Library of Science, a leading US-based open
access publisher, has experienced similarly rapid growth. Every month, new
groups of scientists and societies approach BioMed Central to start open
access journals, or to convert their existing journals to an open access
model.

Several of the more enlightened traditional publishers have introduced
their own open access experiments. Blackwell Publishing introduced Online
Open, an open access experiment for 30 journals, in February 2005. Oxford
University Press, which has already converted some journals to open
access, launched Oxford Open in May this year. Springer, the world's
second largest STM publisher, has offered an open access option (Springer
Open Choice) for its 1,450 journals since May 2004, and just two months
ago hired Jan Velterop as its Director of Open Access.3

The latest survey on the attitude of senior researchers to open access,
carried out by an independent research group at City University and
published in September 2005, reported that compared to a previous survey
by the same group in March 2004:

The research community is now much more aware of the open access issue.
There has been a large rise in authors knowing quite a lot about open
access (up 10 percentage points from the 2004 figure) and a big fall in
authors knowing nothing at all about open access (down 25 points).
Secondly, the proportion of authors publishing in an open access journal
has grown considerably from 11 per cent (2004) to 29 per cent. 4

The Publishers Association and the International Association of
Scientific, Technical and Medical Publishers commissioned this study, a
clear indication of continuing interest from STM publishers in the open
access model.

Your suggestion that the costs of open access have led to a loss of
enthusiasm for the model is also lacking in support. The most thorough
survey so far of the costs involved in open access publishing, carried out
in 2004 by the Wellcome Trust, the UK's largest biomedical research
charity, concluded that open access research publishing would be likely to
cost significantly less than the traditional model, and so would certainly
be affordable to the scientific community5.

In relation to your call for a "level playing field", BioMed Central
strongly agrees that this is desirable. But the continued strong growth in
open access has not occurred on a remotely level playing field. It is a
testament to the strength of the open access model that its growth has
occurred despite the playing field being anything but level. For example,
many scientists have the perception that, when their funding is evaluated,
they will be at a disadvantage if they have published in a new open access
journal, rather than in a more established traditional journal, even
though the quality of the research is identical. An over-reliance on
Impact Factors, which are not available for many new journals due to the
vagaries of the Institute for Scientific Information's decisions on
journal tracking, can lead to a stifling of innovation in publishing. To
create a level playing field, active steps are needed to ensure that
scientists are confident that their research will be evaluated on its
merits, whichever type of journal they choose to publish it in.

Similarly, it not a level playing field when the government appears to
ignore the impartial advice of the Science & Technology Committee6 and of
major research funders such as Research Councils UK and the Wellcome Trust
with respect to open access archiving, and instead appears to give more
weight to representations from the traditional publishing industry,
arguing against change. Open access archives of published research are
strongly desirable from the point of view of funders and research
institutions. Objections from traditional publishers should not be allowed
to weaken the initiative from Research Councils UK to require deposit in
such archives. Publishers ought to be the servants of the scientific
community, not its masters.

Open access to the results of research has the potential to deliver
dramatic benefits across all sectors of UK society. Researchers in both
academia and industry will benefit from more effective dissemination of
their own work, and from increased access to the work of others. Health
professionals in the NHS, and their patients, will benefit from easy
access to the results of the latest medical research. The broad economic
and social benefits that will result from the more open flow of scientific
and medical knowledge will surely dwarf any possible impact on the
traditional publishers. It is therefore shortsightedshort-sighted for the
government to see this issue purely in terms of defending the publishing
industry status quo.

BioMed Central calls on the government to support the RCUK proposed
position statement, and not to bow to lobbying from traditional publishers
to water down the statement. We also urge you to work to create a genuine
level playing field for open access publishers, by removing some of the
obstacles that currently stand in the way of authors who wish to publish
in open access journals.

Yours sincerely,

Matthew Cockerill

Publisher
BioMed Central Limited

Notes and references 

1.  Minutes of evidence taken before Science and Technology Committee
Wednesday 19 October, 2005.  Available from:
http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200506/cmselect/cmsctech/uc490-i/uc49002.htm

2.  Proposed RCUK Position Statement on Access to Research Outputs.
Available from: http://www.rcuk.ac.uk/access/  

3.  Jan Velterop to help expand Open Choice. Available from:
http://www.springer.com/sgw/cda/frontpage/0,,5-40575-2-157192-0,00.html

4.  New journal publishing models: an international survey of senior
researchers Centre for Information Behaviour and the Evaluation of
Research (CIBER), 2005. Available from:
http://www.slais.ucl.ac.uk/papers/dni-20050925.pdf

5.  Costs and Business Models in Scientific Research Publishing A report
commissioned by the Wellcome Trust, 2004. Available from:
http://www.wellcome.ac.uk/assets/wtd003184.pdf

6.  Scientific publications: Free for all? The House of Commons Science
and Technology Committee - Tenth Report, 2004. Available from:
http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200304/cmselect/cmsctech/399/39902.htm

Make your views known:

If you are based in the UK and believe that open access should be
encouraged by the government, rather than opposed, contact the Science
Minister and make your views known:  Write to: Lord Sainsbury of Turville,
Science Minister, House of Lords, London, SW1A 0PW Don't forget to send
BioMed Central a copy!
 

Grace Baynes
Marketing Communications Manager
BioMed Central
Middlesex House
http://www.biomedcentral.com/ 

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