Open but Not Free — Publishing in the 21St Century Martin Frank, Ph.D
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PERSPECTIVE For the Sake of Inquiry and Knowledge Research culture is far from knowledge. The new technology Disclosure forms provided by the author are available with the full text of this arti- monolithic. Systems that underpin is the internet. The public good cle at NEJM.org. scholarly communication will mi- they make possible is the world- grate to open access by fits and wide electronic distribution of From MIT Libraries, Massachusetts Insti- starts as discipline-appropriate op- the peer-reviewed journal litera- tute of Technology, Cambridge. tions emerge. Meanwhile, experi- ture and completely free and un- 1. Budapest Open Access Initiative (http:// ments will be run, start-ups will restricted access to it by all scien- www.opensocietyfoundations.org/ flourish or perish, and new com- tists, scholars, teachers, students, openaccess/read). munication tools will emerge, and other curious minds.” 2. Bethesda Statement on Open Access Pub- lishing (http://dash.harvard.edu/bitstream/ because, as the Bethesda Open There is no doubt that the pub- handle/1/4725199/suber_bethesda Access Statement puts it, “an old lic interests vested in funding .htm?sequence=1). tradition and a new technology agencies, universities, libraries, 3. Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge in the Sciences and Humanities have converged to make possible and authors, together with the (http://www.zim.mpg.de/openaccess-berlin/ an unprecedented public good. power and reach of the Internet, berlin_declaration.pdf). The old tradition is the willingness have created a compelling and nec- 4. Suber P. Open access. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2012. of scientists and scholars to pub- essary momentum for open ac- 5. Van Noorden R. Europe joins UK open- lish the fruits of their research in cess. It won’t be easy, and it won’t access bid. Nature 2012;487:285. scholarly journals without pay- be inexpensive, but it is only a DOI: 10.1056/NEJMp1211410 ment, for the sake of inquiry and matter of time. Copyright © 2013 Massachusetts Medical Society. Open but Not Free — Publishing in the 21st Century Martin Frank, Ph.D. ince the founding of Philo- Stewart Brand (famously of the the average journal’s cost per ar- Ssophical Transactions in 1665, Whole Earth Catalog): “Information ticle for production in print and journals have been the vehicle of wants to be free.” They promoted electronic formats was approxi- choice for the dissemination of their cause to legislative bodies mately £2,500 ($3,957), once sur- scientific knowledge. Over the by arguing that the taxpayers pay plus or profit is eliminated from years, the number of active, peer- for research, so they shouldn’t the calculation.1 For the Ameri- reviewed learned journals has ex- have to pay again to read the re- can Physiological Society, the aver- panded to approximately 28,000, sults. But what, exactly, has the age cost per article was approxi- collectively publishing more than taxpayer paid for? And can in- mately $2,635. 1.8 million articles per year. formation dissemination truly Digital technology enhanced Most of these journals are acces- be free? access to journal content, but it sible by subscription, and before A scholarly journal serves sev- did not appreciably reduce the the mid-1990s, they were avail- eral functions for authors and cost of publication. Although pa- able only on paper. By the end of readers. It serves to register the per and postage costs were elim- the 20th century, most journals ideas of the authors, date-stamp- inated, they were replaced by had moved their content to on- ing them to provide appropriate costs associated with online sub- line platforms, greatly increasing credit for discoveries. It dissemi- mission-and-review systems and the accessibility of scientific in- nates the authors’ ideas and re- hosting platforms. Online jour- formation. sults to an interested community nals did not reduce the cost of Online dissemination served as of scholars. It certifies the valid- acquisition for libraries. This fact the impetus for the open-access ity of articles through peer review. was especially important, because movement and the call for free Finally, it archives articles, pre- libraries’ acquisition budgets had dissemination of the information serving them for future reference not increased in parallel with the contained in journals. Open-access and citation. According to a study doubling of the budget of the Na- advocates adopted as their slogan conducted by Cambridge Eco- tional Institutes of Health (NIH) the words of author and editor nomic Policy Associates, in 2010, between 1997 and 2003. Instead, n engl j med 368;9 nejm.org february 28, 2013 787 The New England Journal of Medicine Downloaded from nejm.org by NICOLETTA TORTOLONE on February 27, 2013. For personal use only. No other uses without permission. Copyright © 2013 Massachusetts Medical Society. All rights reserved. PERSPECTIVE Open but Not Free — Publishing in the 21st Century libraries’ funds were constrained, the free article in the journal that sociated with this openness — in part because commercial pub- published it. Reference links are a cost that may reduce the funds lishers worked to tie up their directed to other articles in available for research. PubMed budgets by creating large journal PubMed Central. This diversion of Central diverts approximately collections that expanded librar- readers may cause a journal to $4 million from the NIH budget ies’ periodical offerings but at lose subscribers or readers — and in order to collect, process, and an increase in cost. As a result, therefore advertising. A longitudi- convert NIH-funded manuscripts many libraries ended up cancel- nal cohort analysis of 12 sub- into PubMed Central’s archival ing their subscriptions to under- scription-based research journals format.5 Universities divert an utilized journals in niche areas in physiology revealed that PubMed average of $150,000 from their and those from small, indepen- Central drew approximately 14% library budget to establish insti- dent association and university- of full-text article downloads away tutional repositories. Funding press publishers, reducing the from journal websites when arti- agencies are encouraging or re- overall size of their journal collec- cles deposited in PubMed Central quiring their grantees to publish tions. For many libraries, the only became freely available to the pub- in gold open-access journals, al- way to maintain users’ access to lic 12 months after publication.2 lowing them to pay their author needed content was to advocate Similarly, the open-access jour- fees with money from their re- for open access and promote im- nals from the Public Library of search grants or funds allocated mediate free access or the deposit Science (PLOS) had a 22% loss by the agency. For example, in of research results into institu- of traffic to PubMed Central.3 response to a 2012 report from tional repositories where the con- The persistent reduction in full- sociologist Janet Finch about tent would be free. text downloads from journal web- making publicly funded, peer- Open access now comes in sites contributes to a loss of the reviewed research available free two flavors, gold and green. Gold advertising revenue that partially of charge, Research Councils UK open access provides immediate offsets the cost of publication. allocated £100 million ($161 mil- free access to the literature. The PubMed Central also competes lion) to promote gold open access costs of publication are covered with online platform providers, in the United Kingdom.5 A 2004 by an author processing (or publi- serving as the exclusive host for at study at Cornell University showed cation) charge. Green open access least two journals, the Journal of the that shifting from a subscription- requires the author to deposit a Medical Library Association and the based to a “producer-pays” model peer-reviewed manuscript in an Journal of Biomolecular Techniques. would require an additional $1.5 institutional or central repository Open-access publishing has million for the library budget such as PubMed Central. Publica- gained traction over the past 10 (ecommons.cornell.edu/handle/ tion costs are covered through years because of the success of 1813/193). Similarly, assuming subscription fees, but the content the PLOS and BioMed Central that all articles had to be pub- is generally made available free of families of journals. The annual lished with gold open access, charge after an embargo period. volume of articles published in Harvard Medical School would Green open access duplicates open-access journals has increased have to pay $13.5 million (at what publishers already do, mak- from 20,702 in 2000 to 340,130 $1,350 per article) to publish the ing content freely available from in 2011 — accounting for 17% of 10,000 articles authored by its their own platforms after an em- all articles published in 2011.4 faculty in 2010 — considerably bargo period. These articles were published in more than the $3.75 million that PubMed Central is a repository 6713 journals with full and im- was in its serials-acquisition bud- of peer-reviewed and published mediate open access; 49% of get that year. Research-intensive manuscripts designed to provide them were published in journals institutions will thus bear the the public with access to the re- requiring an author fee. The burden of funding free access to search supported by their tax dol- growth in open-access publish- the research literature, subsidiz- lars. PubMed Central actively pro- ing has encouraged professional ing access for less-research-inten- motes itself to readers, and its societies, commercial publishers, sive institutions, including phar- abstracts of articles direct the and even funders to launch new maceutical companies. reader to the free article within open-access journals. Open-access publishing has PubMed Central, as opposed to There is, however, a cost as- evolved over the past dozen years.