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How Open Is Open Access?
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Publishing Group has begun a one-year pilot program that makes articles available for free online viewing and sharing by email or social media using ReadCube5 but which prohibits downloading or printing of the paper by nonsubscribers. So, for the vast majority of papers, we are back to “pay-toread”. In principle, this situation is not so bad if one were interested in reading just one paper. But what if one needed to do more research and wanted to read papers by other scientists who are cited in the planetary boundary paper? (That work cites some 100 other papers.) Would one be willing to pay $20 for each Science paper cited? Other journals charge even more per article (a recent nanoparticle paper6 authored by the two of us, for instance, is available for $35 at the Journal of Physical Chemistry, JPC). This research is starting to get expensive, especially as one usually follows up on more than a few other papers when one reads a journal article. The question, then, is why should people who are not affiliated with an institution that pays for subscription journals have to pay hundreds of dollars to read papers even though they are already paying for the scientific research through their taxes? In some cases they do not have to because many journals nowadays are “open access”7 or they offer scientists an option to make their paper open access, even if the journal itself is not. Articles in open access journals or made so by their authors are available for free download to anybody in the world with an Internet connection. An important milestone regarding the definition of open access was the Max Planck Society’s Berlin Declaration from 2003,8 which emphasized the importance of online repositories for papers. Open access has the potential to transform the scientific enterprise: the National Institutes of Health’s (NIH) Director Dr. Francis Collins, for instance, argues9 that opening up the scientific process to the entire world will inevitably produce better science, and this argument makes sense. Sounds great! How do we make it happen? We recently went through the process of making some of our papers available for open access. It all started last year, when the corresponding authors of 2014 papers in any ACS journal received two promotional codes worth $750 per paper for defraying open access fees. The codes are entered at the Copyright Clearance Center (CCC)10 link contained in a separate e-mail. (The CCC is an entity contracting with ACS to handle copyright management and compliance for ACS.) At the CCC Web site, one finds that the cost of the open access option for ACS papers ranges from $750 to $5,000 depending on several factors enumerated there.11 The Author Rewards promotional codes are worth a combined $1,500, and ACS membership and affiliation with an institution that subscribes to all ACS journals provides another $2,500 credit. Given similar deals at other journals, this seems fair. According to Dr. Susan King, senior vice president of ACS Publications, the “stimulus program is being completely subsidized by ACS
he front page of the Washington Post recently featured Joel Aschenbach’s excellent reporting 1 on a planetary boundaries paper that appeared in Science magazine in early January. The article provides a link to the Science paper,2 where nonsubscribers can pay $20 to rent it for 1 day. The paper lists two coauthors whose work was supported by the United States National Science Foundation (NSF), which is, in turn, supported by American tax dollars. The NSF expects its grantees to publish scientific papers, such as the one on planetary boundaries, and our taxes pay for the NSF grants that support the scientists’ research activities. So why cannot we taxpayers read the papers that contain the science that is supported by our taxes? Well, one can, provided one belongs to an institution that subscribes to the journals one wants to read. A VPN connection readily establishes the rights and permission that a given institution provides its members for any Web site one visits, be it while working at home or on the road. Given that the libraries at Northwestern University and University of WisconsinMadison (where the two authors work) subscribe to Science magazine, the article PDF is automatically downloaded if we click the link to the Science paper, without any time limits, provided we use the VPN connections. The current contract between the library and the publisher prohibits VPN access to individuals not affiliated with the institution. How can one gain access to subscription journals if one is not part of an organization that subscribes to the relevant publicationfor instance, a school, a start-up company, or a newspaper? Northwestern’s chemistry librarian Dr. Elsa Alvaro says that daily passes allowing access to all subscription journals that the library has in stock are available for such situations. The situation is similar at the University of Wisconsin. Library passes fulfill an important function of a university, which is to make scholarship available to the general public. Immediate and regular access to papers, however, is not possible under this scenario, and one needs to present oneself at the library, fill out forms (at Northwestern), and then gain access to subscription journals. This is not open access; this is providing on-site access to the library’s licensed electronic resources. Our universities have negotiated with the publishers for the right to do this. Alternatively, one could e-mail the corresponding author of the paper one is interested in and request a PDF copy. Some journals allow authors to directly share up to some reasonable limit−say 50 copies, like the Articles on Request3 feature of the American Chemical Society (ACS). Yet, this process can be slow, as one would have to wait for the author to respond and, for a high-impact paper like the planetary boundary work, authors quickly reach the limit of the number of copies they are allowed to send out. Regarding the model of selling individual articles to readers, Martin Fenner, a science blogger, notes4 that “the window of opportunity for micropayment services has probably closed.” Another way to obtain articles directly may be enabled by society membership, which sometimes comes with access to some or all of the journals published by that society, but membership typically comes with a fee. And finally, Nature © 2015 American Chemical Society
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DOI: 10.1021/acs.jpclett.5b00381 J. Phys. Chem. Lett. 2015, 6, 1246−1248
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funds, which are composed of a blend of revenues from the annual endowment payout, tuition, overhead charged to federal grants, and taxes. ACS journals are well respected across the board, so it is great to have all of them in our library (the motto “Most cited. Most trusted. Most read.” is there for good reason). Other publishing houses follow the cable TV-bundle model,16 charging high subscription fees in a less than transparent way that they justify by offering seemingly diverse journal portfolios that, however, contain only a few journals that are actually widely read and cited. We note that the NIH require papers describing research it funds to be openly accessible to the public in some form (within 12 months of publication). The version of the paper made accessible by NIH is typically the “as accepted” manuscript version that has not been typeset in a journal article format. On 19 March 2015, the NSF informed its constituents of a public access plan to comply with the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy memo on this topic.17,18 Given the lack of transparency in the process by which journal pricesand fees for making a published paper open accessare set, many scientists are asking how sustainable the pay-to-read model really is, and some opt for institutional repositories, researchers’ Web sites, or preprint servers like arXiv, which make papers posted there by authors available at zero cost to author and reader and which are highly popular in some areas of science,19 but which also do not provide traditional peer-review. Yet, the ACS policy regarding the posting of manuscripts there varies by journal, with editors of JPC permitting it and others, like JACS, allowing it only if mandated by funding agency or employer/institution. Specifically, JPC does not decline for consideration manuscripts that have been posted to arXiv. The ACS’s new $60,000,000 open access stimulus program is a way to make open access a possibility for more than 40,000 ACS journal articles. Yet, once the $60,000,000 open access investment is spent out, most of us will not be able to continue making our papers open access until pending research grants that include line items for this expense are funded. Considering the inadequate increases in federal science funding that have resulted from the 2013 budget sequestration, any new research grants will not come with extra open access funds, meaning that even less money is available for research. Therefore, we need to know the Society’s plans to make open access sustainable, as the current model makes it difficult for individuals without open access budgets, including the citizen scientists NIH’s Dr. Francis Collins envisions, to publish the very papers that were enabled through Open Access. Things are already going in the right direction, as according to the ACS’s Dr. Susan King there is no cost to author or reader for the ACS Articles on Request service and for author self-archiving of accepted manuscripts under the ACS Journal Publishing Agreement. Says Jennifer Amdur Spitz from Chicago-based public relations firm Amdur Spitz Associates:20 “film, music, journalism so many other forms are going through this too. Let’s hope we can preserve enough financial incentive for the creators in the marketplace to keep creating when the marketplace wants all their work to be free.”
Publications; it does not impact membership fees, grants, or educational programs offered by ACS.” The Author Rewards incentive program has a maximum value of some $60 million, if the authors of the more than 40,000 ACS articles published in 2014 elect to use their vouchers to make a paper open access. This investment by ACS is sizable and welcome. The remaining $1,000 per paper open access fee can be defrayed by delaying open access for 12 months and opting out of the Creative Commons License12 add-on. Yet, who is willing to pay $1,000 for immediate, unrestricted open access of one paper, on the off-chance that someone who was not at an institution with subscription journals would actually want to read it? To help with these sorts of costs, the University of WisconsinMadison had a $50,000 open access support fund operating from 2007 to January 31, 2014 to “promote awareness of open access publishing models, and to enable campus faculty and researchers to test the open access waters in the hope that their contributions to important open access publications would help pave the way for new models of scholarly publishing.” Now that the fund has been spent out, we have to turn elsewhere for funds if we want our papers to be openly accessible. Some of our grants have a line item for exactly this purposepublication costsas they are on research projects that produce papers published in open access journals. Such journals cover most of their operating costs by charging their authors; a recent paper on climate-relevant properties of aerosol particles13 that appeared in Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics, which is published by the European Geophysical Union through Copernicus Publications, cost the research grant of one of us €754. And some journals charge for color figures and graphs, even though their subscription charges are already in the six-figure range: a recent paper14 published in Nature Geoscience cost one of our research grants £872.42 for color graphs, and a hard copy of the cover art was going to be even more. Other journals, like those published by ACS, publish colored graphics at no cost to authors or readers. Yet, many of the charges appear to be reasonable, as there are real costs associated with producing a scientific paper. At JPC, these include: 1. Access to a fully supported fast web portal used for manuscript submission. 2. Support for editors and editorial staff who work in real offices and who ensure that manuscripts conform to scientific and editorial standards. 3. An entire organized infrastructure for managing the scientific review process. 4. Technical editors who typeset the manuscript according to the style that each journal requires. 5. A well-maintained reliable server infrastructure that makes papers available for the rest of the world. Some publishing houses producing original content written by professional editors can incur costs as high as $30,000 per paper.15 Although open access journals recover most of their costs for producing a paper by charging the authors of the manuscripts they receive a fee, nonopen access journals recover their costs through journal subscriptions that the institutions pay each year. Northwestern’s chemistry librarian tells us that though the price for each subscription varies with institution and publishing house and is often not made public, charges go up 8−10% each year. This cost is paid for through university
Franz Geiger*,†
Northwestern University, Department of Chemistry, Evanston, Illinois 60208, United States 1247
DOI: 10.1021/acs.jpclett.5b00381 J. Phys. Chem. Lett. 2015, 6, 1246−1248
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sites/default/files/microsites/ostp/ostp_public_access_memo_2013. pdf (accessed Feb 2015). (18) http://www.nsf.gov/news/special_reports/public_access/ index.jsp?WT.mc_id=USNSF_51. (19) The arXiv Preprint Server Hits 1 Million Articles. Nature. http://www.nature.com/news/the-arxiv-preprint-server-hits-1-millionarticles-1.16643 (accessed Feb 2015). (20) Amdur Spitz & Associates. http://amdurspitz.com (accessed Feb 2015).
Center for Sustainable Nanotechnology, Madison, Wisconsin 53706, United States
Joel Pedersen†
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University of WisconsinMadison, Department of Soil Science, Madison, Wisconsin 53706, United States Center for Sustainable Nanotechnology, Madison, Wisconsin 53706, United States
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AUTHOR INFORMATION
EDITOR'S NOTE Views expressed in this Viewpoint are those of the authors and not necessarily the views of the ACS.
Corresponding Author
*E-mail:
[email protected] Notes
The authors declare no competing financial interest. † Sustainable Nano. http://sustainable-nano.com/about/.
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REFERENCES
(1) Scientists: Human Activity Has Pushed Earth beyond Four of Nine “Planetary Boundaries”. Washington Post. http://www. washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/scientists-humanactivity-has-pushed-earth-beyond-four-of-nine-planetary-boundaries/ 2015/01/15/f52b61b6-9b5e-11e4-a7ee-526210d665b4_story.html (accessed Feb 2015). (2) Planetary Boundaries: Guiding Human Development on a Changing Planet. Science. http://www.sciencemag.org/content/347/ 6223/1259855.abstract (accessed Feb 2015). (3) ACS Articles on Requset. ACS Publications. http://pubs.acs.org/ page/policy/articlesonrequest/index.html (accessed Feb 2015). (4) Why There Is No iTunes for Science Papers. Martin Fenner (blog). http://blog.martinfenner.org/2015/02/23/why-there-is-noitunes-for-science-papers/ (accessed Feb 2015). (5) Nature Publisher Hopes to End “Dark Sharing” By Making ReadOnly Papers Free. Science. http://news.sciencemag.org/scientificcommunity/2014/12/nature-publisher-hopes-end-dark-sharingmaking-read-only-papers-free (accessed Feb 2015). (6) Troiano, J.; Olenick, L.; Kuech, T.; Melby, E.; Hu, D.; Lohse, S.; Mensch, A.; Ehimiaghe, E.; Walter, S.; Fu, L.; et al. Direct Probes of 4Nm Diameter Gold Nanoparticles Interacting with Supported Lipid Bilayers. J. Phys. Chem. C 2014, 119, 534−46. (7) Open Access. Wikipedia. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/open_ access (accessed Feb 2015). (8) Open Access at the Max Planck Society. http://openaccess.mpg. de/berliner-erklaerung (accessed Feb 2015). (9) How Open Access Empowered a 16-Year-Old to Make Cancer Breakthrough. YouTube.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v= G55hlnSD1Ys (accessed Feb 2015). (10) Copyright Clearance Center. http://www.copyright.com/ (accessed Feb 2015). (11) Expanded ACS AuthorChoice. ACS Publications. http:// acsopenaccess.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/ACS_SalesChart. pdf (accessed Feb 2015). (12) About the Licenses. Creative Commons. https:// creativecommons.org/licenses/ (accessed Feb 2015). (13) Upshur, M. A.; Strick, B. F.; McNeill, V. F.; Thomson, R. J.; Geiger, F. M. Climate-Relevant Physical Properties of Molecular Constituents for Isoprene-Derived Secondary Organic Aerosol Material. Atmos. Chem. Phys. 2014, 14, 10731−40. (14) Salvo, A.; Geiger, F. M. Reduction in Local Ozone Levels in Urban Sao Paulo Due to a Shift from Ethanol to Gasoline Use. Nat. Geosci. 2014, 7, 450−8. (15) Open Access: The True Cost of Science Publishing. Nature. http://www.nature.com/news/open-access-the-true-cost-of-sciencepublishing-1.12676 (accessed Feb 2015). (16) Bergstrom, T. C.; Courant, P. N.; McAfee, R. P.; Williams, M. A. Evaluating Big Deal Journal Bundles. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A. 2014, 111, 9425−30. (17) Memorandum for the Heads of Executive Departments and Agencies. Executive Office of the President. http://www.whitehouse.gov/ 1248
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