Comment▼ Open access and you
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new freedom is brewing. It’s not mentioned in the U.S. Bill of Rights or the UN Declaration of Human Rights, but it’s increasingly recognized as vital— unrestricted access to scientific information on the Inter net. Open access is a juggernaut that is permanently reshaping the landscape for scientific publishing, and it will change the way you publish and search for scientific information. The principle is simple. If the government pays for the research, then the public should have free and open access to the results. Libraries, researchers, and professional societies all share the goal of making high-quality scientific information as accessible as possible. To their credit, publishers provide an important service in receiving, reviewing, edit ing, indexing, formatting, posting, publishing, and archiving research articles. In addition, publishers add value to the final product by “credentialing” it—assuring readers that the material is high-quality and has passed peer review. These services cost money, which is paid by individual and library subscriptions and by advertisers and authors (through page and reprint charges). But how can publishers recover these costs when their content is freely available online? Is there a better system? The open-access revolution has been fomented by government agencies, foundations, librarians, and scientists who are upset that the average price of journal subscriptions has risen 3-fold from 1986 to 2000. Librarians have painfully cut subscriptions as budgets failed to keep pace. They don’t see the reason for the escalating cost of subscriptions to information paid for by public funding. In this respect, open access is a very democratic concept, which would improve the availability of scientific information in the developing world. But if authors must pay to publish, it has a chilling effect on the ability of scientists in developing countries to submit articles. What’s happening now? The life sciences community has already accepted the principle of open access. Beginning May 2, authors whose research is funded by the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH) are requested to submit their published research articles to the National Library of Medicine within one year of publication. PubMed Central is the open archive of published papers and is supported by NIH. Some have criticized NIH for creating its own archive at a cost of $2–4 million per year instead of simply directing the public to the original journals’ websites, but these original journals have not all released their content. Others criticize the voluntary nature of the system, which places authors in the difficult position of negotiating between the journal and NIH about the timing of the deposit. Still, PubMed Central relies on a flourishing publishing industry to process the original articles, and
© 2005 American Chemical Society
this industry may be undermined when its content is accessible on PubMed Central for free. Eventually, the life sciences community may resort to an “author-pays” system for peer review, similar to the arrangement at BioMed Central, which is the journal of the Public Library of Science. In that case, authors or institutions pay $3000 per article published. The journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences also has adopted an authorpays model, charging $1000 per article. In February, the American Institute of Physics launched AIP Author Select, a compendium of three journals that permits authors, or their funding agencies, to make articles freely available on the web at the time of publication for a $2000 fee. What are the author’s rights in all of this? Of course, you own the rights to your own intellectual property. You can keep your research articles, post them on your website, and self-publish as you choose. But without the credentialing process provided by publishers, few would recognize the contribution. Usually, authors are willing to yield their copyright in exchange for credentialing, publishing, and archiving services. Still, the process seems somewhat unfair to me, and someday it may change. We need a “catch-and-release” system whereby the publisher owns the exclusive rights to the paper for an appropriate time—generally considered as 6–18 months. Then, the paper is reincarnated into the public domain and deposited by the author to a designated online archive. Articles could then be reused without legal complications, and full text and figures could be “data mined” for new correlations and discoveries. Imagine searching full-text databases just like the genomic sequences in GenBank. As scientists and authors, we want as many people as possible to read, use, and cite our research. And for this, we rely on a stable publishing industry. Publishers need to find a business model by which they can capture enough revenue in the short time that the paper resides with them. That may require charging authors and institutions and/or increasing fees for current content. Change is the only thing that is certain. Right now, the American Chemical Society, home of ES&T, is considering making all back issues of its journals freely available after an appropriate period. At ES&T, we strongly encourage this policy. It will result in better dissemination of ideas, increase our readership, and, hopefully, improve environmental science and technology. Open access is an irresistible idea.
Jerald L. Schnoor, Editor
[email protected] APRIL 1, 2005 / ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY ■ 143A
