Chemical Education Today
Letters
Does Information Want To Be Free? Responses to a Recent Editorial on Open Access to JCE’s Published Articles Editor’s Note Last November in an editorial titled, “Does Information Want To Be Free”, I asked whether readers wanted this Journal to provide them with the highest possible quality and pointed
out that “high quality information needs to cost something”. Responses that were sent directly to me appear below.
Open-Access Journals and JCE: What Do the Authors and Readers Want?
fees of interlibrary loan. And even apart from outside funding, most academic institutions encourage and financially support their faculty to do research and to publish results. The total dissemination costs are typically only a small fraction of the overall costs of the research that generates the information to be disseminated.
In his November 2008 editorial, John Moore raised the question, “What does information want?”, and asked for comments (1). Because the question was asked in the Journal, I would like to give my answer in the same venue. Recasting the Question Information as such has neither wants nor, if it had, any known means to express them, and I will therefore comment on the underlying, real question: “What do the major stakeholders want?” The major stakeholders are the authors and the readers. The readers have already voted, overwhelmingly, by increasing the readership of journals that have converted to open access, sometimes even by an order of magnitude, and by the drop in individual journal subscriptions even in the absence of a competing open-access journal. Readers are consumers of information, which they want as conveniently and inexpensively available as possible. Because I guess that most authors want the largest possible readership for their writings, which they provide for free anyway, I see no conflict here between those major stakeholders. But wanting something is not enough: if it is desirable, how can we make it happen? Unfortunately, discussions both pro and con “open-access” publishing often confuse several aspects: the source and physical form of the information, the question of who pays for its gathering and for its dissemination, and the matter of quality control. So let us look at these, one by one. Content Sources and Media for Dissemination Authors and Their Funders I doubt many readers would like to go back to the days when science was the prerogative of a few independently wealthy individuals, either as practitioners or as patrons. Science nowadays is largely a communal, often taxpayer-supported effort, underwritten by government-owned laboratories (e.g., NIST and NIH) and government-funded institutions such as NSF, their private counterparts such as HHI, and other foundations, or industry. All these pay for the research that generates the information, they usually (except for proprietary industrial research) insist on its dissemination, and these funders explicitly allow for the costs involved, such as conference attendance of speakers, the cost of reprints, and page charges. Many granting agencies specifically include support for libraries in their allowable overhead charges, and therefore pay for part of the journal subscriptions or the transfer costs and copyright
Publication Media Information can be broadcast in many physical forms, each with different characteristics. For this discussion the most salient characteristics to consider are convenience, reliability, and durability. The Internet revolution provides an alternative to paper-based publishing—an alternative with growing appeal, as well as the promise of lower cost (by avoiding the costs of paper, printing, and mailing). While the open-access movement has certainly been stimulated by the development of electronic media, the practice of open access has existed long before the rise of electronic media— for example, in the form of public libraries, where everyone can go and read for free. NIST in Gaithersburg, MD maintained free photocopy machines specifically for use by nonemployees consulting its library holdings. On the other hand, even in the Internet age there is a need for archival (i.e., printed) copies, because the long-term availability as well as the format of Internet data cannot be guaranteed: just try to listen to an old gramophone record, to project a 35-mm movie, or to read an old paper tape, a Diablo disk, or even a 5.25-in. floppy disk. Internet and paper publishing will likely coexist for a long time, and the extra costs of paper copies will have to be charged separately to those individuals and institutions that need or want archival material. Paying for Content Production and Dissemination The question involved is really one of money: who pays for the actual costs of disseminating the information gathered mostly by communal funding, and for its quality control? In open access, the content is not free—it is only free to the reader, but the publication costs are borne by either or both the source of the information and advertising. Given that the institutions supporting the research also have an interest in broadcasting it, and that the dissemination costs are a relatively small fraction of the total, they will usually support page charges, which are one of the two common modes of supporting free-access publication. For most authors it will make little difference whether they have to pay page charges, because their employers or granting agencies will usually pay for either the journal subscriptions or copyright fees upon interlibrary use, or the up front page fees of open-access journals. The few individual authors (including retir-
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Chemical Education Today
Letters ees such as me) who would have to pay page charges themselves are usually excused from paying, or pay a reduced amount. The most common alternative to page charges is advertising revenue: community newspapers are often financed solely by their ads, as are the Internet editions of major newspapers, such as my daily morning fix, The Washington Post (2), which is freely available, yet of high quality. Here is another example: Google clearly profits from its business model of trading desired information for targeted advertising (3)—and so do its users. And while many scientific journals shun advertising, J. Chem. Educ. already uses it (4), and therefore could easily experiment with the same approach as The Washington Post of using subscription fees to pay for the extra costs of printing and delivering paper copies for those who prefer or need them. Page charges could still be charged, if necessary, to support the remaining expenses, although I suspect that, with the expanded readership due to open access, advertising alone might well produce a sufficient source of support. Demand-Side Content Dissemination: Libraries and Some Positive Effects of Reduced Subscription Costs So far I have left out one important component in the distribution chain: the role of the disseminators. On the demand side of that distribution chain are the libraries, which provide general access to journals as well as books, and on this basis build archives of information. Many university libraries favor the open-access model, and actively participate in SPARC, the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition of the Association of Research Libraries (5), founded by the Association of American Universities and the Association of American University Presses, and endorsed by the Association of College and Research Libraries. SPARC, now with almost 800 member institutions worldwide, favors new approaches to disseminate research results, and has mostly focused on scientific, technological, and medical fields, where journal prices are high. It strongly supports the movement towards open-access publishing, which promises lower overall costs than those of the ever-increasing prices and profits of those for-profit journals whose publishers exploit their monopoly positions. In order to prime the pump of open-access publishing—and because the resulting up-front expenses will most likely be offset by the absence of subscription costs or interlibrary fees—several SPARC member institutions, starting with the University of California at Berkeley and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, have made funds available to pay the page charges for their faculty, postdoc, and student authors when they publish in open-access journals; the University of Wisconsin–Madison reimburses authors for up to half their open-access fees (6). Closely related movements are the 132 colleges and universities that publicly support the Federal Research Public Access Act (7), and the growing trend, started by MIT in 2002 (8), to make course materials freely accessible on the Web. For an overview of open access see ref 9. Supply-Side Content Dissemination: Journal Editors and Some Models for Offsetting Publication Costs On the supply side of the scientific information transfer, editors are the disseminators. Editors play a crucial role, because the quality of any journal is largely determined by the standards set,
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and especially by selection of reviewers. I know: for 10 years I was the U.S. editor of an international electrochemical journal (10). I did my job without any personal remuneration; my academic employer paid the bill for my “release time”, and both my chairman and my dean thought that was a good deal, because they were happy to have editors of prestigious journals on their faculty. I did it because it was an obligation to colleagues as well as an honor, and I am sure that I also benefited professionally from the many contacts I made and the many manuscripts I read and, often, edited. As far as I know, the reviewers acted from similar impulses: they felt responsible for maintaining the professional quality of their journal, and none of them did it for pay (which was not offered anyway). Those impulses have nothing to do with how the journal is financed, either through page charges up front, through subsequent subscriptions and copyright fees, or through advertising. But even if one subscribes to the idea that only money motivates people, open-access publishing does not mean that editors necessarily need to volunteer their services, or that there are no other real costs involved in running a journal, regardless of its output medium. Open access does not imply cost-free, nor profit-free: there are businesses based on publishing open-access journals for profit, just as there are traditional journal publishing houses for profit, and some of the old, well-established for-profit publishers now offer an open-access alternative to their authors. Again, the business model of Google illustrates the trade-off of open-access information in exchange for targeted advertising: their algorithms provide a very effective sorting and ordering of an otherwise unintelligible mass of information, yet Google can give its results away, and make a healthy profit doing so. Maintaining Quality Control and Increasing Readership Quality comes primarily from the authors, who like to publish in well-reputed, widely read journals, maintained by reputable editors and reviewers, who typically (yet not necessarily) volunteer their services. Quality control comes from those editors and reviewers, and professional staff involved. Expenses stem from salaries (e.g., for staff beyond the voluntary services of journal editors and peer reviewers), the necessary hardware and software, and the printing and mailing costs of paper copies. And neither quality nor quality control has anything to do with whether those inevitable expenses are paid up front by page charges, afterwards by subscriptions and copyright fees, or by advertisers who want access to a specific audience. Open access in and of itself does not lower the inevitable expense of quality control and dissemination, but the Internet can be a big help to lower distribution costs and reach a wider readership. Conclusion In summary, open access is neither cost-free nor does it obviate the need for editorial quality control. The recent experience is encouraging: just look at the Public Library of Science (PLoS) journals (11), which in a few years have catapulted themselves to the top of the heap in quality and readership. In short, open access offers the hope of lowering the overall cost of publication to society, and the near-certainty of a much wider distribution of the fruits of science. In my opinion, both are good things.
Journal of Chemical Education • Vol. 86 No. 9 September 2009 • www.JCE.DivCHED.org • © Division of Chemical Education
Chemical Education Today
Letters Literature Cited 1. Moore, John W. J. Chem. Educ. 2008, 85, 1467.
2. The Washington Post Home Page. http://www.washingtonpost.com/ (accessed Jul 2009). 3. Google Corporate Information Web Page. http://www.google.com/ intl/en/corporate/ (accessed Jul 2009). 4. Journal of Chemical Education Advertisers Listing. http://www. jce.divched.org/Advertisers/index.html (accessed Jul 2009). 5. SPARC Home Page. http://www.arl.org/sparc/ (accessed Jul 2009). 6. SPARC ENews Web Page. http://www.arl.org/sparc/publications/ articles/memberprofile-berkeley.shtml (accessed Jul 2009). 7. SPARC FRPA Act Web Page. http://www.arl.org/sparc/advocacy/ frpaa/index.shtml (accessed Jul 2009). 8. MIT Open Courseware Page. http://ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/web/ about/history/index.htm (accessed Jul 2009). 9. Suber, P. Open Access Overview. http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/
fos/overview.htm (accessed Jul 2009). 10. Journal of Electroanalytical Chemistry Home Page. http://www. elsevier.com/wps/find/journaldescription.cws_home/504087/ description#description (acessed Jul 2009). 11. Public Library of Science. http://www.plos.org/ (accessed Jul 2009). Robert de Levie The author is a retired professor from Georgetown University Department of Chemistry Bowdoin College Brunswick, ME 04011
[email protected] Supporting JCE Online Material http://www.jce.divched.org/Journal/Issues/2009/Sep/abs1031.html Full text (HTML and PDF) with links to cited URLs and JCE article
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