MAY 2005 VOLUME 18, NUMBER 5 © Copyright 2005 by the American Chemical Society
Editorial Open Access Publication: One Editor’s Opinion The issue of open access publishing has been at the forefront of debates about scientific publishing for the past few years and appears to be reaching a head with respect to libraries, society publishers, commercial publishers, and funding agencies. Open access is a concept that is enabled by the Internet and is, therefore, new. Access to scientific journals was previously controlled primarily by libraries and librarians. Readers had to enter a library, usually at a university, to find a journal, and what they found was determined by a committee of librarians and faculty members who balanced resources with the needs of their research community. University funds for journal purchases have not been able to keep up with the pace of new journal introduction or with increases in prices, especially from commercial publishers, so there was and continues to be a tension between publishers and purchasers. New journals have not been adopted by libraries nearly as often as established journals are renewed. Thus, the power of incumbency is just as great in university libraries as it is in the United States Congress. This trend is changing somewhat in the electronic world because many publishers now offer packages of all their journals or subgroups of journals for discounted prices that make them more affordable than purchasing individual titles. As I mentioned in my January editorial, this has had a strong positive impact on the adoption of Chemical Research in Toxicology. However, this only represents increased access to those with affiliations with universities, medical centers, companies, or nonprofit research institutions. It does not represent open access to the community at large. We may think that we have open access because everything that comes across our desktop comes through a portal that our institution pays for us to enter. Try reading the same journals from home without signing in through your institutional electronic library, from a high school, or from a four year college.
Open access is a good idea, although its exact meaning is a bit uncertain. One model is that all information is freely available to everyone in the world as soon as it is published. Journals have been created by the Public Library of Science with this model. Another form of open access charges subscription fees for a fixed period of time and then provides free access to all of the older literature. Many society publications have adopted this model, and the fixed time for paid subscriptions is typically 6-12 months. The American Chemical Society (ACS) has not adopted either of these models but has allowed authors to e-mail or post a link on their Web site to distribute 50 free e-prints of their final published articles to interested colleagues. It is hard to be opposed to universal access to the scientific and biomedical literature; in fact, I am strongly supportive. However, this is one of those cases where the devil truly is in the details. Someone must pay for the cost of publishing information by whatever medium, so it is worthwhile to consider the financing of journal publishing. This discussion will be focused on society publishers. They are committed to advancing specific fields of science, and publishing journals in those fields is one of the most important things they do. They are willing to endure some financial pain to ensure that important information relevant to their society’s mission is published. Commercial publishers are driven by profit and respond to many different masters, including market forces and investors. Commitment to a given field of research may not be a high priority if a commercial publisher experiences financial trouble. Let me start by saying that it costs a lot of money to publish scientific information whether it is on paper or over the Internet. Editorial staff are required to process manuscripts, make decisions, interact with authors and reviewers, and forward accepted manuscripts for composition and publication. Publishers are needed to copy edit manuscripts, typeset them, process the Supporting
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Information, and then print the articles or mount them on their Web site. The ACS estimates that if they never printed another journal page, they would save 15% of the total cost of publication. That seems astonishing because most of us authors seem to be doing an increasing amount of work for publishers. We have to use certain preferences for word processing, graphics, and file submission. It can be a real pain to submit an article to some journals because of the demands they make on authors for composition. Surely, the publishers are saving some money on that! No doubt, they are, but there are additional costs associated with electronic publishing, archiving, and security that more than offset the savings provided by electronic submission. I believe that when a detailed analysis of costs is done once publishers fully adapt to electronic publishing, it will show that it is more expensive to publish an electronic product than to publish a paper product. Once the paper product is mailed, the publisher’s responsibility is done; libraries are responsible for all archiving. This is not so with an electronic journal. Archives must be maintained by the publisher, hardware and memory expanded, software upgraded, etc. We all know how rapidly technology evolves and how quickly computer equipment becomes obsolete. This happens not only at the journal archive but also in the editorial office. The ACS needs to upgrade our hardware and software every few years so we can keep up with technological advances in journal editing. The ACS has only been publishing on the Internet since 1996, and since then, their information technology staff has increased from 8 to 105. I really believe that this is just the tip of the iceberg because there are other hidden costs of electronic publishing of which most of us are not even awaresfor example, staging areas for new software development and implementation, hardening of Web sites, etc. I strongly urge university librarians to carefully consider these hidden costs before committing to building electronic archives to store and disseminate publications from their faculty so that they are sure about the true financial costs of their commitment. How does a society pay for the costs of publishing? Societies strive to cover their costs and return a small amount to the society for its activities. This contribution is a small percentage of the total publication budget and nowhere near the hefty profits that commercial publishers achieve. Any society that has begun publishing a new journal in the past 15 years likely lost money on that journal for quite a while before breaking even. They stick it out because nurturing new fields is part of their scientific mission. However, the costs of building those new journals has to be covered from the income generated by existing journals. This further reduces any contributions to the society. Financing journal publishing is conceptually simple, although not easy. Either the reader pays or the author pays. Readers pay through library subscriptions (for ACS, personal subscriptions generate no net income) or individual article purchases (typically a small number). Authors pay through page charges, submission fees, color costs, and reprint charges. Some have proposed levying an open access charge to cover these costs and to minimize or eliminate subscription costs. There are some fields and some very prestigious journals that may able to do this, but I do not believe an open access fee will be viable for most journals. Several years ago, we instituted a $35 per page charge at Chemical Research in Toxicology and had to discontinue
Editorial
it within 18 months because our submissions decreased substantially. No one called or wrote to complain about the page charge; they just sent their manuscripts elsewhere. So I think an additional charge of $1000-3000 to support open access publishing will not be embraced by most authors. ACS journals are a tremendous bargain for authors because the ACS does not charge a submission fee, page charges, or color costs. They only charge for reprints, and of course, those are optional. Because many authors are not buying reprints anymore, it is possible to publish papers in ACS journals at no cost. I offer an example from my own lab. I recently published a paper in an ACS journal and a second paper in another society’s journal. The first paper was 10 printed pages, and the second was seven printed pages; each paper had one color figure. I paid for 100 reprints for the paper in the ACS journal, which cost $533 and included a $100 surcharge for color. I also paid for 100 reprints in the other society’s journal ($532, including $52 for color), but in addition, I paid mandatory page charges ($525), half-tone charges ($200), a color charge ($300), and a heavy paper charge for color ($120), which totaled $1677. Because reprints are optional, I could have elected not to buy any, in which case I would have paid nothing to publish a 10 page article in an ACS journal and $1145 to publish a seven page article in another society’s journal. I am very fortunate to have funding from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) that allows me to pay for publication costs, but my colleagues in other fields are not so lucky. I bring up this example to illustrate that ACS has a limited pool of funds with which to pay for its publications program. It really boils down to institutional subscriptions, single-article sales, and some advertising. Why does the ACS not levy page charges, submission fees, etc.? Because ACS publishes 32 journals across a range of disciplines in chemistry, many of which have limited resources for research and even more limited resources for publication. The ACS has made a choice to publish journals in those areas because it is scientifically important to do so; as far as I can tell after 18 years of editing an ACS journal, the society has never made a decision to publish or not to publish a journal solely, or even mainly, on the basis of financial viability. So is ACS gouging libraries with its subscription prices to cover costs? I’m not the best person to answer that, but my understanding is that the cost per word for ACS journals is very comparable to those published by other societies. Certainly, the cost per word for ACS journals is a fraction of the cost per word for commercial journals. Several years ago, the ACS digitized its complete backfile of published journals to generate a searchable PDF archive of all its publicationsssome of them back to the 1870s. This was a marvelous technological accomplishment that stimulated other societies to do the same. The ACS decided to charge for the backfile to recoup the costs of creating and maintaining it. So libraries pay a subscription fee for ACS journals that covers the cost of the current year plus the previous four years, AND they can choose to pay a separate fee for the backfile. Most research libraries pay for the backfile because it is a great product. However, librarians are unhappy about the fact that they have to pay for information they have paid for once, and they do not like the fact that they lose one year’s information every year from the current subscription.
Editorial
The ACS decision to charge for its archive is not consistent with open access publishing and has placed ACS Publications in an awkward position of being somewhere between a society publisher and a commercial publisher. It has damaged the ACS’s credibility as a leader in scientific publishing and has distracted authors, reviewers, and readers from the numerous accomplishments of ACS Publications, including its commitment to authors across the full range of chemical sciences. ACS recently announced a change in their policy that allows authors to e-mail or post a link on their Web site to distribute up to 50 free e-prints of their final published articles to interested colleagues. By this new initiative, the access restriction will be lifted at 12 months, allowing free access to such articles via those same author-directed links as a step toward more open access. I believe this will have minimal initial impact because most readers do not access articles through these Web sites; they access them through journal Web sites, SciFinder, or PubMed, which do not link to individual or institutional Web sites. However, Google is becoming a force in scientific searching, so it may be possible fairly soon to find article links on institutional or individual Web sites. The second policy that ACS just announced is more substantial in that they have agreed to provide final drafts of accepted but unedited manuscripts published by NIH-funded authors to the NIH’s PubMedCentral 12 months after publication. This is a good idea that not only provides open access to NIH-funded research but also saves authors the trouble of deposition if NIH accepts the ACS proposal. The ACS is currently reviewing the pricing models for its journals and all associated policies. The time has come for the ACS to assume its natural position as a productive leader in scientific publishing by making a commitment to open access publishing. My personal recommendation is that the ACS develop a pricing model that charges only
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for a current year’s subscription and releases all published articles at no cost 1 year after publication. This will not only provide open access to the world’s most significant collection of chemical literature but also eliminate a psychological barrier that is preventing librarians and scientists from collaborating with ACS Publications in generating new models for archiving and searching the chemical literature. We have entered a period where rapid technological change is going to overturn existing models of scientific publication, dissemination, and archiving. All of the stakeholders (authors, publishers, and librarians) need to roll up their sleeves, shift the focus from the philosophical to the practical, and work together to design new systems to maximize their capabilities and resources. Any model that does not recognize the realities of the new publishing landscape or that uses precious resources to duplicate capabilities will be wasteful and ultimately unsustainable. Once this first, and most obvious, problem surrounding open access is solved, we can focus on the more significant problem of open use. How does one access and use published information in a world in which words and data are controlled by copyrights that limit what one can do with raw data contained in scientific articles? The technology exists to process raw data for compilation, mining, analysis, etc. However, that technology cannot be used with many of the forms of data that are currently submitted to journals, especially as Supporting Information, and its use is technically precluded by the copyright agreements that all authors sign. These issues will have to be the subject of a future editorial.
Lawrence J. Marnett TX0500934
