COVER STORY
OPENING ACCESS Publishers weigh the risks and benefits of free online journal access SOPHIE L. ROVNER, C&EN WASHINGTON
T
IME WAS, A RESEARCHER TYPED A MANUSCRIPT AND
mailed it to a publisher. If the manuscript made it through peer review and was accepted, the author could expect the article to appear in a printed journal some months later. How times have changed. Now a researcher submits a digital manuscript, which the publisher passes on to reviewers, who may offer feedback in as little as a day As soon as a manuscript is accepted, it may be posted on a journal's website, before or after the paper goes through digital editing and production. Digital capabilities clearly have enhanced the publishing process, and in isolation, they might have left the fundamentals
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of the journal market unchanged. But two other forces have been at work, and they are dramatically reshaping market dynamics. First, prices for many journals that cover science, technology, and medicine (STM) have risen substantially over the past decade, particularly for those produced by commercial publishers. This pricing trend has forced libraries to cancel some subscriptions and cut back on other purchases and has stirred considerable resentment among some readers, subscribing institutions, authors, and even editors. At the same time, Internet users have grown accustomed to being able to jump around the Web to access nearly any conceivable piece of information and in many cases to read it for free. It's hardly surprising that these users would come to want free online access—commonly called open access—to journal articles as well. WWW.CEN-0NLINE.ORG
sive and inaccessible. Nicholas R. CozPublishers have responded to the call for instance, "has legitimate worries that for open access with replies ranging from zarelli, a professor of molecular and cell bi open access will undermine subscription ology at the University of California, Berke "sure thing" to "let me think about it" to revenue, thereby compromising the soci "not on your life." One of their prime con ley, and editor-in-chief of the Proceedings of ety's ability to sustain a high-quality pub siderations is revenue, because open ac the National Academy of Sciences, was among lishing program for the long run," accord cess has the potential to throw publishers the attendees who responded to this ques ing to Robert D. Bovenschulte, president off their economic foundations. If a new tion with a hearty "yes" and who think that ofACS's Publications Division. journal starts as an open-access publica the expense and inaccessibility present a se Journal revenues are used in part to sup tion, or if an established journal converts rious problem. port administration of the peer review sys to open access and its customers drop their tem as well as careful editing and composi The solution, Cozzarelli believes, is open subscriptions as a result, the publisher must tion of manuscripts. In chemistry journals, access. Backers of the movement cite sev turn to other revenue sources such as page "structures matter, even in tables of con eral reasons for their support. Some believe charges, research-funding agencies, or in tents, and they are expensive" to process, that greater access to journal articles will stitutional sponsors. because they need careful checking and advance research faster. More researchers sometimes require nonstandard structural will read open-access articles than articles Publishers who choose to commit to representation, Heindel said. Furthermore, that require a subscription, the reasoning open access also have to decide how open he noted, manuscript submissions and ac goes, and those readers will be able to ap the access should be. Should they offer full, ceptances for chemistry journals are rising, ply the findings and build upon them. immediate access to all of their journals? raising publisher costs for staff hours, paper, Should they offer access only to material Another principal argument is that be printing, and shipping. that's at least a year old (a model that some cause researchers provide publishers with refer to as "back access" rather than open manuscripts for free, publishers shouldn't Mounting and maintaining publications access)? Or should they provide online ac charge for access to those papers once online and developing new digital func cess only to subscribers—a model referred they're published. Some proponents be tionalities can also require substantial funds. to as "toll access"—while allowing authors lieve that the results of research support For example, Patrickjackson, publishing di to post their own articles on their person ed by the public through taxes should be rector for chemistry and chemical engi al websites? This particular flavor of open accessible to its sponsors. In addition, neering publications for the commercial access, which many publishers already per smaller universities and colleges that can't publisher Elsevier, said at the workshop that mit, is much less likely to have a negative afford to subscribe to a large number of the firm is spending $200 million during impact on subscription revenue. journals would benefit from open access. 2005 and 2006 to move ScienceDirect, its huge online collection of journal products, Publishers are experimenting with all On the other hand, others believe that to a new architecture. ACS, too, has these models and more. Many of invested heavily in computer tech the experiments are occurring in JOURNAL EXPANSION nology for its journals. fields such as physics and the life Number of papers submitted to and published sciences. Pressure is building on There are further concerns about in JACS has been growing publishers of chemistry journals to the possible impact of open access follow suit. on other programs supported by Thousands of manuscripts 10ι publishing revenues. For example, at ACS, these funds support the de OPEN ACCESS therefore has been velopment of new journals, such as debated in numerous chemistry-re Nam Letters, that respond to emerg lated venues, including the pages of ing fields, according to Madeleine C&EN (March 7,page 37); theAmerJacobs, executive director and chief ican Chemical Society national meet Published executive officer of ACS. ing held in San Diego in March; and a workshop hosted by the National Academies in Washington, D.C., in OTHER PRODUCTS and activities 1996 1997 1998 1999 2000 2001 2002 2003 2004 October 2004. Ned D. Heindel, a funded at least in part by journal in chemistry professor at Lehigh Uni JACS = Journal of the American Chemical Society. come include the society's website, SOURCE: Chemical Abstracts Service versity and 1994 president of ACS, chemistryorg, which provides ed organized the workshop in associa ucational information on chemistry tion with the Chemical Sciences Roundto a global audience; National Chemistry open access is a solution in want of a prob table of the academies' National Research Week, which enhances the public appre lem. As Heindel put it at the workshop, Council. The group released a report on ciation of chemistry; and education pro "Chemists in general feel they have ade the workshop last week; it's posted at books. quate access" to journals. "We're not in a grams that enable teachers to do a better nap.edu/catalog/11288.html. job of teaching science,Jacobs noted. "Rev crisis mode." enues do advance the scientific communi The workshop was designed to address Some advise caution because open ac ty's work worldwide and don't just go to whether chemical journals are too expencess could prove counterproductive. ACS,
If open-access journals are to succeed in chemistry and physics, authors may have to drop their opposition to page charges and agree to manuscript submission charges. WWW.CEN-0NLINE.ORG
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COVER STORY support ACS member services," she con cluded. "The amount that is reinvested every year is millions of dollars." The argument that professional soci eties need journal profits to help fund their other programs doesn't wash with Cozzarelli. "It's a kind of extortion," he said at the workshop. A subscriber who wants the content of one of the society journals is forced to support these other programs, whether or not the subscriber wants to. In sum, open-access backers are un happy with the status quo. Although they have directed their anger in particular at commercial publishers with large profit margins, publishers with significantly smaller margins—including ACS—are al so drawing fire now Indeed, the society came in for some severe bashing at both the ACS meeting and the workshop re garding pricing and access. But Peter Gregory managing director for publishing at the Royal Society of Chemistry, defended ACS in an e-mail af ter the workshop. 'ACS publications are widely regarded as being amongst the finest and best value in the world," he wrote. 'ACS can really not be accused" of making its journals either expensive or inaccessible. ACS finds itself in an interesting dilem ma, with some of its representatives push ing for open access and others hating the very thought. Charles Ρ Casey—who was ACS president at the time of the work shop and is now immediate past-presi dent—was obviously reluctant to disclose his personal opinion at the National Acad emies workshop. When attendees pushed him to do so, he voiced his support of open access, no doubt startling some at the meeting. "Speaking for myself," he added, "I'd like to see ACS {give} more access to our journals than we have now I'm lobby ing for that internally" Indeed, since the workshop, ACS has announced experimental new policies in tended to provide free access to articles one year after publication (C&EN, March 7, page 10). The first policy applies to arti cles written by scientists whose research is funded by the National Institutes of Health. N I H itself recently established a policy encouraging scientists it supports to submit their peer-reviewed manuscripts to PubMed Central, the agency's open-ac cess digital repository of biomedical and life sciences journal literature (C&EN, Feb. 7, page 23). On behalf of its NIH-funded authors, ACS has now committed to de posit the author's version of an accepted, peer-reviewed manuscript in PubMed Central, for release to the public 12 months after publication. U2
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ACS's second new experimental policy covers all of its authors. In the past, the so ciety has permitted authors to distribute up to 50 free digital reprints of an article dur ing the first year after publication via a link to an ACS website. Now ACS will elimi nate the limit after the first year. Neither of these new policies affects access to the society's journal archive, which currently contains articles that are more than five years old and costs subscribers $1,500 to $4,500 per year depending on the size of the institution. FOR SOME, ACS's new measures don't go far enough. Indeed, Casey noted that the editors of a majority of the society's jour nals support some form of open access, even if access isn't immediate. Gordon G. Hammes, former editor ofACS's Biochem istry, stated flatly at the workshop that "a responsible scientific society should not charge for electronic archives." He believes that access to journal articles should be come free within six months to a year af ter publication. Costs associated with maintaining the online archive could be paid for by "adding a trivial amount to jour nal subscriptions," he said. Others associated with ACS are con cerned about the potential impact of open access on the bottom line. Casey himself expressed concerns at the workshop: "What would happen to our journal sub scriptions if our archives were made avail able for free after six months?" Regarding that issue, Elsevier'sJackson said at the workshop that for some jour nals, such as those in molecular and cell bi ology, most usage occurs within three to six months of publication. Offering such journals free after 12 months would there fore have little impact on revenues. In fields where significant usage occurs after the first year, such as chemistry the proposi tion would be much riskier, he said. Steven M. Bachrach, a chemistry pro fessor at Trinity University, San Antonio, noted at the ACS meeting that citation rates for chemistry articles remain high several years after publication. That means that these articles continue to have value to readers—and thus to the society—be yond the first year. "The longer the delay between publica tion and open access, the lesser the prospect of causing a reduction in sub scriptions," Bovenschulte noted. "But no one really knows how institutional cus tomers will react to free access after vari ous time intervals." It's possible that open access and prof it—or at least cost recovery—can coexist.
ENDURING IMPACT Citations of articles in JACS remain high for several years after publication Citations per article, February issues 10
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• 1999 Articles B1999 Communications • 1998 Articles Β1998 Communications JACS = Journal of the American Chemical Society. SOURCE: Steven Bachrach, Trinity University
A number of models that aim to satisfy these two needs are being proposed and tested. (For a list of open-access journals categorized by subject matter, see the Directory of Open Access Journals at www: doaj.org.) Bachrach described one such model, sometimes called an overlay journal, at the ACS meeting. In the version he described, authors would deposit their manuscripts in open-access repositories based at their uni versities. Journal publishers would select certain papers from these repositories to peer review and copyedit. The resulting "journal" would consist of a table of con tents with digital links to the edited arti cles. Bachrach believes that peer review and copyediting would represent an added value that subscribers would be willing to pay for. Most publishers are unlikely to move this far from conventional formats—at least for now Instead, they are testing models that mix traditional aspects of publishing with varying degrees of enhanced access. The Institute of Physics, for one, has adopted an unusual access model for its journals: It provides open access to all arti cles during the first 30 days after publica tion and then converts them to toll access. Several other publishers are experi menting with the model that is being urged on ACS—free online access to content within a year of publication. For instance, beginning this January, Elsevier made the content of its Cell Press family of journals available for free one year after publication. T h e Proceedings of the National Academy
of Sciences provides free access to its archive after six months. "Not only has it not ad versely affected us, it has benefited us by engendering loyalty among authors and reWWW.CEN-0NLINE.ORG
viewers," Cozzarelli said at the workshop. "It generates goodwill." PNAS originally tested a model in which it provided free access one month after publication, noted editorial staff member Sarah B. Tegen at the ACS meeting. But subscriptions declined, and the delay was extended to six months. PNAS authors who don't want to wait that long for their articles to become available to everyone can make them instantly free by paying a $1,000 open-access fee, which can be waived in cases of need. The fee drops to $750 for authors from institutions that have site licenses for PNAS. In the April 26,2005, issue, authors of six articles out of 61 opted for the open-access feature. PNAS will track whether these articles are read more than toll-access articles. So far, on average, the articles that are open access immediately are read 50% more than the other articles, according to Cozzarelli. Springer, another commercial publisher, introduced a similar option in mid-2004 with its Open Choice program. Authors who want their articles to be immediately free to all on Springer's website pay a $3,000 fee. In terms of operating costs and revenue expectations, PNAS is in an exceptional position. Unlike Springer and many other publishers, the National Academy of Sciences does not permit PNAS to retain any surplus and does not expect it to fund other academy activities. EACH ARTICLE that appears in PNAS costs the journal up to $3,800 to publish. The journal covers part of this cost through author publication charges, which average about $1,500 per article. As with several other journals that levy publication charges, PNAS can waive this fee in cases ofneed, although only about 2% of authors request a waiver. PNAS covers most of the remainder ofpublishing costs through subscriptions and site licenses, which range from $250 to $6,600. The Public Library of Science, a nonprofit coalition of scientists and physicians that publishes two open-access journals, also recovers publication costs through a variety of sources. PLoS relies on $1,500 author charges, advertising fees, and institutional memberships starting at $2,000 that provide members with reduced author fees and print subscriptions. The group also has a $9 million grant from the Gordon & Betty Moore Foundation. PLoS currently publishes PLoS Biology (launched in 2003) and PLoS Medicine (2004). Three other open-access journals, WWW.CEN-0NLINE.ORG
in the fields of computational biology, genetics, and pathogens, are planned for 2005. When a workshop attendee asked PLoS Executive Director Vivian Siegel what the prospects are for starting a. PLoS Chemistry journal as away to pressure ACS to loosen its access and pricing policies, she responded, "You're not the first person to ask me." PLoS is staying out of chemistry this year but is not making a commitment to stay out of the field after that, she said. As some workshop speakers noted, however, chemistry publishing is less dominated by high-margin commercial publishers than are fields such as the life sciences. So the chemistry journal market may not be as appealing a target for other publishers. The chemistry sector differs from the life sciences sector in other ways. Whereas page charges are widely accepted in the
ety (APS), Editor-in-Chief Martin Blume said at the workshop, "page-charge revenue has gone virtually to zero" because prior experimentation has shown that authors will switch to other publishers' journals rather than pay the fees. He stated that there may be a difference between publication charges that enable open access to an author's article and those that don't net the author additional benefits. But physicist authors maybe unwilling to pay even for open access. The U.K.'s Institute of Physics and its publishing partner, the German Physical Society, are shelling out nearly $200,000 a year to keep their online-only, open-access New Journal of Physics afloat. The journal, which this year is charging author fees ranging up to $900 per paper, has been "a total financial failure," Gregory said. If open-access journals are to succeed in chemistry and physics, it's quite possible that authors will have to drop their opposition to page charges, and they may even have to agree to manuscript submission charges. That's not likely to happen unless organizations that fund research include some extra monies for publishing the results. Other institutions with an interest in widening access may also subsidize publication costs. For example, theJoint Information Systems Committee (flSC), which supports innovative use of information technology in education, has set up agreements that permit U.K. academics to publish in some open-access journals for free, including the New JournalofPhysics and journals published by BioMed Central. BioMed Central relies on a mix of institutional memberships, author charges for nonmembers, and revenues from ancillary products such as Faculty of 1000—a literature-evaluation service—to support its publishing activities. In some cases, institutional sponsors serve as the sole source of funds for an open-access journal. APS offers one such publication, the online-only Physical Review Special Topics—Accelerators & Beams. Launched in 1998, the journal is supported by large-accelerator laboratories. The labs were motivated to provide backing because "a peer-reviewed journal in this field was badly needed," according to Blume. Of course, if the labs were to decide to withdraw their support, APS would need to institute author or subscription charges. Similarly, the nonprofit Beilstein Insti-
Chemists in general feel they have adequate access"to journals. "We're not in a crisis mode."
BEGGING OFF Even well-funded chemists resist page charges, according to Heindel. life sciences, they are resisted in the field of chemistry ACS, for one, stopped trying to collect page charges about ûve years ago. Heindel noted that when he was involved in an ACS review of page charges, "we saw a large number of well-funded chemists who pleaded poverty It was an enormous problem." Physics journals face some of the same challenges. At the American Physical Soci-
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COVER STORY tute for the Advancement of Chemical Sciences will financially support a new peerreviewed chemistry journal that is due to begin publishing later this year (C&EN, March 21, page 13). The institute will publish the open-access BeilsteinJournal of Organic Chemistry in cooperation with BioMed Central. Fully open-access journals are "gold" no matter what their source of revenue, according to a classification developed by Stevan Harnad, a cognitive scientist at the University of Quebec, Montreal, and a central figure in open-access circles. Although these journals have attracted considerable attention, they don't provide the only means for readers to view articles for free. As an alternative, many journals allow authors to place a copy of their own articles in an open-access digital archive. D e pending on the publisher's requirements, the repository may be a researcher's personal website, a university-wide repository, or even NIH's PubMed Central. Harnad, who is a champion of such "selfarchiving," terms journals that permit the practice "green." Examples of green journals and publishers include Science, PNAS, APS, Elsevier, Springer, and Nature Publishing Group. Publishers such as ACS, whose journals offer neither open access nor self-archiving, are termed "gray" Harnad would like to see ACS ease its access restrictions, but he doesn't think it's necessary for the society to go gold. 'All ACS needs to do now in order to be on the side of the angels is to go green," he wrote in an e-mail after the workshop. Some organizations aren't waiting for publishers to give permission for authors to self-archive. T h e Wellcome Trust, a British medical research charity, is currently developing a policy that will require researchers whom it funds to deposit their papers in PubMed Central or a European equivalent within six months of publication. The charity which also wants to encourage open-access journals, will back its initiative by providing authors with funds to cover publication fees levied by these publications. And because openaccess journals tend to have a lower impact—in terms of tenure and research-funding decisions—than traditional toll-access publications such as Nature, Science, or the Journal of the Ameri-
can Chemical Society, the trust offers reassurance to researchers who are reluctant to patronize such journals. On its website, the trust "affirms the principle that it is the intrinsic merit of the work, and not the title of the journal in which a researcher's work is published, that should be
AUGMENTED IMPACT "The objective of open access is to maximize research impact by maximizing research access," according to Harnad. considered in funding decisions and awarding grants." The Wellcome Trust believes it is on firm financial footing in supporting open access as a publishing model. In an economic analysis published last year (www. weUcome.ac.uk/doc_WTD003185.html), the charity concluded that author-funded open-access publishing "should be able to deliver high-quality peer-reviewed research at a cost that is significantly less than the traditional" subscribersupported model. Savings will occur because authorpays journals lack costs for subscription management, license negotiations, and many sales costs, according to the trust. Even if t h e group is correct, not all subscribing institutions would benefit equally in an author-pays, open-access model. For example, top research universities could see their journal-related costs go up, because these universities presumably are
The longer the delay between publication and open accesSp the lesser the prospect of causing a reduction in subscriptions/'
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responsible for the majority of papers in journals. Cornell University Library analyzed the financial impact on more than 100 universities in a study released last year (dspace.library.cornell.edu/handle/1813/ 193). For Cornell itself, whose researchers publish more than 3,500 scholarly articles annually, switching from a subscriptionfunded system to one funded solely by authors would increase total expenditures for serials by at least $1.5 million, or 19%, per year. Of course, if research-funding organizations footed the bill for at least some of these page charges, Cornell wouldn't have to absorb such a large increase. ON THE OTHER HAND, Trinity University publishes only about 20 to 30 science and engineering articles per year, Bachrach said at the ACS meeting. "So we would come out positive" if open access supported by author fees supplanted the subscription model. There could be some other peculiar consequences of a transition to open-access journals supported by author charges. Bovenschulte noted that about one-third of ACS journal revenue comes from subscriptions in the industrial sector. If open access takes hold and is primarily financed through author fees, the burden of journal support will shift more squarely onto the shoulders of academe. That's because industrial scientists submit very few of the articles in ACS journals. So what is the likely future for increased access to journal articles? Despite the fact that many journals permit it, "researchers have been slow to self-archive" their papers, both because they don't realize the benefits and because they are busy, Harnad has conceded. In fact, he estimates that only about 15% of STM authors are self-archiving. Nor have authors flocked to open-access journals; they still want to publish their papers in high-prestige journals, which are rarely the open-access publications. Furthermore, some researchers remain unaware of the whole open-access issue. Therefore, if open access does take hold, it's likely that the driving forces will be institutions and readers rather than authors. Moreover, it's quite possible that a shift away from the traditional subscriptionbased model won't produce any savings for the community as a whole. "In an open-access model of refereed scholarly publishing," according to the Cornell University Library report, "the costs of publishing do not go away, they are simply redistributed." • WWW.CEN-0NLINE.ORG
