[Commons-Law] The Reality of Open-Access Journal Articles

[Ram]

The Reality of Open-Access Journal Articles

By ANDY GASS and HELEN DOYLE

Although reasonable people can undoubtedly disagree about aspects of
open-access publishing -- generally speaking, making journal articles
available online at no charge -- one point is beyond dispute: The
concept is no longer merely a theoretical possibility. It is time to
move beyond rehashing tired arguments about whether open access poses
a threat to publishers, professional societies, or research budgets.
We should begin to discuss how best to use what open access gives us:
the unfettered availability of scholarly literature.

The strongest evidence that open access to peer-reviewed articles is
here to stay, at least in the life sciences, comes from two
developments: the increasing number of agencies and foundations that
have begun to require or encourage free online access to publications
based on research they have helped finance; and the growing number of
journals that allow authors to make their papers freely available.
This month the National Institutes of Health announced that it will
ask scientists whose research it supports to deposit articles about
that research in PubMed Central, the free-to-use archive run by the
NIH. Some prominent journals have begun offering authors the option to
pay, through their grants, an open-access surcharge to make their
papers freely available immediately upon publication. And the Public
Library of Science (our employer), a nonprofit organization of
scientists and physicians, has established new journals that offer
free online access to their full contents, and whose articles have
begun to attract the attention of the international media.

Although questions remain, quite a few experts are clearly betting
that open access will not precipitate the collapse of scholarly
publishing. In fact, the case could be made that a consensus in favor
of open access is emerging among scientific and policy-making
institutions -- as well as individual scientists -- around the world.
ExpIicit endorsements have come in the past year and a half from the
Wellcome Trust, one of the world's largest nonprofit supporters of
biomedical research; several United Nations initiatives; and dozens of
prominent research organizations. Given such support, it makes sense
to focus now on the interesting possibilities we face.

1. What will become of the market for secondary filters of primary
research articles, services like BioMed Central's Faculty of 1000,
which highlight important papers published in a wide swath of
journals? Will fee-for-access ventures that collect open-access
articles become a new cash cow for publishers? At present, faculty
members offer their recommendations to the filtering services free,
and publishers sell their aggregated opinions to institutions -- will
established professors go on contributing their free labor to such
entrepreneurial enterprises?

2.How will the role of the research library change, as open-access
scholarly communication becomes more widely practiced? To what extent
will librarians be freed from the burdens of subscription management?

Many university libraries now encourage open access by subsidizing a
portion of the publication charges in open-access venues for authors
affiliated with the university, through channels like our employer's
institutional membership program. Will those subsidies continue? If
so, will they continue to be paid from libraries' budgets, or will
they come from research budgets -- a source that would be more
consistent with the view of open-access proponents that costs of
publication should be part of the costs of conducting research? Or
will external granting agencies, many of which already pay scientists'
page charges and color-illustration fees, assume the full costs of
their investigators' open-access publications?

Will libraries continue to serve as intermediaries through which
researchers find open-access information, as well as that available
only through subscription, and how?

Those questions relate not just to academic libraries, but to the
mission of colleges and universities. The time has come for a
comprehensive review of how best to pay for the dissemination of
professors' work.

3.How will reduced legal barriers to reusing articles -- a stipulation
of most formal definitions of open access -- affect teaching,
research, and other scholarly activities? There are, of course, good
precedents for having few or no legal restrictions on the reuse of
scholarly work: Every article published by an employee of the NIH is
in the public domain. Some more-restrictive open-access licenses now
available, like the Creative Commons attribution license in use for
articles from our employer and from BioMed Central, permit users to
reproduce scholarly work in any medium, for any purpose, as long as
the author receives proper credit.

4. What kinds of educational tools will such licenses make possible?
For example, will we see a proliferation of online articles enhanced
with explanatory links and informational sidebars, which make
scientific discoveries more comprehensible to a wide audience? Will
such resources be produced by commercial enterprises? By nonprofit
organizations? Or by networks of volunteers, as is the case with
open-source computer software?

5. Will open-access articles enable more researchers from
less-developed countries to work on the frontiers of science? Given
that all credible open-access journals waive publication fees for
authors who can't afford to pay them, increased availability -- and
therefore knowledge -- of the literature might well allow scientists
in the developing world to increase their output of cutting-edge work.
Would that change, in turn, help resolve the "10/90 gap" -- the
unfortunate reality that less than 10 percent of the global
expenditure on medical research goes to study the predominant health
needs of 90 percent of the world's population?

Most important, what kinds of discoveries might result from
searchable, open archives of peer-reviewed, full-text scientific
literature? The aggregation of gene sequences in a single, freely
accessible information space (GenBank) has spawned entire fields of
research; will open access to journal articles have a similar effect
on areas of work that could benefit from "mining" full texts and
figures? Clearly, comprehensive collections of open-access literature
would make it much easier to systematically review published medical
studies.

Will open-access literature lead to frequent discoveries of
correlations between phenomena previously thought to be unrelated?
Will it spark more open access to data sets and databases of
laboriously compiled and annotated information? The potential for open
access to lead to new discoveries is its single most compelling asset,
though one that is frequently overlooked.

Discussing open access seems to be a growth industry in academe.
Oddly, though, many of the recent debates and arguments about it seem
to have taken a notably regressive turn. In light of the widespread
enthusiasm for using the Internet to remove barriers to research
articles, those backward-facing cavils are shortsighted and distract
attention from more important issues.

Open access is no longer just an idea to be deconstructed, analyzed,
and reanalyzed. We now have information about how publishers are
practicing it and how scholars and researchers are reacting to it. The
really intriguing questions about the topic today deal with the
reality of open access and its exciting promise.

Andy Gass is a policy analyst, and Helen Doyle is director of
development and strategic alliances, at the Public Library of Science.


Source: The Chronicle