[Commons-Law] The paperless library

[prabhu ram]

http://economist.com/science/PrinterFriendly.cfm?Story_ID=4423646

The paperless library

Sep 22nd 2005
From The Economist print edition


Free access to scientific results is changing research practices

IT USED to be so straightforward. A team of researchers working
together in the laboratory would submit the results of their research
to a journal. A journal editor would then remove the authors' names
and affiliations from the paper and send it to their peers for review.
Depending on the comments received, the editor would accept the paper
for publication or decline it. Copyright rested with the journal
publisher, and researchers seeking knowledge of the results would have
to subscribe to the journal.

No longer. The internet—and pressure from funding agencies, who are
questioning why commercial publishers are making money from
government-funded research by restricting access to it—is making free
access to scientific results a reality. This week, the Organisation
for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) issued a report
describing the far-reaching consequences of this. The report, by John
Houghton of Victoria University in Australia and Graham Vickery of the
OECD, makes heavy reading for publishers who have, so far, made
handsome profits. But it goes further than that. It signals a change
in what has, until now, been a key element of scientific endeavour.

The value of knowledge and the return on the public investment in
research depends, in part, upon wide distribution and ready access. It
is big business. In America, the core scientific publishing market is
estimated at between $7 billion and $11 billion. The International
Association of Scientific, Technical and Medical Publishers says that
there are more than 2,000 publishers worldwide specialising in these
subjects. They publish more than 1.2m articles each year in some
16,000 journals.

This is now changing. According to the OECD report, some 75% of
scholarly journals are now online. Entirely new business models are
emerging; three main ones were identified by the report's authors.
There is the so-called big deal, where institutional subscribers pay
for access to a collection of online journal titles through
site-licensing agreements. There is open-access publishing, typically
supported by asking the author (or his employer) to pay for the paper
to be published. Finally, there are open-access archives, where
organisations such as universities or international laboratories
support institutional repositories. Other models exist that are
hybrids of these three, such as delayed open-access, where journals
allow only subscribers to read a paper for the first six months,
before making it freely available to everyone who wishes to see it.

All this could change the traditional form of the peer-review process,
at least for the publication of papers. The process is organised by
the publisher but conducted, for free, by scholars. The advantages
afforded by the internet mean that primary data is becoming available
freely online. Indeed, quite often the online paper has a direct link
to it. This means that reported findings are more readily replicable
and checkable by other teams of researchers. Moreover, online
publication offers the opportunity for others to comment on the
research. Research is also becoming more collaborative so that, before
they have been finalised, papers have been reviewed by several
authors. This central tenet of scholarly publishing is changing, too.


--
Prabhu Ram,
Max-Planck-Institut for Intellectual Property, Competition and Tax Law,
MarstallPlatz 1,
80539 Munich
GERMANY

Tel: + 49 89 24246226
Mob: + 49 17629830521
Web: http://infoserve.blogspot.com