[A2k] Creative destruction in the library

[Ian Brown]

Creative destruction in the library

Jun 29th 2006
>From The Economist print edition
http://www.economist.com/science/displaystory.cfm?story_id=3D7109062

Free access to research is proving more expensive than hoped. But it is
spreading, nevertheless
...
Other arms of the British scientific establishment are involved, too. On
June 28th three of the eight research councils that distribute
government money to British scientists announced that, in future, any
work they pay for will have to be published freely soon after being
accepted for publication by a journal; the other five support the
principle but are not in a position to enforce it.

Britain's Royal Society, the world's oldest scientific organisation, has
also got in on the act. Like several other institutions that make at
least some of their money from scientific publishing, the Royal Society
had opposed open access on the grounds that standards might slip. If
each article published brought additional revenue, an organisation might
be tempted to run the unworthy as well as the worthy. But now the
society has changed its mind, at least in part. On June 21st it launched
a service that charges the authors of scientific papers a fee to post
their work online as soon as it is accepted for publication by any of
the society's journals. Until now, authors have had to wait for a year
before their work became freely available.

The Royal Society's American counterpart, the National Academy of
Sciences, is a convert, too. In 2005 its house journal, the Proceedings
of the National Academy of Sciences, published 565 open-access papers,
reflecting the fact that almost one in five authors asked (and paid) for
their work to be made immediately and freely available. This figure has
remained stable, according to Diane Sullenberger, the executive editor
of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The journal
charges $1,000 per paper (although those working at institutions with a
site licence pay $750) and it boasts not only that it complies with the
National Institutes of Health public-access policy, but that it also
extends access even further. It automatically deposits the final
published version of all its papers, regardless of who paid for them, in
PubMed Central, after six months, and also makes them free on its own
website.

There are, however, a few thorns among the roses. Traditional publishers
are often sceptical about the business models of their open-access
rivals, and they sometimes have cause to be. The Public Library of
Science (PLoS), an American organisation regarded by many as the
flagship of the open-access movement, lost almost $1m last year. As a
result, it is about to increase its charge from $1,500 per article to as
much as $2,500, depending on which of its journals an author publishes in.

Undeterred, PLoS will, in August, launch an open-access online database
called PLoS One. Unlike papers published in the main PLoS journals,
those in PLoS One will not be assessed for their probable impact or
level of interest before they are accepted. Instead, researchers will be
able to comment on them through annotations and discussion threads. PLoS
describes the project as =93return[ing] control over scholarly publishing
to the research community=94. The database would be similar to the Los
Alamos archive, an online repository of physics papers that has been
running for the past decade.

BioMed Central, a British open-access publisher, has also increased its
charges=97from $500 to as much as $1,700 per article. It, too, has still
to break even. Yet it received some good news this month. Thomson
Scientific, a firm that evaluates the impact of journals, looked at
citations made in 2005 of articles published between 2003 and 2004.
Eleven journals published by BioMed Central received their first such
assessment, and nine of them appeared in the top ten highest-impact
journals in their fields. Whatever the traditional publishers might
hope, open-access does not look in imminent danger of perishing.