Technology Blog

Kuan-Teh Jeang, Open Access And Public Archiving: The Future Of Scientific Publishing?
NIH Catalyst
, Jan-Feb, 2006 (accessible only to NIH employees). (Thanks to Jennifer Heffelfinger.) Excerpt:

Traditional journals, like print journalism, remain the dominant force at the moment. However, slowly but surely, the open-access web and electronically based upstarts are gaining traction. Indeed, a senior science writer at the New York Times recently told me –when asked how the Times sees its free web-based competitors– “We’re running scared!”…Now, the pervasiveness of the Internet offers the potential for numerous additional communities –within or outside academia, in rich and in poor nations– to access previously guarded knowledge. Such access is in keeping not only with the concept that publicly funded science should be shared without charge, but also with the tradition long embraced by scientists that access to large databases such as the genomes of animals and plants and archives like PubMed should be free and public.

Nonetheless, broad acceptance of open-access publishing is at a tipping point. Several factors may yet influence its success or failure. The first is the economics of publishing for a wide audience. The web promises to be a low-cost venue that can reach, with unparalleled rapidity, large numbers of geographically dispersed and economically disparate parties.

Contrast this availability with the rising cost of the traditional print model, which threatens affordability by even the best-funded libraries in wealthy nations. For example, United Kingdom statistics show that between 1998 and 2003, the average subscription price of academic journals rose by 58 percent while retail prices increased by only 11 percent.

A second factor is public demand in developed and developing worlds. The view that at-large access to scientific data is not needed because of lack of public interest is incongruent with empirical experience. Existing numbers indicate that only one-third of the users of PubMed are academicians and researchers, whereas two-thirds are the “public” –clearly not indifferent. As science moves increasingly toward globalization, access models that transcend professional classifications, national boundaries, and accidents of birth are timely and necessary….

Currently, NIH, the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, the United Kingdom’s Wellcome Trust, Germany’s Max-Planck Society and Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, and France’s CNRS and INSERM have all encouraged their funded researchers to deposit peer-reviewed articles into publicly accessible repositories. The two major publishers of open-access journals –Public Library of Science (PLoS) and Biomed Central– have also adopted policies of directly and immediately depositing their published works into PubMed Central….I have an interest in the evolution of scientific publishing. Twelve years ago I helped start a traditional journal, the Journal of Biomedical Science, which I edited for more than 10 years. Two years ago, I left that project to found Retrovirology, an exclusively web-based open-access journal.

Although I have an abiding loyalty to my scientific societies and feel that they deserve continuing revenue streams, my personal read of the winds of change is that open-access publishing and publicly accessible digital repositories like PubMed Central may well be the dominant future players….Based on the acceptance that Retrovirology has gained within my scientific community, it seems to me that scientists do look beyond the cover of a journal to recognize the value of open accessibility to their work. Our journal caters to a relatively small cohort of retrovirologists, but it is accessed steadily 1,000 times each day, 30,000 times each month. These numbers are disproportionate to our known academic audience and suggest that a significant percentage of our readers are members of the public who value and trust our content. Public access, public trust, and public archives –are these not the wave of the future of scientific publishing?