The normal mechanism [of academic journal publication] is that scientists offer the fruits of their research– often bankrolled by the taxpayer– for nothing to publishers. Those publishers then charge money to people who wish to read their journals. Publishers have been making handsome profits from this arrangement. But change is afoot. Open-access publishing, in which papers are freely available immediately upon publication, is sweeping the dusty corridors. The catch is that the sponsors of research will have to fork out more money to pay for it.
The new fashion is to be found on both sides of the Atlantic. In America John Cornyn, a Republican senator from Texas, and Joe Lieberman, a Democrat senator from Connecticut, recently introduced a bill that seeks to compel all federal government agencies “to develop public-access policies relating to research conducted by employees of that agency or from funds administered by that agency”. If it is passed, every American government outfit that commissions more than $100m-worth of research a year will have to make the results free to all-comers as soon as they are accepted for publication.
America’s biggest sponsor of medical research, the National Institutes of Health, has already thrown its weight behind such a move. For the past year it has strongly encouraged the recipients of its grants to make their results available on a free archive, called PubMed Central, as soon as they are published elsewhere.
In Britain, meanwhile, the Wellcome Trust (the world’s second-biggest medical-research charity), has gone a step further. Rather than encouraging its researchers to deposit electronic copies of their findings with PubMed Central, it compels them to do so –although they have six months after publication in which to comply….
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….
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….
BioMed Central, a British open-access publisher, has also increased its charges –from $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.
