Hello Kathy

I understand that you are charged with compiling the CILIP statement. I hope
the set of points below will be helpful. It's based on the posting I made to
the CILIP list on 11 Jan, amended to take into account some useful comments
received since. I'm copying it to the list, in case anyone wants to comment
further. Good Luck with the statement!

        SUGGESTED POINTS ON SCIENTIFIC PUBLICATION

        - Publicly funded researchers in the UK, publish their findings so that
other reseachers, anywhere in the world, can access them, challenge them and
use them as the basis of further research. This process of "scholarly
communication" reduces duplicated effort, ensures quality, and increases the
productivity of research and development.

        - Traditionally, research is published in peer-reviewed journals. About
2,500,000 articles per year, in some 24,000 journals.

        - The authors of these articles don't expect royalties or fees for them:
their reward is in recognition of their research ("visibility" or "impact").

        - Traditionally, publishers of these journals have covered the peer-review
and other production costs by charging subscriptions for the paper journal
issues. Universities and research institutions bought subscriptions (often
with public money) so that their own researchers could access and use the
peer-reviewed research output of others. This approach has come to be
described as "toll-access".

        -But even the richest institution has only ever been able to afford a
fraction of the 24,000 journals published, and this is rapidly reducing as
the price of journals continues to outstrip inflation. The majority of
potential users of any research article are denied access, and much of its
research impact is lost.

        -The rise of Web technology, by radically reducing the basic technical
costs of access to information, has higlighted the prospect of a new
paradigm in scholarly communication, where access to research results would
be made freely available to any interested researcher. This would maximise
the impact of any piece of research, and thus the productivity of the whole
research process. This approach is known as "open-access".

        -A new type of publication has arisen which uses this approach.
Open-access journals are freely available to users, as they recover their
peer-review and other production costs from the institutions whose
researchers contribute the research articles themeselves. This approach is
strongly to be encouraged, but currently accounts for only about 5% of total
research output.

        -The remaining 95% continues to be published in "toll-access" journals.
However, an increasing number of research organisations worldwide are
setting up "open-access" websites on which their researchers can
"self-archive" full copies of the articles that have been contributed to
"toll-access" journals, so that their research results can be widely
available and acheive the greatest possible impact.

        -There are issues to be resolved by the community as to how to ensure that
the archived article is identical to the journal article, and which of them
should be treated as the "article of record" if there are differences
between them. Furthermore, there may well be future "primacy" disputes
between rival scientists as to who should be credited with publishing a
finding first, when one article is in print, and the other online. But these
potential difficulties should not obscure the clear impact advantages of
author self-archiving of journal articles.

        -Fifty-five percent of journals already officially support this author
self-archiving. Many of the remaining 45% will agree if asked. Government
should do whatever is in its power to persuade all UK publishers to support
self-archiving and all research institutions to set up open access archives.

        -Although a substantial proportion of the publishing community may be
expected to lobby in favour of the status quo insofar as their cost-recovery
model is concerned, there is little evidence that "open-access" archiving
damages sales of "toll-acess" journals: it simply increases the readership
of research, far beyond the institutions that can afford to buy
subscriptions. Extension to all research institutions and the contents of
all journals would lead to more efficient use of public money in both
research grants and university library budgets, and incidentally do a great
deal to bridge the divide between the information-rich countries and the
developing world.

        -Open access could also help bridge the divide between the scientific
community and the general public in the UK. The interested lay person has
until now been inhibited in following the latest research developments, by
lack of access to the primary research literature. The web has
revolutionised the way information can be accessed: 64% of British adults
are already internet users(1), and the People's Network has made internet
access and advice on the retrieval and evaluation of online information
available to every citizen from their local public library. Yet unless and
until that citizen can access the full text of the definitive,
peer-reviewed, published research findings, they are in danger of having to
rely
on secondary internet sources which may be inaccurate or misleading or even
deliberately designed to undermine the scientific communication process.
Government endorsement of researcher self-archiving, open-access archives in
all research institutions and open-access search services in every public
library would greatly contribute to the development of an informed
electorate.

1 http://www.statistics.gov.uk/pdfdir/intc1203.pdf