On Thursday 2 February, Suzanne Keene said:

"I am delighted with the way that the academic research 'industry' has been
disrupted - nearly all journals online now. The next interesting step is for
universities to publish academic articles online, bypassing expensive
publishers, which is already on the way."

Hmm... not quite, Suzanne, and indeed it's that sort of shorthand that's
giving the publishing lobby ammunition to try to stop the Open Access
movement. Among researchers, only a few crackpots really believe that the
new paradigm for scholarly communication will be to "publish academic
articles online, bypassing expensive publishers": articles self-published on
the web without peer review are potentially, to paraphrase Sam Goldwyn, "not
worth the paper they're written on".

What is "already on the way", is that more and more universities and
research institutions (1) are archiving copies of their researchers'
peer-reviewed, published articles onto online Institutional Repositories, so
that they can be accessed for free. This is done with the agreement of an
increasing number of publishers (2), who are beginning to realise that it
won't harm their journal sales, and is inevitable anyway if the Research
Councils hold their nerve and make it a condition of funding (3).  

I've rehearsed the arguments a few times before in different fora, but for
those MCG folk interested, it goes like this:

        - 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 highlighted 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 themselves. This approach is
strongly to be encouraged, but currently accounts for only about 8% of total
research output (4).

        -The remaining 92% 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 achieve 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.

        -93% percent of journals already officially support this author
self-archiving (2). Many of the remaining 7% will agree if asked. For the
rest, authors will have to continue the age-old practice of sending out
reprints on request.

        -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-access" 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 (5), 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.

1
http://archives.eprints.org/?action=home&country=uk&version=&type=&order=nam
e&submit=Filter
2 http://romeo.eprints.org/stats.php
3 http://www.rcuk.ac.uk/access/index.asp
4 http://www.doaj.org/articles/060113
5 http://www.statistics.gov.uk/CCI/nugget.asp?ID=8&Pos=&ColRank=1&Rank=374

******************************************
Prof Bruce Royan   www.concurrentcomputing.co.uk
41 Greenhill Gardens, Edinburgh, EH10 4BL,   UK
+44 131 4473151                    +44 77 1374 4731
******************************************
 

**************************************************
For mcg information and to manage your subscription to the list, visit the website at http://www.museumscomputergroup.org.uk
**************************************************