In the current scientific publishing model, the commercial publisher usually receives submissions from authors/researchers who want to publish something. Large numbers of teachers in academia are pressured to publish about their research, often with salary levels directly connected to that effort. A scientist-researcher must sign over copyright to the commercial publisher and loses control to the commercial company that agrees to publish their article. It becomes expensive for the university that employs the scientist who originated the research to then access the information; its library service must pay the publisher for aggregate subscription packages in order to get the specific science journal covering this research (which may have been performed at its own institution!) Finally, the scientist may not later continue to freely use and change the material as his work continues, because he signed away copyright information to a commercial license holder.
Aggregators and some large houses with many imprints, such as the Dutch/British Elsevier and German publisher Springer Verlag, have published scientific research both in print and online, gaining secure buyers’ markets in academia. Aggregators, like Elsevier, gather together other companies’ publications, put them in an easily used format, and market them as subscriptions at different levels. Springer, which recently merged with another large European publishing corporation, Kluwer, was a giant in scientific publishing even before World War II; it accounted for over 90 percent of science publications before the war.
An alternative, front-end approach has been offered recently by the open source publishers such as the Public Library of Science (http://www.plos.org). It follows, roughly, the model used in open source software coding and licensing. The alternative model allows scientific authors to retain copyright, and the Public Library collects (only the needed) fees for review, editing, and publishing up front. Then the scholarly information is made available under open license, subject to proper citation, in a similar manner to Linux® code or open database software. The material can be distributed freely and used by other scientific institutions. Professional associations are divided in their assessment of the merit of open-source for scientific purposes. American Academy of Pediatrics describes the model:
Under an author-pays model, the publishing costs for an article are not primarily picked up by the reader, but rather by the author. A current experiment with this model is under way at the Public Library of Science's journal PLoS Biology, which started up last October with the help of a $9 million grant. Authors pay $1,500 per published article in PLoS Biology, and the content is free to readers on the Internet (although there's still a subscription for the print version). (McConnell, AAP)
Some commercial, large volume publishers and subscription handlers have begun to meet the challenge of open source publishing by offering their own version of front-end publishing (see Springer electronic publishing at www.springer-sbm.de), offering to publish research articles for advance fees that are roughly double those of the Public Library of Science. Springer also says they will leave more control copyright to the author. PLOS has disseminated their position very widely, supported by institutions such as Stanford University, Sloan Kettering Research, and the Max Planck Institute:
The anachronistic system of giving away the copyrights to the original research reports and then paying for access to them costs more and deprives most of the world - including the people whose taxes paid for the research in the first place - from having any meaningful access to the results. (Public Library of Science, http://www.plos.org/journals/model.html, accessed November 28, 2004)
At the end of the 1970s, a U.S. federal commission examined the conditions surrounding access to scholarly publications, both for universities and for individuals engaged in scientific research privately. At the same time, Congress shifted funding away from the support of academic publishing. Many universities and non-profits had been printing their own publications for decades. Johns Hopkins was one of the first universities to publish with its own presses (1887), and The American Chemical Journal was one of the earliest publications it produced. “The difficulty of keeping the right financial balance has plagued university presses from the beginning” (Givler, 2002). In addition, publishing for other than scholarly markets has been “something university presses have always done” (Hamaker, 113). But external support, from other publishers or foundations or government agencies usually made this possible, at least indirectly. For example, University of Chicago Press (one of the best), would have “drowned in its own red ink” without the support of commercial publisher Harper (Givlar, 113).
Primarily, scientific researchers at the time of the 1970s commission began to complain about lax standards in publications, proliferation of mediocre journals, and problems with sufficient acquisition through the university libraries, where budgets lagged well behind the costs of purchasing books and maintaining journal subscriptions. This experience paralleled the general experience of financing post-secondary education in the country. More than 20 years later, the complaints and budget pressure have not diminished; and this area also now embraces a vigorous interest in online, real-time access to answers and materials for academic research.
The report of the 1979 commission (Breneman et al., p. 154-155) recommended establishing a national center for library and information resources, which would be “…a distribution agent for publishers of certain types of materials” and would have the responsibility of relieving public libraries of duties relating to copyright law enforcement. The 1970s report affirmed the need for government support in the sharing of special scientific knowledge critical as a “public good,” paid for (in large part) by citizen taxpayer support:
Knowledge, the substance of scholarly communication, is a public good in the sense that one person’s acquisition of it does not diminish the amount available for others, and indeed, may ultimately enhance it. The private marketplace cannot be relied upon to produce the socially optional amount of such public goods, and thus subsidies of one form or another are generally required for their production. (Breneman, p. 8)
The commission’s report particularly supports enhanced access to scientific and research materials for smaller (less wealthy) academic organizations and individuals:
And, most important, its existence [the distribution agency] will expand access to the full range of research materials to scholars and all others who are not located at major universities. (Breneman, 154-155)
Some federal agencies (such as NIH or U.S. Department of Labor), research contractors (like the National Research Council), and university or non-profit press system(s) regularly publish research material. But the U.S. National Commission on Libraries and Information Science remained primarily advisory in function; actual publishing and distribution of scientific research material, or facilitated access to scientific knowledge, remained in the hands of commercial publishing, enhanced by modern communications.
The big commercial publishers and aggregators have filled the gap eagerly:
Networking continually tightened the links between publishers, wholesalers, booksellers, and consumers. Large publishers with many imprints and business units engaged in large-scale rebuilding of in-house systems at large-scale cost. Rather than rely on intermediaries, many -- journals publishers in particular -- have now built e-commerce hubs of their own. (Adams, 2002)
Cutting edge research is not willing to wait, nor should it have to, while the market sorts out which parts of the new science will be most profitable. Commercial profitability and related intellectual property disputes (copyright) continued to cause significant stumbling blocks to cooperative scientific research. For example, delays in publishing might relate to “sales of patent offers” and purchases of copyright for software or computer tools that facilitate the scientific research, such as field-specific modeling software, which has become increasingly necessary in theoretical sciences. Modeling of complex uncertainty on small scales (in biochemistry or genetics, for example) or modeling of geographic factors (signal research) depends more and more on this kind of computer support.
One paper presented in 2000 at a conference for the American Chemical Society on cytochromes P450 (critical for drug interaction questions) was delayed in publication because the modeling software developed between a chemistry professor and a theoretical statistician, working at two different universities, gave rise to start-up business, licenses to be sold, and other time-consuming commercial product issues (Murphy, 2000).
In the directions to the U.S. National Commission on Libraries and Information Science (NCLIS), heir to the 1970s legislation, lawmakers required the Commission to, “Promote research and development activities which will extend and improve the Nation’s library and information-handling capability as essential links in the national and international communications and cooperative networks….”; but it was well into the 1990s and the Internet explosion before the Commission was able to thoroughly study the multifaceted situation. The Commission reported in 1991 that:
There is no assurance that the government is providing full public access to what should be public information. There is also no assurance on what that information is, or where it is. Instead, proper public information dissemination depends on the judgment of thousands of unmonitored officials at all levels in thousands of lower level units of government. (NCLIS, 1991)
In March 2001 after completing long study, the U.S. NCLIS published its final report on public information dissemination. The Commission’s final report affirms that the federal government’s public information resources are “owned by the people” and should be available, except where legally restricted, to
Guarantee researchers, students, parents, teachers, businesses, policy-makers, entrepreneurs and ordinary citizens access to a comprehensive and authoritative research collection of the government’s knowledge holdings. (NCLIS, p. 2-15)
Aside from National Defense and security questions, different Federal agencies have disagreed on the interpretation of this mandate, claiming that “operational interest only” or a variety of other reasons would exempt them from making their work available to the public.
The chemistry professor interviewed for this paper, Dr. Suzanne Slayden, said she subscribes to both hardcopy and online journals in her scientific field of interest. She has considered necessary, read, and used both online and print versions of premiere chemical journals as resources for teaching and interesting research news (Slayden 2004). She had not made use of the Public Library of Science, an open source subscription resource available through GMU; but they do not have a section specifically for chemistry. She reacted skeptically to the concept of an open source model for chemistry, noting that good scientific research would only be published in such a medium if certain people (“good enough to publish anywhere”) were willing to use that venue. However, the professor’s most serious concern was for preserving appropriate peer review of research, to keep the scientific research quality good.
As a writer, rather than a researcher and teacher, the picture for Dr. Slayden and other professors differs somewhat. Pressure to publish something has continued to grow as academic staffs compete for salary, recognition, and tenure. Commercial publishers bundle together many less desired publications with the highly recognized ones and require university libraries to buy large “packages” covering multiple journals. Otherwise, the university will not be given access to key professional journals. Professors’ eagerness to publish, and the “bundling” practices of commercial publishing have allowed strong growth of minor, relatively weak professional journals. This contrasts to results hoped by the 1979 commission when it stated, relative to lesser journals:
No artificial barriers should be erected to block the introduction of new journals, but neither should universities or foundations provide subsidies to prop up failing journals that do not enjoy a strong reader loyalty. (Breneman, p. 22)
George Mason University’s Science Librarian, Michael Terry, readily agreed that commercial obstacles exist to prevent open access for research to scholarly scientific literature. Journals become available online to the libraries only after they have been published in hardcopy. GMU subscribes to several premiere scientific series, published by Elsevier, Wiley, and Kluwer (now Springer). The subscription for Elsevier publications is shared with two other universities, to save costs. It encompasses about 1800 journals (in the “required package”) and costs about $450,000 per year. GMU pays roughly $100,000 for the Wiley publications (200 to 300 journals), and takes about another 700 journals from Kluwer-Springer (at about $150,000). Large costs are incurred, also, for licenses to certain databases used in library research, such as Beilstein and SciFinder Scholar (for the latter, more than $33,000 per year is required for only two simultaneous research seats at the database). Currently, the university library does not get involved with software licensing or rentals, although individual departments or the university administration may help scientists who need to get a license for some particular work.
Individual web publications at university sites or conference presentation papers offered by professors are considered “gray literature.” Mr. Terry said that since such items are “self-published,” the university libraries treat them as a “whole different animal.” They may or may not be peer reviewed, and the quality is debatable. During peer review, investigators send their papers for review and editing (usually) to other universities with comparable departments, where they are read for innovation and accuracy. The process of securing multi-university peer review for a scientific research article takes about 18 months (more in the social sciences). For this reason, scientists are often interested in presenting papers at scholarly conferences or on the World Wide Web.
Stanford University librarian, Dr. Michael Keller, in defending the institution’s decision to support open source for science, noted:
We’re not doing this to position ourselves to negotiate more effectively with Elsevier. We’re doing this to change the whole scene. We’re trying to change the fundamental nature of scholarly communication in the journal industry. . . . This has given us a message to send to a whole bunch of other institutions around the country. It’s really important to see that we didn’t buy into the ‘must-read’ argument from Elsevier and yet we continue to be a great research institution with a relatively lean list of periodicals. (Delgado, 2004)
Elsevier previously had been charging Stanford just under
$1 million per year for 400 popular titles; this sum represented nearly 20
percent of the budget for periodicals at the school. In the meantime, Stanford’s own publishing contribution to open
source, HighWire, hosts the largest repository of free full-text life science
articles in the world, with more than 750,000 free, full-text articles
online. Launched in 1995, with the Journal
of Biological Chemistry, HighWire includes hundreds of top journals such as
the New England Journal of Medicine.
National Institutes of Health (NIH) recently began making more scientific research available over the WWW, in recognition of the taxpayers’ “right to see the research.” The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) joined the Association of American Publishers in October 2004 to caution NIH about fixing a specific publishing model until authors, professional societies, librarians, and other interested persons can contribute to the discussion of workable publishing models that will protect scholarly articles from distortion through proliferation of unverified copies.
IEEE had experimented, in the 1990s, with online access to technical articles based on specific user profiles, in a “pay-per-view” methodology. At that time, the publication distribution system failed because not enough subscribers would commit to a certain number of articles per period. In 2004, however, profiling technologies have improved, and people have become more used to taking their professional instruction online. IEEE has teamed with Ovid.com to try again offering “pay-per-view” for technical articles, this time in the fast changing and closely watched bio-technical engineering field.
While there is nothing wrong with per-article payment to support online publishing in itself, the emphasis in this case seems to fall again on profit potential, rather than getting supporting knowledge out to the research community quickly, easily, and directly. In a discussion about desirable publishing models for support of advancing science, the university consortia should play a key role. If they help each other (rather than reacting too competitively) improved licensing and access solutions could be worked out for their affiliated researchers, and better collaborative use of current scientific knowledge will not be left at the mercy of the marketplace.
Adams, Peter, 2002, “Technology in publishing: a century of progress,” in Abel, Richard E.; Newlin, Lyman W., eds., Scholarly Publishing: Books, Journals, Publishing, and Libraries in the Twentieth Century, New York: Wiley and Sons.
Breneman, D. W.; Morton, H.C., (1979), Scholarly Communication: The Report of the National Enquiry, Johns Hopkins Press: London and Baltimore.
Delgado, Ray, (2/24/2004), “Faculty Senate approves measure targeting for-profit journal publishers,” Stanford University News Service, http://www.stanford.edu/dept/news/pr/04/journals225.html”
Givler, Peter, 2002, “University press publishing in the United States,” in Abel, Richard E.; Newlin, Lyman W., eds., Scholarly Publishing: Books, Journals, Publishing, and Libraries in the Twentieth Century, New York: Wiley and Sons.
Hamaker, Charles, 2002, “The place of scholarly and scientific libraries in an increasingly and more widespread competitive information knowledge marketplace,” in Abel, Richard E.; Newlin, Lyman W., eds., Scholarly Publishing: Books, Journals, Publishing, and Libraries in the Twentieth Century, New York: Wiley and Sons.
McConnell, Greg, 2004, “Online journals seek alternatives to open access,” American Academy of Pediatrics, downloaded from http://aapnews.aappublications.org/misc/terms.shtml, November 28, 2004.
Murphy, R.B. and Friesner, R.A., 2000, American Chemical Society presentation, "QM/MM method for large-scale modeling of chemistry in protein environments and applications to P-450_cam" (see schrodinger.com, http://www.schrodinger.com/About/about.html, accessed November 24-December 6, 2004).
Slayden, Suzanne, November 2004, Professor, Chemistry Department, George Mason University, unpublished personal interview with M.E. Fraser.
Terry, Michael, November 2004, Science Librarian, George Mason University, unpublished personal interview with M.E. Fraser.
U.S. National Commission on Libraries and Information Science, “Comprehensive assessment of public information dissemination,” March 2001, Washington DC: downloaded from http://www.nclis.gov/govt/assess/assess.vol1.pdf, December 5, 2004
U.S. National Commission on Libraries and Information Science, (July 1970) Public Law 91-345.