Open Access – Panacea or Pandora's Box?

Abstract

The publishing industry has altered beyond all recognition in the first two decades of the 21 century, and scientific journals cannot evade the ever-shifting winds of change. There has been a fundamental leap from the expensive hardcopy printing of glossy scientific journals to online digital delivery of most content. Even for those journals that maintain print format, production is less, and many scientists now elect to do their reading and research from a laptop or a tablet. Geoscience Canada went ‘digital only’ about four years ago, and the advantages in terms of costs and flexibility are clear. I will admit that I personally miss the feeling of relaxing in a comfortable chair with my coffee and flipping through the printed pages, but there is no going back on this trend. Online publishing transforms access to scientific material on a global basis; readers on the other side of the world, where libraries would likely not archive printed copies of Geoscience Canada, can now easily read our scientific papers. Providing, that is, that they buy a personal subscription, or that their employer or institution (if they have one) holds an institutional subscription. Our annual subscription fee is amazing value (at less than $100 per year), but costs for some geoscience journals are hundreds or even thousands of dollars annually, and institutional subscriptions are even more expensive. Online publishing still requires subscriptions, because it depends on users paying for access, but such access does not come cheap. This seems a strange paradox, given the cost of digital publishing is so much less than printed media. Many universities now face severe challenges in maintaining these expenditures, and subscriptions to specialized journals are being discontinued, leading to protests from individual researchers. However, those in the ivory towers remain the most favoured in terms of their access to online journals. Ironically, the online digital revolution has actually made access to this vital information more difficult for others within the research community. Those who work outside universities or select government institutions have more limited access, and it is becoming increasingly difficult to seek out such material at your local university library, if indeed one is available to you. Procuring a copy of some hard-to-find article can be a real challenge, and the cost of downloading a single paper is as much as buying a hardcopy book – in some cases the only recourse is to beg the assistance of academic colleagues or even students. Gone are the days when I would walk down Elizabeth Avenue on a nice day to browse some recent issues of journals in the periodicals reading room at Memorial University. Most of the journals that I used to look for are no longer even on the shelves, and hardcopy back issues are increasingly relocated to distant, dusty and inconvenient offsite storage. Papers that are published by scientists who are supported by government funding, in government institutions and at universities, now often appear in journals that the general public or unaffiliated researchers cannot freely or easily access. The online digital revolution makes the sharing of information easier for all of us, and the internet now connects us across the globe, but this new tree of knowledge has yet to fully blossom for scientific publishing. This again seems paradoxical, for commercial scientific publishing remains highly profitable even in times when most other parts of the sector confront serious fiscal challenges in maintaining their business models. Even before low-cost online publishing arrived, scientific publishers enjoyed lower costs, because the authors of papers are unpaid, as are the reviewers and most scientific editors. Given this backdrop, it is not surprising that discontent with access restrictions and increasing subscription costs has grown, and some in the research community have called for deliberate boycotts of prominent corporate publishers. It is also not surprising that research funding agencies, which mostly disperse public resources, are increasingly concerned that their investments are not rewarded by wide visibility and availability of their research. The Open Access concept emerged as a possible solution to this growing dilemma, and it is now a persistent topic wherever scientists gather and talk, although opinions and viewpoints are understandably diverse. Three research funding agencies in Canada, including NSERC, which is the principal source for geoscience research funding, now require that peer-reviewed