Print in Peril

Abstract

There is a growing belief among science publishers that the days of the printed scientific journal may be numbered, and that the countdown has begun. Rising print costs, slashed library budgets, and economic uncertainties have reduced income from both institutional and personal subscriptions, and this has encouraged publishers to consider other options, particularly electronic formats. It has also caused them to raise subscription prices, thereby forcing libraries to drop subscriptions to many journals. Over the past few years, a new concept has been spreading through the academic community – the open access movement has added to the mounting pressure on science publishers to let go of traditional publishing models. Briefly, the argument goes like this. The main point of doing research is to disseminate the results as widely as possible, particularly among the scientific community, who will use and build on the information. By assigning copyright to, and publishing in, traditional scientific journals, authors are perpetuating a system whereby publishers act as “toll-keepers”, blocking the dissemination process, since only those who can afford to pay the toll are able to see the information. Publishers are therefore limiting the “impact” of the research. On the other hand, science publishers administer the peer review process, check and edit the manuscripts, convert them to journal page or computer screen, and market the final result. None of this comes cheap. Estimates vary, but it can cost $4000 or more to bring an article onto the printed journal page. Traditionally, this money has come mainly from end-users, in the form of personal and institutional subscriptions and pay-per-view charges. The Budapest Open Access Initiative (BOAI) came out of a meeting organized by the Open Society Institute in December 2001, the purpose of which was “to accelerate progress in the international effort to make research articles in all academic fields freely available on the Internet. The BOAI proposes a system in which all scientific literature is freely available to everyone, online, through a process of self-archiving. Journals will continue to orchestrate the peer review process, thus ensuring that articles meet recognized scientific standards, and will then publish them, either online or in print form, in the (unlikely) event that this is still financially feasible. Authors, however, reserve the right to “self-archive” their own work on aninstitutional or a personal website. A metadata tagging system run by the Open Archives Initiative (www.openarchives.org) will ensure that papers are searchable and retrievable by anyone with a computer. The various BOAI-associated websites (eg www.soros.org/openaccess and www.eprints.org/self.faq), abound with explanations and FAQs. Concerns about search ability, security, and longevity of self-archived material, as well as copyright, licensing, embargoes, legal issues, and much more, are all addressed. What is less well covered is the question of post-acceptance costs. In the free-for-all, post-BOAI world, the onus is now on the author to provide the money, in the form of a flat fee, as in the Public Library of Science model (www.plos.org), or as page charges; presumably they will be able to afford this, thanks to all the money they have saved on personal journal subscriptions. Supporters of BOAI see the future role of journals – online only – as mainly administering the refereeing process, and quote the pre-acceptance cost of a research article as a mere $200–$500. However, this does not take into account the enormous amount of work that must becarried out after acceptance. The manuscript may be scientifically sound, but anyone who has been involved in producing a journal knows that it usually takes a substantial amount of copyediting for clarity and consistency, as well as reference and information checking, before the paper is readable and accurate. When the paper is written by an author whose English is poor, editorial processing increases exponentially. Who will pay for this in the post-BOAI world? The bottom line is that major publishers such as Elsevier and MacMillan have the resources to evolve and survive. Scientific societies, and the publications they produce, which provide income to help support their other activities, may find themselves in serious difficulty if they continue to charge subscription fees in competition with open access publications. The more cynical might say, “Well, turkeys will never vote for Thanksgiving – of course publishers of scientific journals, including the ESA, are going to feel threatened by self-archiving and open access”. In fact, the ESA is ahead of the game in this instance, as its journals all grant authors permission to “post the work in a publicly accessible form on a personal or home institution’s webpages”. Nevertheless, science publishers must make enough money to survive, to play their part in the circulation of scientific knowledge. If too many fail to survive the proposed revolution, access to that knowledge could be severely compromised. Dr Sue Silver, Editor-in-Chief