Publishing wars

Abstract

Open-access movements are winning increasing support, aided in no small part by souring relations between librarians and traditional publishers. But can open-access advocates win over the academic societies that depend on publishing revenue to survive? Helen Frankish reports.The idea that scientific and medical research should be freely available to all is no longer new. Publishing houses dedicated to this new model of information provision are up and running, and advocates have won widespread support for the movement among scientists. But the debate about whether open access can replace traditional publishing models has become no less heated with time. And recent pledges of support by the US Congress and the UK Science and Technology Committee have only served to fan the flames.Last month, the US House of Representatives Appropriations Subcommittee decreed that an electronic copy of any manuscript arising from National Institutes of Health (NIH)-funded research should be deposited in PubMed Central—the free digital archive maintained by the National Library of Medicine. The NIH has until the end of the year to submit a plan to Congress describing how the proposal can be implemented.This announcement came hot on the heels of a report by the UK House of Commons Science and Technology Committee, which recommended that every UK higher education institution should set up institutional repositories to allow researchers to self-archive their publications (so the work can be freely accessed via the internet), and that storage of government-funded research papers should be mandatory.Above-inflation price hikes by traditional publishers such as Elsevier (which publishes The Lancet), Kluwer, and Wiley, have inadvertently helped boost support for open access. The Association of Research Libraries estimates that the cost of journal subscriptions increased by 227% from 1986–2002, while the Consumer Price Index increased by just 64% during the same period—a comparison that has caused consternation among librarians, who are the main source of publishers' subscriptions revenues.Harold Varmus, former director of NIH and founder of open-access publisher the Public Library of Science (PLoS), believes high prices are forcing libraries to cancel subscriptions. He says commercial publishers have “manipulated their monopolies” by demanding that authors sign over copyright for their work, giving publishers free rein to charge extortionate prices for their products. “We are in a situation that is untenable in the long run and we've got to find a way to fix it”, he says.Varmus' solution was to set up a publishing house dedicated to open access, along with co-founders Pat Brown from Stanford University and Mike Eisen from the University of California, which on Oct 19 will launch its second open-access journal PLoS Medicine. Like its sister journal PLoS Biology, launched in 2003, all content will be immediately and freely available “to read, download, redistribute, include in databases, and otherwise use”. To cover publication costs, authors will be charged a US$1500 fee; however, this will be waived, with no questions asked, for authors who cannot afford to pay.Not surprisingly, the open-access movement is facing stiff opposition from commercial publishers, who argue that online access and new pricing models are enabling them to reach more readers than ever before. “We would expect libraries to cancel some subscriptions”, says Robert Campbell, president of Blackwell Publishing, “but despite the claims that libraries are in crisis they have access to many more titles than 10 years ago and with much greater functionality.” However, he is interested to see if open-access initiatives such as PLoS will succeed. “Let the market decide the way forward”, he adds.PLoS Medicine plans “to compete with the very best general medical journals”, but practical difficulties, such as persuading researchers to submit their best articles to a new medical journal, will need to be overcome.“I suspect it's going to be quite difficult to attract very high-profile papers initially”, says Rory Collins, from the Clinical Trial Service Unit at Oxford University, UK, and a member of PLoS Medicine's editorial board. “People submit what they hope will be high-impact papers to high-impact journals. And it's difficult for any journal—whether it's open access or not—to become a high-impact journal rapidly.”Virginia Barbour, senior editor at PLoS Medicine, who left The Lancet to join Varmus' organisation, understands why people are nervous about open access. “It's a change in practice”, she says. But Barbour believes that if funders get behind the open-access movement, things will change. “They have to say: ‘You will not lose out on tenure in 5 years' time’;”, she explains.Indeed, the UK Wellcome Trust and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute in the USA, two of the largest funders of medical research, have already given their strong support for open-access publishing by approving the use of their grants to cover publication charges.But winning over scientists and funders is just part of the battle. Some of the most vocal criticism of open access has come from the non-profit society publishers who depend on revenues from their journals to fund activities such as conferences, educational outreach programmes, and provision of scholarships and grants.Varmus says that some academic societies are being inattentive to their members' needs by sticking with the established business model. He suggests societies can raise funds in other ways “such as increases in membership fees and increased rates for meetings and other activities”.But William Rosner, professor of medicine at Columbia University, New York, and member of the Endocrine Society Council, counters that it would be “an enormous mistake” to prevent societies from supporting their other non-profit activities through publishing. He is particularly concerned about the consequences of rushing into open-access publishing before all the potential problems have been considered, and all the necessary safeguards put in place.One “very real and very frightening” possible consequence, Rosner says, is that funding agencies who pay publication charges for open-access journals could influence what does or does not get published. “They could say: ‘Hey, we're not going to pay to publish this. We don't like what you're saying’”, Rosner explains. “By anyone's standards, that is a major conflict of interest.”While the increasingly heated debate about open-access publishing is taking place among people in industrialised countries, its potential impact is perhaps most obvious for those in developing countries.Programmes such as the Health InterNetwork Access Initiative (HINARI), which provides free or low-cost online access to journals in countries with a per-capita GNP of less than $3000, have gone some way towards bridging the information gap. But in reality HINARI is not as good as it sounds, as publishers have opted out for some larger developing countries, such as Brazil, China, and India, where they already have a fairly large subscription base.The open-access movement has the potential to transform access to health information, says Neil Pakenham-Walsh from the International Network for the Availability of Scientific Publications, a non-governmental organisation that aims to improve access to information for health professionals in developing countries.The lack of copyright is the “crucially important” feature of open-access journals, he says. The freedom to circulate information, not just the freedom to access it, means that information is far more likely to be seen and used by many people. It also means that information can be used for multiple audiences. “If you are, say, a local publisher in a developing country and part of your target audience is, say, nurses in that country, then the fact that the text is open-access means that you can select exactly what you want and reproduce it as it is, or adapt it as needed”, he explains.But Pakenham-Walsh is concerned by the focus on open access to research published in scientific journals, which has important limitations for health-care providers. The “big challenge” is whether the open-access model can be expanded to include other types of publication, for example text books and databases of systematic reviews. “For a health-care provider in a rural area, access to a whole load of medical journals would not be much help for figuring out what to do”, Pakenham-Walsh explains. “Any single research article has got limited application to health care in its own right; it needs to be seen within the context of other available evidence.”There are easier and quicker ways, however, to bridge the information divide, argues Subbiah Arunachalam, an information scientist at the MS Swaminathan Research Foundation in Chennai, India. “Rather than frittering away our energies setting up new open-access journals or trying to persuade existing journals to go the open-access way, one can make the playing field very nearly level if all researchers in the world self-archive their papers in institutional archives. Then everyone with internet access can access everyone else's papers.” Open-access movements are winning increasing support, aided in no small part by souring relations between librarians and traditional publishers. But can open-access advocates win over the academic societies that depend on publishing revenue to survive? Helen Frankish reports. The idea that scientific and medical research should be freely available to all is no longer new. Publishing houses dedicated to this new model of information provision are up and running, and advocates have won widespread support for the movement among scientists. But the debate about whether open access can replace traditional publishing models has become no less heated with time. And recent pledges of support by the US Congress and the UK Science and Technology Committee have only served to fan the flames. Last month, the US House of Representatives Appropriations Subcommittee decreed that an electronic copy of any manuscript arising from National Institutes of Health (NIH)-funded research should be deposited in PubMed Central—the free digital archive maintained by the National Library of Medicine. The NIH has until the end of the year to submit a plan to Congress describing how the proposal can be implemented. This announcement came hot on the heels of a report by the UK House of Commons Science and Technology Committee, which recommended that every UK higher education institution should set up institutional repositories to allow researchers to self-archive their publications (so the work can be freely accessed via the internet), and that storage of government-funded research papers should be mandatory. Above-inflation price hikes by traditional publishers such as Elsevier (which publishes The Lancet), Kluwer, and Wiley, have inadvertently helped boost support for open access. The Association of Research Libraries estimates that the cost of journal subscriptions increased by 227% from 1986–2002, while the Consumer Price Index increased by just 64% during the same period—a comparison that has caused consternation among librarians, who are the main source of publishers' subscriptions revenues. Harold Varmus, former director of NIH and founder of open-access publisher the Public Library of Science (PLoS), believes high prices are forcing libraries to cancel subscriptions. He says commercial publishers have “manipulated their monopolies” by demanding that authors sign over copyright for their work, giving publishers free rein to charge extortionate prices for their products. “We are in a situation that is untenable in the long run and we've got to find a way to fix it”, he says. Varmus' solution was to set up a publishing house dedicated to open access, along with co-founders Pat Brown from Stanford University and Mike Eisen from the University of California, which on Oct 19 will launch its second open-access journal PLoS Medicine. Like its sister journal PLoS Biology, launched in 2003, all content will be immediately and freely available “to read, download, redistribute, include in databases, and otherwise use”. To cover publication costs, authors will be charged a US$1500 fee; however, this will be waived, with no questions asked, for authors who cannot afford to pay. Not surprisingly, the open-access movement is facing stiff opposition from commercial publishers, who argue that online access and new pricing models are enabling them to reach more readers than ever before. “We would expect libraries to cancel some subscriptions”, says Robert Campbell, president of Blackwell Publishing, “but despite the claims that libraries are in crisis they have access to many more titles than 10 years ago and with much greater functionality.” However, he is interested to see if open-access initiatives such as PLoS will succeed. “Let the market decide the way forward”, he adds. PLoS Medicine plans “to compete with the very best general medical journals”, but practical difficulties, such as persuading researchers to submit their best articles to a new medical journal, will need to be overcome. “I suspect it's going to be quite difficult to attract very high-profile papers initially”, says Rory Collins, from the Clinical Trial Service Unit at Oxford University, UK, and a member of PLoS Medicine's editorial board. “People submit what they hope will be high-impact papers to high-impact journals. And it's difficult for any journal—whether it's open access or not—to become a high-impact journal rapidly.” Virginia Barbour, senior editor at PLoS Medicine, who left The Lancet to join Varmus' organisation, understands why people are nervous about open access. “It's a change in practice”, she says. But Barbour believes that if funders get behind the open-access movement, things will change. “They have to say: ‘You will not lose out on tenure in 5 years' time’;”, she explains. Indeed, the UK Wellcome Trust and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute in the USA, two of the largest funders of medical research, have already given their strong support for open-access publishing by approving the use of their grants to cover publication charges. But winning over scientists and funders is just part of the battle. Some of the most vocal criticism of open access has come from the non-profit society publishers who depend on revenues from their journals to fund activities such as conferences, educational outreach programmes, and provision of scholarships and grants. Varmus says that some academic societies are being inattentive to their members' needs by sticking with the established business model. He suggests societies can raise funds in other ways “such as increases in membership fees and increased rates for meetings and other activities”. But William Rosner, professor of medicine at Columbia University, New York, and member of the Endocrine Society Council, counters that it would be “an enormous mistake” to prevent societies from supporting their other non-profit activities through publishing. He is particularly concerned about the consequences of rushing into open-access publishing before all the potential problems have been considered, and all the necessary safeguards put in place. One “very real and very frightening” possible consequence, Rosner says, is that funding agencies who pay publication charges for open-access journals could influence what does or does not get published. “They could say: ‘Hey, we're not going to pay to publish this. We don't like what you're saying’”, Rosner explains. “By anyone's standards, that is a major conflict of interest.” While the increasingly heated debate about open-access publishing is taking place among people in industrialised countries, its potential impact is perhaps most obvious for those in developing countries. Programmes such as the Health InterNetwork Access Initiative (HINARI), which provides free or low-cost online access to journals in countries with a per-capita GNP of less than $3000, have gone some way towards bridging the information gap. But in reality HINARI is not as good as it sounds, as publishers have opted out for some larger developing countries, such as Brazil, China, and India, where they already have a fairly large subscription base. The open-access movement has the potential to transform access to health information, says Neil Pakenham-Walsh from the International Network for the Availability of Scientific Publications, a non-governmental organisation that aims to improve access to information for health professionals in developing countries. The lack of copyright is the “crucially important” feature of open-access journals, he says. The freedom to circulate information, not just the freedom to access it, means that information is far more likely to be seen and used by many people. It also means that information can be used for multiple audiences. “If you are, say, a local publisher in a developing country and part of your target audience is, say, nurses in that country, then the fact that the text is open-access means that you can select exactly what you want and reproduce it as it is, or adapt it as needed”, he explains. But Pakenham-Walsh is concerned by the focus on open access to research published in scientific journals, which has important limitations for health-care providers. The “big challenge” is whether the open-access model can be expanded to include other types of publication, for example text books and databases of systematic reviews. “For a health-care provider in a rural area, access to a whole load of medical journals would not be much help for figuring out what to do”, Pakenham-Walsh explains. “Any single research article has got limited application to health care in its own right; it needs to be seen within the context of other available evidence.” There are easier and quicker ways, however, to bridge the information divide, argues Subbiah Arunachalam, an information scientist at the MS Swaminathan Research Foundation in Chennai, India. “Rather than frittering away our energies setting up new open-access journals or trying to persuade existing journals to go the open-access way, one can make the playing field very nearly level if all researchers in the world self-archive their papers in institutional archives. Then everyone with internet access can access everyone else's papers.” NIH research: widening access, building collaborationThe debate about opening access to the scientific literature is progressing at an astonishing pace. On Sept 3, the US National Institutes of Health published a statement entitled “Enhanced public access to NIH research information”. The agency set out its mission “to share and support public access to the results and accomplishments of the activities that it funds”. Then came the punch that has sent some publishers reeling. Full-Text PDF