The Parachute

The Problem of 'Overwhelm'

2012-01-19T18:53:00.000Z

I wrote my previous post, Peer Review, Holy Cow, as a provocative one, of course. The reason, though, why I think the matter requires attention is that I see a problem looming: the problem of what I call 'overwhelm'. This problem looms on several levels. First of all the capacity of the pool of reviewers able and willing to deal with the growing manuscript flow – several times over, given that many articles 'cascade' down the journal pecking order and need to be peer-reviewed at every stage – is reaching its limits. And secondly, arguably more importantly, the increasing difficulty for researchers to read all that they might want to read. In many areas there is simply too much that's relevant.

In 1995 I wrote an article entitled "Keeping the Minutes of Science". I still take that phrase fairly literally. Research articles in journals are an account, for the record, of the research work done and the results achieved. Thinking along those lines (I realise that not everybody agrees with me) leads to a few consequences. 1) Articles are not primarily written for the reader-researcher, but mainly an obligation for the author-researcher (though the two groups overlap to a very large degree). The adage is 'publish-or-perish', remember? It's not 'read-or-rot'. 2) As a result, it is only proper that payment for publication comes from the side of the author. That is most fortunate, because that also makes Open Access possible. 3) 'Minutes' are often filed quickly and are not meant to be read widely. Only when there is a problem, are they retrieved and perused.

You will have spotted the paradox of, on the one hand, articles not being read widely and, on the other hand, the desirability for Open Access. Well, that is where the 'minutes' analogy falls down. Because articles do play a role in conveying the scientific knowledge and insights gained by the authors.

However, that doesn't mean that the information and knowledge bundled up in an article can be conveyed by it being read in the conventional way. This is where the problem of 'overwhelm' starts to bite. There is just too much to read for any normal researcher*. So more and more, articles need to be 'read' by computers as a help to researchers to ingesting the information they contain. That is why Open Access is so important, especially the BOAI-compliant OA that is governed by licences such as CC-BY. It makes large-scale computer-aided reading possible.

The notion of using computers for reading and ingesting large amounts of research articles means that presentation becomes unimportant. Or rather, important in different ways. The computer-readability and interoperability comes first, and visual elements such as lay-outs are practically irrelevant. In a comment by Scott Epstein to my Peer Review, Holy Cow post the point is made that visual presentation is a value-add that distinguishes publishers from outfits like ArXiv. The publishers' presentations are nice-to-have, of course, but far less 'need-to-have' than they seem to assume. Computers can deal very well with information presented in an ArXiv fashion, provided the computer interoperability is taken care of.

My personal contention is also that peer-review is largely redundant beyond a basic level that can well be taken care of by an endorsement system, once computers are involved. We shouldn't be so scared of potential 'rubbish' being included. Analyses of large amounts of information will most likely expose potential 'rubbish' in a way that makes it recognisable similar to how 'outliers' are identified in scatter graphs (and ignored, if that seems the right thing to do, in the judgment of the researcher looking at the results).

Scott also mentions 'curation'. Curation is important, but is not necessarily – or even often – done by reviewers or journal editors, in my experience. Scott seems to agree, as demonstrated by his choice of words: "journal editors also (or should) curate the content." A system that allows for (semantic) crowd-curation of scientific assertions, which subsequently could be recognised by computers in any articles in which these assertions are repeated, is likely to be a better use of available resources, with the added benefit of not relying on a small number of 'experts' but instead, using a much wider pool of potential expertise.

I would like to finish with a few quotes from Richard Smith, ex Editor of the British Medical Journal and currently Board Member of the Public Library of Science:

"...peer review is a faith-based rather than evidence-based process, which is hugely ironic when it is at the heart of science."

"...we should scrap prepublication peer review and concentrate on postpublication peer review, which has always been the ‘real’ peer review in that it decides whether a study matters or not. By postpublication peer review I do not mean the few published comments made on papers, but rather the whole ‘market of ideas,’ which has many participants and processes and moves like an economic market to determine the value of a paper. Prepublication peer review simply obstructs this process."

Jan Velterop

*See "On the Impossibility of Being Expert" by Fraser and Dunstan, BMJ Vol 341, 18-25 December 2010

Holy Cow, Peer Review

2012-01-11T14:32:00.000Z

Looking at it as dispassionately as possible, one could conclude that peer review is the only remaining significant raison d’être of formal scientific publishing in journals. Imagine that scientists, collectively, decided that sharing results were of paramount importance (a truism), but peer-review isn't considered important any longer. If you imagine that, then the whole publishing edifice would suddenly look very different. More like ArXiv (where, by the way, I found this interesting article).

A recent report estimates that the “total revenues for the scientific, technical and medical publishing market are estimated to rise by 15.8% over the next three years – from $26bn in 2011 to just over $30bn in 2014.” If we assume an annual output of 1 million articles, this revenue – which, for practical purposes, equals the cost to science of access to research publications – equates to a cost of $3000 per article, and even if the output is 1.5 million articles, it’s still $2000 per article.

So the real question is: is peer review worth that much? It’s not that peer review might not have benefits at all. At issue is the cost to science of such benefits as there may be. And although post-publication peer review could easily be done, by those who feel the inclination to do so, when and where it seems to be worth the effort, it may not happen very often, of course, as there are few incentives. Isn't the endorsement system a viable alternative?

Of course, ArXiv-oid publishing platforms also carry a cost, but per article it’s likely to be only a small fraction of the amounts mentioned above. In the case of ArXiv it is about $7 per article, each of which is also completely Open Access. Seven dollars! That’s the size of a rounding error on the amounts of $2000 - $3000.

Peer review made sense in an era when publishing necessarily claimed expensive resources, such as paper to print on, physical distribution, shelf space in libraries, et cetera. One had to be careful and spend those resources on articles that were likely to be worth it, and even then restrict what was spent on individual articles by imposing maximum lengths and the like. Also, finding the articles worth reading was difficult and the choices and guidance journal editors and editorial boards made were welcome.

How all this has changed with the advent of the Web. There is hardly any need for restrictions on the number and length of articles anymore, and searching – not to mention finding – articles that are relevant to the specific project a researcher is working on has become dramatically easier. As a result, the filtering and selecting functions of journals have become rather redundant.

“All very well, but what about the quality assurance that peer review provides?” Well, it is debatable that peer review does that reliably, though I’m willing to accept that it might. However, given its costs, can we really not deal with a lack of this quality assurance in the light of the benefits of universal and inexpensive Open Access that ArXiv-oid platforms could bring? Are we not dealing with it right now? We all know that almost all articles eventually meet their accepting journal editor, and it’s difficult to imagine that every article we find with a literature web search is of sufficient ‘quality’ (whatever that means anyway) for our purposes. And yes, we will encounter ‘rubbish’ articles. Don’t we now, with nigh universal peer review? But we deal with outliers in data all the time, and it is my conviction that we can deal with outliers in the literature just as well. Anyway, ArXiv-oid platforms with an endorsement system will to a large degree prevent excesses.

Scientists are people, and as such not too well equipped to make completely rational choices. Besides, the ‘ego-system’ of qualifying for grants, tenure, et cetera, has it’s own rationality (akin to how to deal with the prisoner's dilemma). But the prospect of being able to save tens of billions of dollars each year, even after allowing generous sums for running ArXiv-oids with endorsement systems instead of peer review, which savings could be used for research (the amounts saveable are not far off the annual NIH research budget!), must be food for some serious thought. Let's see if we can think this through. It's not fair to expect scientists themselves to break the cycle. But funding bodies?

I realise that what I'm proposing here is the 'furthest point', but that's where we have to hook up the tightrope, if we want to be able to traverse the chasm separating today from what might be, no?

Jan Velterop

PDF resurrected

2011-12-14T11:51:00.001Z

This blog is devoted to open access. Please subscribe. To the concept of open access to scientific information, that is.

Not for the sake of open access in itself. No l'art pour l'art. But for the sake of enabling scientists to make use of any information that is relevant to their research in any way that makes sense for them. In that spirit, please allow me to divert to writing about something that is not open access as such, but does help scientists to get to and use available knowledge more efficiently and conveniently.

Much – actually, the overwhelming majority – of the scientific literature is made available in the form of PDFs. There are good reasons for that. Easily downloaded, easily stored on your hard disk, easily printed nicely, integrity guaranteed to a satisfactory degree ('version of record'), et cetera. But in a web-connected world, having static, 'dead' documents like PDFs also has major drawbacks. Many scientists would like to look 'beyond the PDF'. Me, too. I am on record to have used the awkward verb 'depedefy' and making the case that that is just what should be done. No longer.

What has changed? Well, Utopia Documents. It is a scientific PDF-reader that connects the articles you have in PDF format to the web. Any PDF document that's not just a bitmap (image). The published articles, manuscripts written in MS Word that you have saved on your laptop or deposited in repositories as PDFs, even whole books. When you have Utopia Documents installed (it's free, and available for Mac, Windows and Linux from www.getutopia.org), the advantages of PDFs remain, and the disadvantages begin to melt away.

The current version of Utopia Documents is optimised for the life sciences – molecular biology, biochemistry, preclinical medicine, and the like. But this is clearly only the beginning. New functionalities and links to resources are continually being added and upgrades will be released regularly. Progress keeps being made in the foreseeable future and beyond, but that's no real reason to wait with using the PDF-reader, of course.

Conflict of interest: no conflict, actually, just interest. I'm a fan. I will do what I can to advocate Utopia Documents because I think it is a wonderful tool for scientists, potentially making their lives easier and their research more effective. And I and my colleagues will assist those who developed it and are continually improving it, with ensuring its sustainability.

Please help. The only things you have to do is to download the software, start using it, and tell your friends and colleagues about Utopia Documents.

Jan Velterop

Science Publishing: All About Submission

2011-12-13T18:07:00.001Z

I think 'gold' open access publishing needs to be supported by submission fees rather than article publication fees, as is now generally the case.

The basic reason I am in favour of submission fees is that it makes scientific publishing really the service industry that it is, its main task nowadays having nothing to do with publishing per se, but mainly with arranging peer review and quality assurance of one sort or another. 'Publisher' is therefore a bit of a misnomer by now, a relic of the past. Publishing, as in 'making public', is very easy and people can do it by themselves, in a way that one does on a blog, for instance. Or even by depositing a manuscript in an institutional repository, which is publishing, in the sense of 'making public'. Science publishers should really be called 'quality assurance providers' or something in that vein. Because that is what a modern STM publisher is. A (perhaps too simplistic, but quite useful) model may be the 'exam' model. Submitting a paper is not unlike applying for, say, a driver's test, for which you pay, irrespective of the outcome. An article's scientific robustness is being tested; little else is of relevance (or rather, should be of relevance).

Apart from this, there are some clearly beneficial consequences of a submission-fee system.

It discourages spurious submissions and encourages pitching at the right journal at the right level
It therefore relieves pressure on the peer review system (fewer unnecessary rounds of peer review)
It relates any fees paid for the main work done by 'publishers'
It allows any prestige journals (insofar that they have a reason to exist) not to have to worry about high rejection rates and the related necessity of high article publication fees otherwise needed for OA to the small number of accepted articles (the Nature and Science argument)
It spreads the amount needed by a 'publisher' over a larger number of articles – the accepted plus the rejected – leading to the possibility of lower average fees
It removes the suspicion that OA journals might be tempted to accept more than they should just because of the money that accepted articles bring

To be fair, there are also downsides.

The need to be able to justify rejections properly, particularly if challenged (after all, submitters have paid for an assessment)
The reality that other publishers offer free submission (although this argument may not cut too much ice, given that it was also used against author-side payment, which turned out not as deadly to the model as was thought by opponents of OA)

The last point is probably keeping publishers from going in the direction of submission fees. I do hope that one of the more visionary publishers dares to make the plunge.

Jan Velterop

Hybrid journals – double or quits?

2011-12-11T14:46:00.001Z

Hybrid journals – journals that combine toll access to some articles with open access to others – do not generally enjoy a good press. Terms such as 'double-dipping' are used. This is not justified, as a general rule. I can't guarantee that double-dipping never happens, but I don't think it is generally the case. Publishers could do more to disabuse the library and research communities of the notion that it is, though.

That said, it is difficult, because even the basic understanding of how a subscription system works is often lacking outside (and even sometimes inside echelons of) the publishing community. One of the difficulties is that deciding on the price of subscriptions depends on a number of prior assumptions. There are possibly more than these three, but they are the most important ones: 1) how many subscriptions will we be able to sell; 2) how many submissions will we get and how many of those will be accepted for publication (i.e. what will the costs be); and 3) what margins can we expect to contribute to overheads and profit (or surplus, in the case of a not-for-profit publisher).

Typically, a publisher will have a portfolio of journals of which some do well, some just break even, and some make a loss if all costs, including overheads, are fully allocated. Hybrid journals will be found in all three categories. So what does 'double-dipping' mean? Are loss-making journals 'half-dipping'? Is 'double-half-dipping', in the case of those loss making journals, just 'single dipping'? Does it even make sense to think in those terms?

I think not. The objective way to look at it is to see the subscription price as the price to be paid for the non-OA articles that are published in a hybrid journal. That may be low or high if expressed in subscription price per non-OA article, but that is what a subscription to a hybrid journal is. Incidentally, comparing subscription prices per article (p/a) across a library collection will show a very wide range, and the inclusion or exclusion of hybrid journals is not likely to make any difference in the distribution of p/a in that range.

It may be helpful to think of a hybrid journal as twin journals sharing the same title, Editor, Editorial Board and editorial policy: one subscription-based, and one OA.

The OA articles in a hybrid journal are just as much OA as in any OA journal as long as they give the reader/user the same rights (of access and re-use), i.e. as long as they are covered by a licence such as the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC-BY) or the CC Attribution and Share Alike License (CC-BY-SA) and not the CC Attribution Non-Commercial License (CC-BY-NC). Sticking to CC-BY-NC licences, which does happen, is a sign of insecurity on the part of a publisher or of a lack of understanding as to what the purpose of open access actually is. Though there may be a number of cases where the publisher has overcome that insecurity but just hasn't thought about changing the licences yet.

As said above, hybrid journals do not generally enjoy a good press, but I have heard positive comments about them as well in the scientific community. Those relate to the notion that the editorial policy (the acceptance/rejection policy) of hybrid journals is not influenced by the potential financial contribution coming from the authors. The 'open choice' is typically given as an option only after the article has passed peer review and is accepted. I don't think acceptance and rejection policies of any respectable OA journal are influenced by the prospect of authors paying, and I certainly don't know of any such practices at the OA publishers I am familiar with, but it is an extra assurance hybrid journals offer that that is indeed not the case.

Jan Velterop

The future of today is not what it used to be

2011-12-10T16:13:00.001Z

One of the threads on the Liblicense-L discussion forum, on 'the future of the subscription model', has been running for quite a while now. Without much consensus. A few exchanges on the desirability and practicability of an 'author-side-paid' open access model as an alternative, strayed into a system financed by submission fees rather than fees for publication, and I am inviting views on that idea. The exchange on the forum, in chronological order (unedited save for a few typos and the insertion of a few hyperlinks):

(7 December 2011) There was an earlier comment on this thread (which I lost, alas) to the effect that one way to build an author-pays service is with a fee for submission rather than for publication. This is a great idea, and in a world without ruinous competition (John D. Rockefeller's phrase), it would work beautifully, as it aligns the cost to authors with the actual cost of delivering the service. But what happens when your competitor offers a free Christmas promotion? Or if eLife takes 10 years to figure out a business model? In a competitive market, you can never be smarter than your stupidest competitor, and if that

competitor wants to give away the store, I can see your store loaded onto someone else's truck.

Joe Esposito

(7 December 2011) Joe, isn't this already happening? And isn't this why a system based on submission fees hasn't successfully emerged yet?

The competition (subscription-based journals) are offering free promotions (to authors) all the time. They have found people who pay them through the back door (librarians, paying for subscriptions, as
long as it lasts). "In a competitive market you can never be smarter than your stupidest competitor." The words are yours.

This discussion is called "Future of the Subscription Model". The fundamental issue here is that the subscription model is simply not suited to an environment where maximum distribution is possible without marginal cost, and what is being distributed is not consumable (in the sense that it disappears if you consume it). In the bible there is a story about 'loaves and fish'. Allegorical (I presume). But scientific information in the internet environment is like the biblical loaves and fish. Albeit not food for the body, but food for thought. Scientific thought.

Jan Velterop

(9 December 2011) Oh, gosh, Jan, where to begin? This is just plain wrong. There is nothing "back door" about having a librarian pay for something. And it would be a wonderful world if maximum distribution were possible without marginal cost, but in fact there are huge costs to that distribution, if by "distribution" you mean that you persuade people actually to read something. Moving bits around costs nothing, and presumably this is what you mean, but the bits on my hard drive are meaningless unless I engage with them.

We have here the old saw about non-rival goods. It does not apply to media. Media is not a product but something that must engage human attention. That's a scarce thing. There is no superabundance of information when you take into account that someone has to be thinking about the information.

But it really is unfortunate that you insist on making this a binary game. I don't know if I could possibly have been more lavish in my admiration for the author-pays model. It sits side by side with the subscription model and other forms of traditional (that is, toll-access) publishing. Who has to choose? Over time, the different economics of these models will influence the nature of the content such that you will get different things from subscriptions than you do for author-pays. Is there anything wrong with that? Why would anyone accuse a radio of not being a television?

Joe Esposito

(9 December 2011) Joe, I fear we are talking cross-purposes. My frame of reference is primarily STM journals. In that frame of reference I just don't recognise your definition of 'distribution' as "actually persuading people to read something", unless 'something' means literally that. Sure, publishers try to stimulate downloads, since they help them making he case to librarians that they should renew their subscriptions and licences. But it's a numbers game, in which 'something' pretty much means 'anything', and the marginal cost of extra downloads is negligible.

Indeed, the bits on your hard drive are meaningless unless you engage with them. Researchers do engage with the information they have access to, and they would like to have even more to engage with, but all this engaging isn't necessarily in the form of reading nowadays. Perhaps it can be described as 'meta-reading', but it is more and more about extracting facts and assertions, collating them with those from a large number of publications, connecting and relating them, analysing them, and using the information gleaned as a basis for further thinking, experimentation, et cetera. Occasionally articles are still being read linearly, but even then, particularly if they are being read online (or nowadays also in PDF when the PDF is opened with the likes of the scientific reader Utopia - free from getutopia.org) as a starting point for further navigation of information and knowledge.

Human attention is indeed a scarce thing. And that attention is less and less being attracted by journals per se, let alone their publishers. It's the connections between facts and information across a vast array of publications and databases that attract attention. Fragmentation of information in all manner of different journals some of which are accessible and some not is the scourge of many a scientist. The observation that most articles are being accessed only after having been found with general search tools such as Google are testimony to the fact that practically nobody relies anymore on the choices journals and their publishers make.

The role of a publisher nowadays is to provide the service to a scientist of having his or her contributions peer reviewed and subsequently added to the common pool (well, ocean) of knowledge and information in a standardised, accessible and attributable way. That role is not satisfactorily played with the encumbrances of the subscription model.

You are right that the subscription model may be suitable to content of a certain nature. Magazines – even scientific ones – and the like come to mind. Nothing wrong with that. For the mainstay of scientific communication, however, the model is not suitable any longer. Of course it will amble along for a time. Quite a long time, even. Inertia is a pretty strong force.

Jan Velterop

The discussion is likely to continue...

Mandatory Academic Freedom?

2011-12-09T08:57:00.001Z

From the Internet Freedom Conference in The Hague – 8-9 December 2011 (or from following on the internet) Dimitar Poposki (Twitter name @poposkidimitar) sent the following tweet: "Q: Can Open Access to taxpayers scientific research be considered as a mandatory academic freedom?"

The answer is 'no'.

First of all, what is 'academic freedom'? From J. Peter Byrne, "Academic Freedom", 99 Yale Law Journal 251, 252-253 (1989):

The First Amendment protects academic freedom. This simple proposition stands explicit or implicit in numerous judicial opinions, often proclaimed in fervid rhetoric. Attempts to understand the scope and foundation of a constitutional guarantee of academic freedom, however, generally result in paradox or confusion. The cases, shorn of panegyrics, are inconclusive, the promise of rhetoric reproached by the ambiguous realities of academic life.
The problems are fundamental: There has been no adequate analysis of what academic freedom the Constitution protects or of why it protects it. Lacking definition or guiding principle, the doctrine floats in law, picking up decisions as a hull does barnacles.

Einstein defined it rather pithily as:

"The right to search for truth and to publish and teach what one holds to be true."

And added to it a duty:

"One must not conceal any part of what one has recognised to be true."

In that vein, I would think it easy to make the case that another duty is publishing with open access any research carried out with public money.

But 'mandatory freedom' is an oxymoron. That's why the answer is 'no'.

Of Loaves and Fishes

2011-12-07T14:54:00.001Z

And when he had taken the five loaves and the two fishes, he looked up to heaven, and blessed, and brake the loaves, and gave them to his disciples to set before them; and the two fishes divided he among them all. And they did all eat, and were filled. And they took up twelve baskets full of the fragments, and of the fishes. And they that did eat of the loaves were about five thousand men.

Recognise this story? Well, it is about scholarly publishing. Avant la lettre. You realised that of course. 'Loaves and fishes' stands for 'food for thought': scholarly, scientific articles. You can share the information without losing it, until everyone hungry for it has their fill, and when they have, and start discussing, you are likely to end up with more information than you dished out initially.

The story is already some 2000 years old! Shame it took us so long to understand its meaning.

Copyright or Controlright?

2011-12-06T17:59:00.001Z

Copyright is funny business. Even in science. Even in Open Access. You would be forgiven for thinking that copyright is all about protecting economic interests. But you would be wrong (though sometimes it is about protecting economic interests, honest).

Let’s examine the case of Open Access. Formal Open Access publishing that is, along the model of author-side payment for the service of publishing. It works like this: a number of authors have written an article (single authorship is quite rare these days) and submitted it to a journal that offers Open Access should the article be accepted after a process of peer review, for the quid pro quo of an amount of money. That amount of money compensates the publisher for the fact that he won’t be able to sell the article anymore (by way of subscription to a journal, for instance) when it is published with Open Access. After all, the article is openly and freely available (that’s what Open Access means) so who would buy it? Sound reasoning.

By the way, paying for the service of publishing one’s article is nothing new. In the past an author paid by transferring copyright (which the publisher could then convert into money by selling subscriptions – in effect selling access rights); in the Open Access model the author pays with actual money. Much more straightforward.

So far, so good. But you would think that if an article is published with Open Access you could actually use it. Simply reading articles is an antediluvian notion, and it is the re-use that makes Open Access worth it. Many Open Access articles can be re-used, and that is usually indicated by a so-called CC-BY copyright licence (Creative Commons Attribution), that requires, where possible, attribution of the authors, which is fair enough in the scientific ego-system. Besides, the authors (or their funders) actually paid for Open Access, so attribute is the least one can do.

But, alas, not all Open Access articles carry a CC-BY licence. Too many have a so-called CC-NC licence, which stands for Creative Commons Non-Commercial. This means that even the slightest possibility that re-use might result in some commercial activity, even if just derived in the second degree, re-use is prohibited. Goodness knows why.

What happens here is really not in the realm of protecting commercial interests any longer. Copyright has morphed from a way to protect legitimate interests into a way of controlling (read ‘restricting’) usage. Of Open Access articles! 1984 revisited! I’m sure it happens without many publishers involved even realizing.

C’mon publishers, the CC-NC licence doesn’t give you a penny more in revenues and it frustrates the hell out of scientists. Please change it to CC-BY. Please.

The Cost of Status Enhancement

2011-10-09T17:14:00.000+01:00

It's been said that the shift to OA will do little or nothing to help alleviate the economic pressures on universities, and that most of the money for publishing will continue "to be sucked out of universities for the benefit of other businesses".

It is a widespread and common misconception, in Academia as well as in publishing circles, that what is being paid for is ‘publishing’. I don’t think it is. Publishing (as in ‘making public’) is actually exceedingly cheap. It can be done on the web by anyone at insignificant cost. Researchers don't need publishers to convey knowledge to other researchers.

No, what is being paid for is what might be called ‘status enhancement’. The status of individual researchers, of research departments, of universities, even of whole countries. Publishing is used – hijacked? – for that purpose. In order to work as a status enhancement mechanism, publishing has to be formal, with ‘quality’ proxies such as peer-review and citation metrics and Impact Factors, with ‘labels’ (journal titles) that indicate these ‘quality’ markers, with redundancy limitation rules (every article must be unique, ‘self-plagiarism’ is not even allowed), etc. The providers of these services – the ‘hijackers’? – call themselves publishers (whether OA or non-OA), of course, but they are in the employ of those in the ego-system who desire status enhancement.

And they charge what they can get away with. That’s known as 'market mechanism'. They are just catering to what is expected of them. Academia drops the money on the proverbial street and publishers just pick it up. They are not in the business of alleviating the economic pressures on universities and most never pretended that they ever were (although it must be said that OA publishing, at least in principle, introduces competition on price into the system which may indeed help with alleviating some economic pressures; although it is a solution that comes with its own problems, as many a solution does).

Those who have ethical or moral questions – or even just economical questions – about the cost of formal publishing and the profits made, should consider asking those questions as well in relation to the necessity of the desire for status enhancement in Academia. Is the importance of such status enhancement worth the cost?

Jan Velterop

(This post has also appeared as a comment on a post on The Scholarly Kitchen blog)

Fruit and frugivores

2009-11-10T18:03:00.002Z

Publishers often don't seem to clearly see their real role in the world of scientific knowledge exchange, but libraries don't seem to, either. Both roles have evolved considerably in the last decade and a half.

For publishers it means that owning and selling content is now becoming a relic of the past, and only still exists because of the considerable inertia in the system. Their role is now clearly what it always was in disguise, namely a service to authors. The need for print and distribution made it perhaps inevitable to get a distorted view of the situation, and selling the carrier – paper – was easily confused with selling the content, but a publisher's real 'market' was, and is, authors. That's also – as appropriate for a 'market' – where the competition takes place. Only authors have a meaningful choice between publishers; libraries (readers) do not.

As for libraries, their role in the past has always included dealing with publishers. After all, they are in charge of the incoming collection of literature, and making sure that their constituency of readers has access to what it needs. Now that the role of publishers has become more clear, namely the role of service providers to authors (which is clearest with open access publishers), many librarians still feel the need to be involved, this time on behalf of their constituency of authors. But authors never were the library's true constituency, at least not when it comes to the authors' dealings with publishers.

So why should libraries take it upon themselves to play the intermediary between authors and publishers. Have authors asked for that? Have university administrators asked for that? Have funders asked them to take up that role? Or is it a consequence of the publishers asking libraries to support OA publishing? I suspect it is the latter. But libraries could decline. They are not in charge of research funding, so why should they be involved in paying for the necessary publication of research results, the cost of which is an integral part of doing research? It certainly isn't provided for in their collection budget.

There is of course nothing against libraries being in charge of the 'outgoing' collection – the papers written by researchers at the library's institution – as well as the incoming one. But it is my impression that a clarity of understanding of such a role is missing, particularly of the budgetary implications.

Take this blog entry in "The Scholarly Kitchen". It is fairly typical for such comments to take as read the idea that libraries pay for OA article processing charges. But logical it isn't. And any comparison between the cost of subscriptions and the cost of OA publishing is bound to be misleading, as it is, in the expression of Stevan Harnad, comparing apples with orangutans. (The analogy may be more appropriate than might first appear: fruit/frugivores – articles/researchers ['textivores'?].)

Library 'membership' of an OA publisher is a supporter-scheme for OA. A stimulus in OA's early stages. It can never be – and shouldn't be – a subscription substitute. Susan Klimley, the Serials and Electronic Resources Librarian in the Health Sciences Library at Columbia University, who is quoted in the blog post, got it right (I paraphrase): The library creating author funds to pay article processing fees helps to reinforce a fundamental disconnect between who creates, and who pays for, article publication. Setting up a pot of money is not going to solve that problem. Authors need to be more sensitized to the cost of producing information, and author publishing funds work against that aim.

Jan Velterop

Preparing for the previous war

2009-11-09T11:47:00.001Z

Whilst ‘green’ OA and ‘gold’ OA may be equivalent when it comes to open access, to be frank, there is a difference in usefulness. The matter is one of practice rather than of principle. The issue is PDFs.

Gold OA almost always includes an HTML version as well as a PDF. And if anything is missing, it is the PDF. Green OA, on the other hand, more often than not offers just the PDF, and not a machine-readable HTML or XML version. Both are, of course, fine for the traditional form of knowledge intake, via the eye, by reading the articles. But they are not both suitable for computer-assisted intake, via machine-reading and text-mining. That is not easily possible, in practice, with PDFs, and not at all with bitmap PDFs (at least not without cumbersome procedures involving prints and optical character recognition, or OCR scanning).

Not having machine-readable access may not be a problem for everyone, but in disciplines where there is a growing over-abundance of new papers, traditional human reading is not an option if one wants to stay truly up-to-date. In areas such as the ‘-omics’ (genomics, proteomics, metabolomics), but not only in those, the ability to perform text-mining is of crucial importance.

There is no reason in principle that a machine-readable version of one’s paper is not deposited in one’s repository, and advocates of ‘only green OA’, ‘primarily green OA’, or ‘green OA first’, ought to encourage HTML deposits. They are readable by machine and human eye alike, and therefore vastly superior for the purpose of knowledge sharing.

OA to PDFs may be better than non-OA, and that of course remains the case. But relying on OA PDFs for knowledge sharing and dissemination is not dissimilar to ‘preparing for the previous war’.

Jan Velterop

On OA, language barriers, and the meaning of 'ambush'

2009-11-07T15:40:00.005Z

I missed the original “Open and Shut?” blog post, but reading Walt Crawford’s “Cites & Insights” for November 2009, I saw that Richard Poynder “seems to suggest that [I] have been an effective agent for ‘ambushing the OA movement’”. Ambushing? Not being a native speaker of English, I thought I’d better look up if ‘to ambush’ could have another meaning than “staging a surprise attack”, and to read Poynder’s original article. Actually, Poynder, in his post “Open Access: Whom would you back” of 10 March 2009, doesn’t just ‘suggest’ that I have been an effective agent for ambushing the OA movement, but he asserts: “Velterop began to mastermind stage two of the publisher's strategy for ambushing the OA movement: accelerating take-up of Hybrid OA in order to marginalise Green OA.” Perilously close to libel, Mister Poynder!

Poynder is entitled to his views, of course, but it would be nice if he could expound them without misrepresenting and insulting people (yes, I am offended, and an apology on his blog is appreciated!). He doesn’t do OA any favours, either, with a blog post that is teeming with inaccuraces, conjectures, and mistaken inferences, and given that, it doesn’t surprise me that he even misses the fact that BioMed Central, now Springer, actively promotes repositories (green!) and offers services to universities to install them. Fortunately for OA, there are many more people like me, who truly work on advocating OA in its wider sense, and who are not drawn into what in my view is a narrow-minded pseudo-orthodoxy that only sees green.

The idea that whatever I did or advocated with regard to accelerating gold OA was in any way an ‘attack’ on green OA (“…in order to marginalise…” even) is preposterous, and that it could be a surprise is nothing less than absurd. The surprise is more likely that anybody could see advocating OA in general and working on gold OA as an attack on green OA.

How advocating gold OA as one of the routes to OA could be an attack on green OA is a complete mystery. The original Budapest Initiative recommended two, complementary, strategies, that later came to be called ‘green’ and ‘gold’ open access by Stevan Harnad. Both were hailed as welcome strategies to achieve Open Access, and Harnad, as well as I, and all the other participants of the meeting that effectively kick-started the ‘movement’, signed the Initiative. Poynder was not on the OA scene yet. Although the Budapest Initiative spoke of ‘OA journals’, a little while later the Bethesda Statement clarified that Open Access is a property of individual works, not necessarily journals or publishers. Poynder has a problem with so-called hybrid journals, but according to ‘Bethesda’, the OA articles in hybrid journals are true open access. No surprises there, no attack on the OA movement, no ambush. Just genuine, pure OA. Of articles in otherwise traditional journals.

Hybrid journals were an attempt at transiting existing journals to OA. In some cases it worked (Nuclear Acid Research), and in other cases not (yet). I would be the last to deny that the hybrid model is problematic. Because it gives a choice to authors, it cannot impose either the traditional model or the OA publishing model. And because of the widespread, but naïve, perception that a journal’s subscription price is, or should be, proportional to the number of papers published, it is not understood and sometimes severely criticised. Publishers, therefore, have good reason to dislike the hybrid model as well. They will, I suspect, move in the direction of full OA (what might be called the “pay-or-go-away” or “POGA” model), or revert back to subscriptions/licences (the “licence-sphere”, or “L-sphere” model).

Poynder brings up the affordability issue. And he complains about the level of article charges. That’s to the point, and fair comment. But it seemingly hasn’t dawned upon him that gold OA is open to competition, and these charges are bound to converge on a level that reflects this competition. Green OA, on the other hand, relies on the L-sphere, with its monopoloid characteristics, remaining intact for the foreseeable future. Dismissing the role of gold OA publishers in moving OA forward, because they see it as a business opportunity, is deeply misguided. It is like dismissing companies for making equipment to generate clean energy and reduce CO2 emissions on the grounds that they may benefit from doing that. Or venting the opinion that what these companies do is bad, because there might be even better techniques. Quite absurd.

Poynder seems to have it in for publishers, any publishers, be they OA publishers or not, and sees any differences between OA publishers and traditional subscription publishers as “a figment of OA advocates' imagination.” As one of the early OA advocates, I couldn’t disagree more. Besides, if OA is about publisher bashing and money only, then it’s bound to fail. Sure, a more economical system may be a desirable side effect of OA, but can’t be the core aim of it all. The mistake Poynder (and, I’m afraid, his guru Harnad) make(s) is to see so-called ‘green OA’ – seemingly not even OA as such – as an end in itself. It isn’t, and it shouldn’t be. The ultimate goal is to universally share (scientific and scholarly) knowledge, in what I call the noösphere (a term taken from Pierre Teilhard de Chardin), a ‘knowledge-sphere’ around the world that everyone can ‘inhale’. And OA is just one of the methods to share knowledge. Any OA. Including gold OA, and even ‘delayed OA’ (after all, ignoring the value of opening up older knowledge is devaluing older knowledge). Is delayed OA ideal? No, of course not. But OA itself is not ideal and is no more – or less – than one of the first steps to be taken to come to true knowledge sharing, to a true noösphere. OA is mostly about sharing documents, often enough just in PDF format. Access to documents is great, but it still leaves formidable barriers to knowledge sharing intact. One of the examples I have in mind is the language barrier.

English may be the lingua franca of scholarly exchange; the notion that there is no unique scientific knowledge available in other languages is absurd. And even the notion that if it is available in English its true availability is universal is a wholly unrealistic one.

But it’s not just the barrier put up by different languages. Even between native speakers of English a lot of knowledge that is published and openly available in English is nonetheless lost. Lost in ambiguity. Researchers are famously (infamously?) sloppy with their language. And publishers, although they sometimes ameliorate the worst excesses, do not, on the whole, seem to set a lot of store by disambiguation of scientific literature. OA publishers are no better than traditional ones in that regard.

Open Access is a most significant element in getting to a global noösphere, and although it’s clearly not the only element, all efforts to promote OA, in any form, help. Unlike dismissing gold OA, which doesn’t.

Jan Velterop

Open wider

2009-03-15T17:01:00.003Z

There seems to be a bit of a discussion between Joe Esposito and Stevan Harnad on Liblicense, loosely about the significance of OA and of peer-review.

Quoting Joe Esposito (reacting to an article by Richard Poynder on 'Open and Shut'):

"The real thrust of the world of open access is neither green nor gold, but what I have termed "unwashed," that is, the vast and growing – and growing and growing and growing – world of material that is not peer-reviewed. Take Poynder's own article, for example, or posts to this list. Look at the material that is accumulating in IRs, arXiv, and elsewhere; think about all the blogs and Twitter feeds.

The evidence is mounting that many advocates of open access have never actually used the Internet. The myth persists that OA publishing is just like traditional publishing except that it is free to the user. While there are some segments of OA that are just that, it is a shrinking part of the open access material that is being generated. And it is minuscule compared to what we will see in the years to come.

This doesn't mean peer review is going away. It simply means that peer review is evolving to conform to the characteristics of the online medium, just as the novel grew with the printed page and tennis is a game played around a net. Increasingly peer review will be post-publication, not pre-publication. I suspect all this talk about Gold and Green is a waste of everybody's time."

Quoting Stevan Harnad (reacting to Joe Esposito):

"Or could it be that some of the opponents of Open Access to the 2.5 million articles published annually in the planet's 25,000 peer-reviewed scholarly and scientific journals have never actually done any scholarly or scientific research, hence never published in a refereed journal, and never had any need to consult one for their scholarly and scientific research?"

Open Access to peer-reviewed material is important, but to reduce the scholarly knowledge exchange to just peer-reviewed articles is to ignore the massive amounts of data and knowledge that are shared in other ways. I see the importance of unrefereed scientific published material increase. Dramatically. As long as it is open.

But what does that do to the trustworthiness of that information? Isn't the whole point of peer-review to make sure that what is published conforms to accepted standards of scientific inquiry so that the reader can have a certain amount of trust in the results that are presented? Well, of course. But what is presented in journal articles are mostly results derived from data. Interpretations and annotations of data. Seldom the data themselves. Journal publishing evolved in the past, when the physical reality of sharing actual raw data was nigh impossible, so almost every scientist had to rely on the interpretations as published in journals. But now that we can share the raw data (view Tim Berners-Lee's call for sharing raw data), and tools to manipulate those raw data become widely available, relying on journal articles may well take second seat. And now that instant comment on data as well as on journal articles has become possible, with blogs, twitter, and what not, review after publication is a reality of today (albeit not used all that widely yet).

Furthermore, technology is emerging that is able to quickly identify if data and articles are in essence in line with the scientifically accepted knowledge of today, and is merely confirmatory in nature, which makes the outliers stand out. Those can either be scientific rubbish, or potential breakthroughs, and a peer-review process is well-spent on them, ante (the technology is a great tool for editors!) or post publication.

Peer-review may or may not survive in the way it is now. But it seems clear to me that openness of published articles as well as raw data is, after initial hesitant steps, bound to show explosive growth.

Jan Velterop

Harold Varmus...

2009-03-09T16:25:00.001Z

...on the Daily Show with Jon Stewart: video

Getting the right arguments right

2009-03-08T10:19:00.003Z

Congressman John Conyers has publicly responded, on the Huffington Post, to the call from Larry Lessig (initiator of Creative Commons) and Mike Eisen (initiator of PLoS) to speak up.

Peter Suber, in turn, responded in detail to John Conyers. Admirable detail, and a discussion with well-articulated arguments, like this, is the way forward, in my view. In an earlier post, 'Aiming at the right target', Peter is saying "Let's not make it easy for the bill's supporters to say that the critics simply don't understand". He is right, and in that vein I feel that I should humbly offer some advice.

In one of his arguments he points out the problem with the old NIH policy, which, he says, "...had the effect of steering publicly-funded research into journals accessible only to subscribers, and whose subscription prices have been rising faster than inflation for three decades". It is the second half of this sentence that is misleading. Technically it is true, of course, especially if he refers to average prices. But it is misleading by omission.

There are at least two reasons why the comment about inflation has to be put in context in order to avoid being misleading:

The average journal prices have risen faster than inflation, but the average number of articles published in them as well, reflecting the above-inflation rise in scientific output. The correct measure should not be the average journal price, but the average price per article published. That may still have risen faster than inflation, and I haven't done the math, but having those data would turn the argument of inflated prices into a real one, or render it irrelevant.
Secondly, scientific journal publishing is a global pursuit. Inflated prices may just as easily be an effect of a precipitiously plunging currency (at the library's side), or a steeply rising one (in the publisher's country), as of publishers' pricing policies. Indeed, if much of the work hadn't been sweat-shop-ized, outsourced to low-wage countries, price rises might have been much bigger. As with so many of the goods we purchase these days.

I think the arguments for open access are strong enough without the inflation red herring.

Jan Velterop

Footing the Bill

2009-03-03T14:15:00.003Z

Should you need any further evidence that the American democracy is in essence a lobbyocracy, the anti-open-access bill of congressman John Conyers provides it. Of course it isn’t called the ‘Anti Open Access Bill’, but the “Fair Copyright in Research Works Act”. But then, this is the way of the world these days: euphemania.

The Americans are not alone in living in a lobbyocracy, where powerful special interests rule the roost. In other countries the people do as well. Take Australia. But Australians don’t seem to do euphemisms. They call a spade a shovel, and they have a web site to address these matters, unambiguously called lobbyocracy.org, exposing money flows in politics. (By the way, lobbyocracy.info and lobbyocracy.us are still available today, March 3rd 2009, should anyone want to do the same in the US.)

It is amazing how misguided the reasoning is of Conyers' bill (Peter Suber does a sterling job exposing the fallacies in his Newsletter). "Fair copyright in research works", huh? For a scientist, fair copyright is a notion used to ensure attributed plagiarism, otherwise known as ‘citation’. It is one of the most important things about copyright. No, it is the most important thing about copyright. For a researcher.

For publishers it’s different. For them, copyright, or rather, the transfer of copyright, is a way of payment for the services they render. Though they call themselves publishers, these services are hardly to be called publishing any longer (in the sense of ‘making public’). They are procedural services resulting in the labelling of an article as ‘peer-reviewed and accepted by’ a given journal. The act of publishing is on the web these days, and anyone can do it. This is, of course, precisely the problem. The publishers’ business models are based on the idea that it is they who are publishing. They did, but that’s the past, when print was the only means of dissemination, of making public.

That said, the 'publishers' do fulfill a role that is needed in science. Researchers are required to publish in peer-reviewed journals. Essential for survival in the ego-system. ‘Publish or Perish’, remember? Of course, they also need to read, although the imperative isn’t quite there. No such thing as ‘Read or Rot’, after all. But to publish is the key to any career as a scientist at all. This fact should inform the business models: he who has the most interest pays.

Back to copyright. For publishers who think they publish, the transfer of copyright is just a way in which the author pays for the publishers’ services. If the value of that copyright is eroded – or in the view of some publishers even nullified – by funders’ mandates and embargoes, they have a problem. The most straightforward way out of that is of course substituting a monetary charge for the transfer of copyright. This is what the open access publishers have understood. The so-called ‘gold’ open access model.

So what should traditional publishers do? (I’m assuming that an egregious bill such as Conyers’ will fail.) Should they refuse articles that come with open access mandates attached? After all, they do not come with the required ‘payment’ of full copyright transfer. And embargoes are problematic (although the argument that articles have appreciable economic value after the typical embargo period of 12 months is rather weak, to say the least, seeing that almost all of the revenues of a publisher are realised in advance, as the subscription and licensing model demands). Refusing is hardly possible if they want to stay in business at all, since the authors are obliged by their funders to withhold transfer of copyright for anything other than temporary (a period of generally a year) and have no choice. Here, too, open access publishers have the advantage. After all, they simply do refuse articles that come without payment. With some discretionary exceptions, their policy could be expressed with the slogan “Pay, or just go away!”

But one thing I rarely see or hear. That is the notion that mandates with embargoes are a threat to ‘gold’ open access publishers as well. Especially the mandates with short embargoes, of, say, six months. What if researchers can wait that long to see most articles? And authors to publish their articles? Neither on the side of the reader or the writer would there be an incentive to pay for the necessary service that publishers do provide, be it in the form of transfer of copyright or plain money.

Which brings me to my final point. Payment for ‘gold’ open access publishing the way it is done now is also problematic. The reason is that payment for the services of a publisher is fully loaded on the published articles (and the same is true for ‘toll-access’ publishing as well, of course). And yet, much of the work is related to articles that do not come through the peer-review process and are rejected. A truly fair system would charge a submission fee, for which the publisher would organise the peer-review process. Like a driver’s test. You don’t just pay when you’ve passed and get your driver’s licence. You pay every time you take the test. It would probably also mean alleviation of the peer-review burden, since submissions would be carefully pitched to the journal of the appropriate level for the article, and not be allowed to cascade down the journal hierarchy.

Could that be a bill to put before Congress? Requiring that all scientific research is published with open access and that the only charges scientific journals can make are submission charges?

Jan Velterop

Industry-funded research IFfy?

2009-02-14T18:21:00.003Z

In his column Bad Science, in The Guardian on Saturday 14 February, Ben Goldacre drew attention to an article in the British Medical Journal by Tom Jefferson et al in which the observation was reported that...

"Publication in prestigious journals is associatedwith partial or total industry funding, and this associationis not explained by study quality or size."

The Impact Factor (IF) of the journals in which research funded by the public sector was published averaged 3.74 and the IF of the journals in which industry-funded research was published averaged 8.78. As Impact Factors go, that is a substantial difference. And, as Jefferson et al indicate, there was no discernable difference in terms of quality, methodological rigour, sample size, et cetera between the articles in question. Goldacre doesn't have an explanation. The suggestion is given in his column (he admits it is an "unkind suggestion") that it may have to do with journals' interest in advertisements and reprint orders – which can indeed be massive – from the very same industry that funds the research these journals publish. He doesn't say it, but this could mean, of course, that the journals accept articles based on research funded by industry, particularly the pharmaceutical industry, more readily than articles based on publicly-funded research.

I don't have an explanation for the phenomenon, either, but I doubt that journals accept industry-funded articles more easily than public sector articles. For a start, most publishers do not have in-house Editors-in-Chief who decide what's published and what not. That doesn't mean the publishers cannot have an influence on those Editors, but often it is already so difficult for them to get Editors to comply with everyday, sensible wishes, that I think this would be rather far-fetched. For publishers that do have in-house Editors-in-Chief, such influence may be more easily exerted.

A hypothesis I can imagine, however, is different and less sinister, although also to do with the massive numbers of reprints disseminated by the pharmaceutical industry. But this hypothesis would reverse cause and effect. Might it be that because of the wide dissemination, availability, and visibility of these reprints, the industry-funded articles are cited more often? After all, we know that articles are not only cited because they are the most appropriate ones, but also simply because they are the appropriate ones known to the author. (Sort of like when you ask a 'randomer' – a word I learnt from my 18-year old daughter and that I guess means random person – for the best restaurant in town, you are likely to get the best restaurant he or she knows, which is not necessarily the best restaurant in town). If articles based on industry-funded research are cited more often, the journals in which they appear get a higher Impact Factor.

If this hypothesis holds water, it would mean that wide availability is one of the important factors – with dissemination and visibility, and of course relevance – for being cited. In other words, could the results described in the BMJ article constitute evidence that open access could have a similar effect on Impact Factors as that – still hypothetically – caused by the massive numbers of reprints that the pharmaceutical industry purchases and disseminates?

Food for further study, I would think.

Jan Velterop

Deploring or exploring?

2009-02-10T15:48:00.002Z

When Homo sapiens was still in the early stages of his evolutionary development, he hadn't yet figured out many other uses for water than to drink it. And perhaps to bath and swim in it. This is conjecture, of course, but the earliest evidence of the use of boats, or even just rafts, dates from much later than the emergence of Homo sapiens, so assuming that he was just using water to drink may be an acceptable point of departure for my story.

Water is one of the most abundant resources on earth, but if you're just using it to drink, you don't quite get much of its potential out of it. When people invented rafts, and developed boats – probably in the form of dug-out logs – a whole new world, literally, opened up to them. They all of a sudden didn’t have to see expanses of water as impediments to getting to the other side, and once navigation was thus discovered, waterways and seas became the most important transportation routes upon eventually empires were built. The rest is history, to use a cliché.

There is something similar going on with the way we use information. The image that I have in mind is that there are virtually oceans of information available to humans, but that the only use we make of that information is ‘by the drink’ – by reading articles or bits of articles. That way, the knowledge contained in the ever growing seas of information (just think of the amounts of information coming out of, say, microarray experiments), is unlikely to come out in full. There remains an enormous amount of “unknown knowns” (apologies for using a Rumsfeldism) if we do not find a way to do more with information than read articles and books, or consult databases. We have to develop ways of extracting knowledge out of large amounts of information. Thousands of papers, and thousands of database entries. Or hundreds of thousands. We can’t read those. We have to invent the equivalents of rafts and boats to navigate information. And still read, but manageable amounts (after all, we still drink, too).

In whatever information navigation we already do, we stay very close to the coast, and only to the coasts we know. We search. And we pretend that we are navigating the vast expanse of knowledge that search capabilities on the internet have opened up. But are we? Is searching not a retrograde step in terms of knowledge discovery? Aren’t we inclined to search for knowledge and relations between bits of information we already know to exist? And so foster more homophily in the process than before, when large-scale search wasn’t yet possible? And stay in our knowledge comfort-zone. Look for confirmation rather than for falsification. We should give chance more of a chance. Serendipitous discoveries are, after all, the 'stuff' of which breakthroughs are made.

Some people deplore the fact that more and more information becomes available. They talk of information overload or overabundance. And if the only thing you can imagine doing with it is read (‘drink’), then you may have reason to be negative about it. If you think like this you may seek solutions in selection, in limiting access, in having the choices made for you. But if you can imagine truly navigating the ever growing seas of information, you will not deplore the abundance, but instead, start exploring it.

Jan Velterop

The discovery of more knowledge (in repositories, research web sites, blogs, and the like)

2008-12-23T16:33:00.002Z

In my previous post I was announcing the knowledge discovery 'button' that could be used to enhance any repository, science blog, or any researcher's, scientific society's, or publisher's site for that matter. Well, it is here now. Available to all. Incorporation of a small bit of code will equip any site who wants it with the knowledge discovery 'button' as you have it on this blog in the upper right hand side (the orange one that says "discover more..."). And with all the functionality that comes with it, of course. Even more functionality is being developed.

It really is a small bit of code that needs to be incorporated, and the fact that I managed to do it myself in this blog should give confidence to even the least HTML-savvy person that it really is easy. This is the code:

<script type="text/javascript" src="http://conceptweblinker.wikiprofessional.org/wikibutton.js"></script>

Just cut and paste it in the code of your repository, web site or blog and enhance its ability to serve up relevant additional knowledge to its readers.

As an example of what it might look like, click the "Discover more..." button and then look at this abstract of an article by Matsuda et al., entitled Silencing of caspase-8 and caspase-3 by RNA interference prevents vascular endothelial cell injury in mice with endotoxic shock. (Cardiovascular Research 2007 76(1):132-140;
doi:10.1016/j.cardiores.2007.05.024).

Abstract
OBJECTIVES: Septic shock and sequential multiple organ failure remain the cause of death in septic patients. Vascular endothelial cell apoptosis may play a role in the pathogenesis of the septic syndrome. Caspase-8 is presumed to be the apex of the death receptor-mediated apoptosis pathway, whereas caspase-3 belongs to the "effector" protease in the apoptosis cascade. Synthetic small interfering RNAs (siRNAs) specifically suppress gene expression by RNA interference. Therefore, we evaluated the therapeutic efficacy of caspase-8/caspase-3 siRNAs in a murine model of polymicrobial endotoxic shock. METHODS: Polymicrobial endotoxic shock was induced by cecal ligation and puncture (CLP) in BALB/c mice. In vivo delivery of siRNAs was performed by using a transfection reagent (Lipofectamine 2000) at 10 h after CLP. As a negative control, animals received non-sense (scrambled) siRNA. RESULTS: Marked increases in caspase-8 and caspase-3 protein expression in CLP aortic tissues were strongly suppressed by treatment with caspase-8/caspase-3 siRNAs. This siRNA treatment prevented DNA ladder formation and less phosphorylation of the pro-apoptotic protein Bad seen in CLP aortic tissues. Transferase-mediated dUTP nick end labeling (TUNEL) revealed that the appearance of apoptosis in aortic endothelium after CLP was eliminated by this siRNA treatment. Although all of the control animals subjected to CLP died within 2 days, administration of caspase-8/caspase-3 siRNAs indefinitely (>7 days) improved the survival of CLP mice. CONCLUSIONS: Gene silencing of caspase-8 and caspase-3 with siRNAs provided profound protection against polymicrobial endotoxic shock. The prevention of vascular endothelial cell apoptosis appears to be, at least in part, responsible for their beneficial effects in endotoxic shock.

If you click on any of the highlighted concepts (the colours disappear after a few seconds, so that you can read the text more easily, but they can be brought back by mousing over the button), you will get a number of options to explore further. First of all, 'add to search', which automatically extends the search argument with synonyms of the concept in question. For instance, if I search further in this way with RNA interference the search is automatically reformulated as "RNA Interference" OR "Post-Transcriptional Gene Silencing" OR "Posttranscriptional Gene Silencings" OR "RNA Silencing" OR "RNA Silencings" OR "Quelling" OR "RNAi" OR "cosuppression" OR "Sequence-Specific Posttranscriptional Gene Silencing".

The options of 'related authors' and 'related publications' are self-explanatory, I guess, and the option 'connected concepts' leads you to a page on which you find concepts that are connected to the concept you clicked on in one of three ways:

there is a factual connection – established in a process of curation, e.g. via the peer-reviewed literature or a curated database such as SwissProt;
there is a co-occurrence in the same sentence in the peer-reviewed literature; and
even though 1. or 2. don't apply, there is such an overlap in the connections that each of two concepts have, that there is a strong 'predictive' association between them, strong enough to 'invite' research to establish if the concepts are indeed factually connected.

Each factual and co-occurrence connection has an 'explain' option with links to the literature from which the connections were 'mined', and so to further discovery possibilities.

There are also links to relevant books, and even more is in the pipeline.

Go forth and multiply (the use of this button)!

Jan Velterop

Repositioning repositories

2008-12-02T19:10:00.002Z

There are more and more repositories and their significance for open access as well as for the universities and institutions that operate them grows, too. Yet many repositories have fairly basic functionality. Some don't mind, and see repositories as a way merely to provide open access or to archive the institution's output. This is a pity. Repositioning them, making repositories attractive places to come to for researchers – and to come back to – would greatly help in their potential success. Many are already on that track. And various developers of repository software, such as MIT's DSpace, are already in the process of starting to experiment with embedding technology that helps the discovery of more knowledge by making it possible for repositories to become 'portals' of sorts.

It's easy enough. Have a look at the functionality that can soon be added to any repository (or blog, or personal site, for that matter) and click the 'button' on the upper right hand side of this page that gives you the opportunity to discover more knowledge. Within weeks we hope to make the code for that button publicly and freely available, for anybody to use on any site (watch this space!). And even more functionality is being worked on and in the pipeline. For now, this technology allows you especially to discover knowledge in the main 'domain of its experience', the biomedical areas.

Below, I am listing a few of the more than a million terms that are recognised as concepts and when you click on them, they open up a 'balloon' with links to more knowledge. I'm just doing that because in this blog you may otherwise not really find too many scientific concepts.

But look at these: hepatic stellate cell – immunoreactivity – squamous cell carcinoma – nonhomologous DNA end joining – monoamine oxidase type B (MAOB) – nuclear envelope – rough endoplasmic reticulum – Kupffer cells – plasma membrane – Ku70.

The first thing you can do is search further. The search will automatically include synonyms. Even something simple as skin is, when used to search further, automatically expanded into the search argument: "Skin" OR "Integument" OR "cutaneous tissue" OR "skin system" OR "Integumental system".

But you can also see authors and publications that are specifically related to the concept you're looking at. And you can see what all the other concepts are that are connected to this concept, and how they are connected. All connections are explained, and these explanations have links to the original source from which the connections were 'mined'.

Of course, this is just the beginning. More knowledge and information that is permanent and relevant can – and will – be added in these balloons. If there is anything you would like us to consider to add, please feel free to give feedback. We do like to hear from you! (Use the 'comments' link below or the email address in the top of this blog.)

Jan Velterop

Giving chance a chance, or the usefulness of serendipity

2008-10-14T10:11:00.005+01:00

A post on the scholarly kitchen, entitled ‘Citation Controversy’, particularly a reference to the principle of least effort, sparked the train of thought leading to this post.

Scientific articles have references, which represent the connection of the article to other articles, and thus other knowledge. Articles in Wikipedia often have references, too. Although it is not rare that one sees the message “This article or section is missing citations”. The ‘Principle of least effort’ article in Wikipedia carries this message (on the date of posting this). Ironically demonstrating the principle, I think. Authors are often quite parsimonious when it comes to adding references to articles. And when references have been added to an article, there isn’t often a thorough check on whether they include all or enough of the appropriate ones. The omission of obvious references may be picked up by reviewers, but the omission of less obvious ones is easily missed. One of the sad things about omitting references is that it may reduce serendipity.

I have a suggestion for ‘Wikipedians’ who wish to add appropriate references and links to Wikipedia articles. In particular to Wikipedia articles in the areas of health and life science, and so encourage serendipitous discovery. I advise them to go to what I informally call 'wikimore', an enhancement layer where they will find that the text of Wikipedia articles is enriched with highlighted concepts. By clicking on a number of those highlighted concepts and adding them to a search query, you can search the appropriate articles to refer to in, say in Google Scholar, or in Wikipedia itself, and when found, add those references to the Wikipedia article, as a good Wikipedian would.

For instance, by clicking on the concepts ‘information seeking behavior’, ‘design’ and ‘library’, and subsequently searching in Google Scholar, I find this article:

Comparing faculty information seeking in teaching and research: Implications for the design of digital libraries, by Christine L. Borgman et al., in the Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, Vol. 56, No. 6. (2005), pp. 636-657. DOI: 10.1002/asi.20154.

An interesting sentence from that article: “…faculty are more likely to encounter useful teaching resources while seeking research resources than vice versa.” In my view this demonstrates the drawback of a least effort approach (I like to call it the ‘laziness principle’), which by its very nature militates against serendipity. And yet serendipity is one of the most important routes to real breakthroughs in knowledge and understanding. A quote from an article by M.K. Stoskopf: "it should be recognized that serendipitous discoveries are of significant value in the advancement of science and often present the foundation for important intellectual leaps of understanding".

I’m not sure if the article I found (one among many others) would be a good reference to add to the Wikipedia article on the ‘principle of least effort’, but I do hope you can see that with wikimore you can, starting from a Wikipedia article, embark even better on a journey of serendipitous discovery than you already can without the enhancement layer that wikimore provides, since with wikimore, i.e. the concept web enhancement as applied to Wikipedia, every concept that is recognized in the text is a link to further information in itself, a ‘reference’, if you wish.

And while you’re at it, you might want to take a look at the ‘knowlet’ of ‘information seeking behavior’, and explore the concepts with which information seeking behavior is connected in the life and medical science area.

Happy exploring!

Jan Velterop

Open Access Day

2008-10-14T08:10:00.004+01:00

Though I haven’t posted for a while on The Parachute, today, on Open Access Day, I feel I should.

Unfettered access to scientific research results is in my view one of the ‘infrastructural’ provisions that enables science to function optimally. So why isn’t open access universal and what can be done to make it so?

After all, open access is easy. Just as I am posting this entry on a blog – open and freely available to any reader, anywhere, any time – I can post a scientific article. It is increasingly unlikely that there are many scientific researchers in the world who don’t have the possibility to publish their articles on a blog or in an open repository. And I use the word ‘publishing’ advisedly. The notion that publishing is something that happens in journals is rather outdated since the emergence of the Web. (Isn’t it interesting, by the way, that our word ‘text’ is derived from the Latin ‘textus’ which means ‘web’?)

Actually, I have to correct myself here. Journals do publish, but they are not needed for the act of publishing by itself. Publishing can easily be done by the authors. The significance of journals lies not so much the scientific content of their articles, but in the metadata of those articles. And by metadata I mean not so much the information about volume, issue, page number, et cetera – though that is useful for unambiguous citation – but in particular the information indicating that, and when, the article has been peer-reviewed (and often enough improved) in the course of a given journal’s editorial process. The role of a journal is to formalize an article, to affix the ‘label’ of the journal to it, indicating not only that it has been peer-reviewed, but also slotting it into what might be called a ‘pecking order’ of scientific publications. One only has to consider the weight attributed to a journal’s Impact Factor to get a sense of how important that pecking order is, or is at least perceived to be.

One of the reasons we do not have universal open access yet is that we keep on confusing the two: publishing (i.e. making public) on the one hand, and formalizing (i.e. affixing a scientific ‘credibility’ label) on the other.

Journal publishers, although still called ‘publishers’, are, in the Web era, mainly in the business of organizing the latter: affixing the label. That is no sinecure, as anyone who has done it will confirm. And as long as it is deemed necessary in the scientific ego-system – in order to get recognition, tenure, funding – it needs to be done. But it should not be confused with making research results openly and freely available.

Journal publishers have been in this business for decades, maybe even centuries. In the print world, publishing and formalizing were completely interwoven, possibly without anyone realizing it. The publishers were paid for their efforts by both readers and authors, though in different ways. Readers paid for access to the information via subscriptions, and authors for affixing the journal label to their articles by transferring their copyright exclusively to the publisher. That exclusively transferred copyright was worth a lot, because it enabled publishers to sell access to their journals, since anyone who didn't hold the copyright (which after copyright transfer included the authors) was prevented from disseminating articles, at least on any significant scale.

But we live in the Web world now, no longer in the exclusively print world. The value to publishers of copyright has decreased significantly since authors either started to ignore it – no-doubt encouraged by the opportunities the Web offers for wide dissemination – or were forced to limit the exclusivity of their copyright transfer, for instance because of mandates to make their articles openly available within a given period of time (within a year, for instance, in the case of the NIH mandate).

Given that open access is a great good to science and society as a whole (I treat this as an axioma), what to do?

Two options for researchers, not mutually exclusive:

Publish research articles freely and openly on the Web, on blogs, in repositories, et cetera, especially in those that allow public comments, and let laying the articles open to such public comments take the place of peer-review. This option may realistically be available only to tenured, established scientists and the very young ones with an independent and iconoclastic frame of mind.
Publish in the ‘traditional’ journal system, but choose journals that accept payment for organizing the peer-review and formalization process, and then make the article in question freely available with full open access immediately upon acceptance, and back this up by depositing a copy of the article in an open repository. This option may realistically be available only to funded scientists, but those who are not able to source funding for it can always resort to option 1.

A few remarks to conclude: There are indications – so far anecdotal – that ‘informal’ publications are gradually being taken more seriously by the science community and that helps the popularity of the first option. There are also indications that even the new and relevant scientific literature is becoming so overwhelming in size in some disciplines that proper manageable ways to get an overview of the state of knowledge, which progresses daily, need to be found. The analogy, if you wish, of a dependable weather report as opposed to just knowing the general climate supplemented by looking out of the window.

And lastly, isn't it fitting that this week, at the Frankfurt Book Fair, the worldwide publishers' jamboree, the inclusion of open access publishing into the mainstream of science publishing is being presented? I'm referring of course to the take-over of BioMed Central by decidedly mainstream publisher Springer.

Jan Velterop

Open Access and WikiProfessional

2008-06-09T14:57:00.003+01:00

One of the first WikiProfessional instances is WikiProteins. An article in Genome Biology describes it in great detail. The lead author of that article, Barend Mons, reacts to the post by Euan Adie on Nature’s Nascent blog (“WikiProteins is a croc”, later changed to “WikiProteins – a more critical look”). Because it is important to understand the open access nature of the WikiProfessional project, I am reproducing Barend's reaction to the blog entry in its entirety here.

Jan Velterop

Although the rather sour blog by Euan is quite an exception in the overall positive reactions we receive on the beta site of WikiProteins, I feel that a matter-of-fact reaction from the lead author of the article in Genome Biology that announced it is warranted. It goes hereby.

First of all on Authorship: Jimmy [Wales] was instrumental in making the initial contacts between me and Gerard Meijssen who was then working on WiktionaryZ, now Omegawiki. He also gave invaluable advice on several aspects of the system and he therefore deserves as much of an authorship acknowledgement as the average senior author/professor who ‘conceived of the study’. See also Gerard Meijssens’ Blog about that.

On the interface etc., we all know this is beta and we struggled for a long time to make it as ‘good’ as it is. Obviously a flat file is easier than managing a relational database and therefore the interface can never be ‘really easy’. I agree with Peter Jan [one of the commentators on the Nascent blog entry] that constructive criticism would have been more useful.

Criticism on the commercial nature (as it were) of a company on a blog made available by another commercial company – one that makes money on others’ scientific contributions for as long as we have been studying nature – is a bit peculiar as well. With the involvement of Amos Bairoch, Michael Ashburner , Mark Musen, Abel Packer, Roberto Pacheco, Matt Cockerill and many others in this process, not to mention Jan Velterop’s reputation, it seems to me that the OA nature of the projects is sufficiently safeguarded. With my personal background in malaria, working for 15 years with colleagues in developing countries, I also built a public track record in pushing free access to information for developing countries.

The content in WikiProfessional applications is completely freely available under the Creative Commons Attribution license (we are working on making author credits more clearly visible). The Knowlets are indeed proprietary as we create added value and apply algorithms that by themselves now have taken several million dollars to develop. It has proven exceedingly difficult to get sufficient public funding for this project, which has been carefully internationally discussed and prepared for several years. Bill Melton and Al Berkeley are to be highly commended for taking the risk to fund the vision.

Also the Knowlet space is in Open Access for non-commercial use. I sincerely hope that seasoned investors like Bill and Al would be more imaginative than trying to monetize this site – and the others still to come – by ads only.

On potential fear of competition: let me tell everyone up-front that the authors on the paper have every intention to connect all information on important concepts via WikiProfessional, not trying to put it behind any barrier or to compete with anyone. Some may see us as a competitor to IHOP or Wikipedia pages on biomedical concepts for instance, which is not true, as you will soon see.

We are planning to add locally maintained databases on genes such as www.dmd.nl to the appropriate concept page in WikiProteins much more prominently placed than today (now an indirect link via SwissProt data), but also locally-maintained databases on single gene mutations such as the growing number of Leiden Open Variation Databases (LOVD’s). We have a project starting to map all concepts in WikiProfessional, including all biomedical concept pages, to the corresponding pages in Wikipedia and other emerging wiki’s. People who find the WikiProfessional interface too difficult will be soon able to contribute to their own wiki of choice and their contributions will be seen in WikiProfessional anyway.

We collectively ‘own’ the basic data and anyone is free to ‘add value’ to these and make that ‘added value’ freely available to all or just for public not-for-profit use. Knewco is just one of the companies that derives value from the data and has decided to make the added value available to the scientific community for free.
I cannot wait until Nature will be Open Access as well, at least as far as the scientific articles are concerned. Then it will be easier to make full use of Nature content for the benefit of the scientific community.

One more point on equity and access: the collaboration with our Brazilian colleagues, with whom I co-developed and signed the Salvador Declaration on Open Access, referred to in the supplementary data of the Genome Biology paper, will soon result in crossing the language barrier to Spanish and Portuguese. The record for my beloved ‘malaria’ in Omegawiki will show you our ambition on in how many languages we would like to support the indexing on-the-fly. For Free.

I hope these further explanations take away at least the worst of Euans fears. I see in today’s version of the blog that he did not only change the original title of the contribution, but I also saw a more balanced reaction to Peter-Jan Roes.

However, Euan, if you still feel that some of your comments were justified and not yet properly addressed, please substantiate your claims and in the process it is highly appreciated if you give some constructive criticism. You would really help the community – and us – by doing that. Let’s keep discussing this project to make it better.

The meanings of 'free'

2008-05-30T15:30:00.005+01:00

I've received questions about Knewco's WikiProfessional. How free it is; and if it is free as in 'free beer' or free as in 'free speech'.

Life's never simple: it's a combination of both.

WikiProfessional's million minds approach does rely on user input. That's nothing new in science – in fact, the whole scientific knowledge edifice relies on user input. The user-generated content in WikiProfessonal is indeed free as in 'free speech'. The relationship-concept matrix (the knowlet-database, dynamic, relational, and constantly recalculated, reacting to any infusion of new knowledge) is also free to users, but free as in 'free beer'. It took considerable effort to develop and build it – and to maintain it – so it actually is (will be) paid for, by advertising and sponsorships we hope. The users 'pay' as in 'paying' a visit, and 'paying' attention, which we can then use to attract appropriate advertisers. (For some reason we haven't quite figured out yet how to survive on plain air, and we need to generate income to sustain our activities.)

It is important to distinguish the knowlet part and the wiki part in the WikiProfessional database. Knewco (the Knowledge Navigation and Expert Wiki Company) owns the first one and the knowlet is patented. In due time, there will be feeds available from the knowlet database to whoever wants to (or pays for, this might typically be a premium service).

The wiki part of the database on the other hand contains publicly as well as privately available authority and community contributions. We don't 'have' those; we just use those, as anyone else can do, at least with regard to the public ones (one has to approach the 'owners', authorities – NLM, Swissprot/Uniprot, etc. – for these authoritative databases). With respect to the community annotations and contributions, those are freely available under a CC-BY licence (Creative Commons Attribution Licence), and eventually we may have this available in a suitable form for downloading. There may be a potentially fruitful collaboration with Open Progress with regard to standardizing the download/exchange format.

Meanwhile, go to WikiProfessional, use the system, give us feedback, register and contribute, and work with us on spreading scientific knowledge via collaborative intelligence.

Jan Velterop

A rose by any other name

2008-05-28T20:15:00.005+01:00

"Doctors often exude an air of omniscience, but in truth they are surprisingly ignorant."

Thus began an article in this week’s Economist. Harsh language, but many a doctor, or other professional, including scientists, will recognize himself or herself in these words. The article in The Economist isn’t specifically about that, but the sense of information overload is surely a major contributory factor to this 'surprising ignorance'. After all, a lot of the information one gets to digest is ambiguous, redundant, fragmented, inconsistent, to name a few problems. As Herbert Simon, an American political scientist once observed: “What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes attention. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention.” The problem of the information glut in a nutshell.

Today saw the launch of an attempt to combat this abundance, redundancy, fragmentation and inconsistency: WikiProfessional.

The idea is that the combined efforts of a ‘million minds’ would be able, in a collaborative intelligence exercise, to refine a system that 'distills' the essence of established knowledge as well as points to new knowledge that has a high likelihood of being established soon. What it all entails is explained in an open access article in Genome Biology.

The concept (so to speak) is so far optimized for the life sciences and medicine, but there is no reason why it shouldn’t work in other areas as well. And in languages other than English. It is based on concepts, and those are of course valid in any language. It’s just the words or descriptions used for them are different. As Shakespeare already noted in Romeo and Juliet: "What's in a name? That which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet."

Just imagine what that means. One of the beauties of the concept approach (as opposed to the keyword approach) is that search terms in one language could, for instance, yield search results in another. Think of Chinese researchers searching with Chinese terms for English literature (they can read English, but may find it more difficult to come up with search terms in English, in the same way that I find it sometimes easier to search with Dutch terms), yet getting served up with English search results. Things like that. Wonderful.

(I have to declare an interest: I’m running Knewco, the company behind WikiProfessional).

Jan Velterop

Wiki temperatures

2008-05-25T10:57:00.008+01:00

In the Chronicle of Higher Education Jeffrey Young reports about a 'frozen' Wikipedia being more academically useful for students than the current version, which can be – and is – edited all the time, sometimes resulting in a lot of heat. There is something tremendously attractive in having unfettered editing possibilities, but also in having stable, authoritative articles in such an extremely useful web resource as the Wikipedia. In an academic environment, one would ideally have both. WikiProfessional, which is specifically conceived for the academic and professional environment, actually gives both. On the one hand it presents stable, vetted and authoritative knowledge, yet on the other hand it gives the utterly useful and necessary option for knowledge to be supplemented and annotated in real time by anyone wishing to do so. Both the authoritative version, and community annotations and additions, are presented side-by-side. Only when annotations and additions are deemed acceptable by the professional or academic community in question – peer-reviewed in one way or another – are they elevated to the level of 'received knowledge'.

For open access WikiProfessional presents a nice additional opportunity: 'annotations' can be links to particularly appropriate and relevant articles. And if such links were made to freely available versions of the articles in question, this would give WikiProfessional some of the functionality of a federated repository, not just enhancing an article's exposure and findability, but at the same time putting it in the right context in the Concept Web. This, in turn, may well further increase the chances of such an article to be cited.

Jan Velterop

Dealing with abundance – getting more out of the science literature than you thought possible

2008-05-15T13:31:00.003+01:00

Open access is adding to the abundance of scientific information available to us. It is to be expected that this abundance will be growing fast, with the growth of open access. This is good, because only comprehensive and unfettered access to the science literature will make it possible for us to be truly abreast of the scientific progress that's being made.

On the other hand, however, it will present us with even more challenges than we already face in terms of being able to deal with all that information. In certain disciplines reading all the relevant papers to our research topic means digesting thousands of papers per year – enough to fill our entire working time. Without assistance from the processing capabilities and speed of computers, we cannot hope to keep up with emerging trends in our chosen fields.

Few scientists can properly cope with mushrooming information and were they to read all the articles relevant to them, they would find that they almost always contain a very large amount of information already known to them. That redundant information is usually provided for the sole purpose of context and readability. The amount of actual new information is often surprisingly small and could have been conveyed in one or two sentences if the context were clear. Yet the essence of the scientific discourse is captured in those few sentences. The surrounding text of articles is, if you wish, the packaging in which the essence is transported, and analogous to the mass of fluffy stuff that's surrounding breakable item that's being shipped: emballage.

At Knewco, the company that I now work for, we aim to provide an environment for concentrating this scientific discourse – 'distilling' it from the abundance of sources, if you wish – and make it more productive by making it computer-processable. Very few scientists can read and digest all the articles and database entries that they would need to read and digest in order to synthesize the essence of the knowledge they need. So what we do is to enable and foster collaborative intelligence between machine processing power and human brainpower. Knewco 'distills' information to the essence of knowledge content from millions of documents, enriching it in the process with linked concepts and context.

This is not the same as making it possible to locate the one right document out of the abundance available. It is identifying 'atoms' of knowledge about a given concept from the literature and combining these atoms into 'molecules' of knowledge (we call those "knowlets" – a knowlet connects facts). Just as a graph can give you in one glance the essence of an enormous array of numbers in one glance, the knowlet gives you the essence of an enormous amount of scientific literature. It's like reading out of a picture instead of text. And as "a picture is worth more than a thousand words", a knowlet could be said to be worth more than the text of a thousand articles. Knowledge redesigned, as it were.

Perhaps more importantly, since a knowlet is a computer artifact, it can be used to identify related information, predict trends and intersections in data (see it as a kind of topology of knowledge), be used in combination with other knowlets of more complex concepts, and be updated in real time to keep information current up to the minute.

For technology of this kind to be optimally effective for scientific knowledge discovery, access to the literature is not sufficient by itself. It goes without saying that the source documents must be computer-readable to be optimally usable. Publishers as well as repositories may wish to take this to heart if they are serious about helping to speed up the pace of scientific progress.

Jan Velterop

Onwards from open access

2008-03-14T11:14:00.002Z

As many of my readers will already know, I have recently decided to leave my position of Director of Open Access at Springer for that of CEO of Knewco Inc. Several reactions that I have since received indicate to me that my move is not necessarily understood by everyone, and I’ve even seen speculations that my leaving open access might mean that it is not going anywhere at Springer.

Let me say the following to that. First of all, OA has developed some very solid roots within Springer and I am most confident that OA is being further developed with alacrity by my successors at Springer.

Secondly, I don’t feel that I am leaving open access. Open access is not some club that one is a member of or not; it is a 'thought form' that one adheres to. And open access is only one of the ways in which the speed, efficiency and quality of scientific discovery can be enhanced.

Looking back on my career, I feel that my motives haven’t changed much. When I was working on IDEAL/APPEAL* (at Academic Press) in 1994-95 and later, I did this on the premise that there must be better ways to disseminate the research papers published in journals than just via relatively small numbers of subscriptions. The IDEAL concept (derided at first, but then imitated by just about all publishers, and often nicknamed BigDeal) was brought about by the realisation that if access to electronic journal articles could be pooled by larger numbers of institutions, then for the same publisher’s income – the same cost therefore to the academic community – the articles would be accessible to vastly more researchers. If ever the cliché
win-win was appropriate, it was here.

Open access logically follows on from that. The challenge was – still is – to find appropriate economic models to sustain professional scientific publishing with open access. The recently agreed arrangements between Springer and the Max Planck Gesellschaft, the UKB (all the Dutch universities plus the Royal Library), and Göttingen University, may point to a way forward. All articles from these institutions in Springer journals are published with open access under these arrangements.

If the underlying motive is, however, to get the most out of the scientific knowledge that has been gathered, which it is in my case, then moving on from open access to the semantic web – the concept web, if you wish – feels, at least to me, an entirely logical step. Not all knowledge after all is captured in journal articles. There is much more besides those, in databases, for instance, and in less formal web conversations. (A case can even be made that journal publishing ‘destroys’ data, for instance by reducing them to simple pixels in graphs, taking away the underlying richness of the data). Also, the connections between knowledge fragments are not always easily made purely by reading journal articles, in may areas a problem exacerbated by the sheer numbers of articles published. And all relevant. We are in a situation of overwhelming – and growing – abundance of scientific information, and methods that deal with that abundance are clearly needed. This is what Knewco people are working on, and I am very excited to join them.

Jan Velterop

*IDEAL: International Desktop Electronic Access Library – APPEAL: Academic Press Print and Electronic Access Licence

Charity and recycled paper

2008-03-04T11:27:00.003Z

I don't think that assertions such as "...not all OA journals charge anything from either authors or readers..." or even "...the majority of OA journals do not charge anybody..." are very helpful for achieving widespread open access. One does come across them regularly, though. It seems more to do with the desire not to spend anything, or rather, to see that if any money is to be spent, it's done by 'someone else'. They may be mathematically correct, though.

The trouble is, 'journal' is in many respects the wrong entity in this regard. It may be a convenient one, but that doesn't make it right. Journals come in all different sizes. They range from publishing a few articles a year to publishing thousands. The variability is such, and the tail of minuscule journals so long, that I wouldn't even be surprised if it turns out that the smallest 50% of journals altogether represent less than 10% of articles published (I didn't do the calculation, but that's my sense).

I wonder, therefore, if the assertions above hold up if one looks at modal journals (i.e. journals with a modal number of peer-reviewed articles published per year; or perhaps journals with a modal impact factor).

Even if that should be the case, there is another issue. A while ago, I publicly pondered the question whether any of the non-charging OA journals (the ones that charge neither author nor reader) would be acceptable venues for articles that are the subject of funder mandates, such as the NIH or the Wellcome Trust. Not too many, I suspect. So far, I've heard or seen no answers to that question.

The non-charging OA journals are likely to operate on the fringe of scientific and scholarly publishing, and although they no-doubt have their function in the landscape, drawing this kind of attention to them at best takes away the focus from the mainstay of the academic peer-reviewed literature, and at worst, destroys these small journals, as there would be no way of coping with a flood of submissions without charging anyone.

It is relatively easy to sustain small fringe journals (some of them may be of very high quality, of course, though those are likely to cater to very small communities) on what the Dutch would call "charity and recycled paper" (liefdewerk oud papier). That's not scalable to the peer-review literature as a whole. Open access deserves to be taken more seriously.

Jan Velterop

Survival of uncertainty, or uncertainty of survival?

2008-02-04T11:22:00.000Z

On Sunday, February 3rd, Peter Suber, on his Open Access News blog, wrote in his comments to a post by Kevin Kelly, that "[new] business models aren't just good ideas, for example, to make OA possible. They are necessities for survival. For publishers, self-interest should be the primary driver for OA."

I fully agree with Peter. I have always approached open access publishing with this as my adage. My previous posting is pointing to some of the ways in which such new business models can develop.

However, a large and prominent school of thought in OA advocacy seems to argue the opposite. Namely that publishers aren't threatened by OA. "Look at physics", they say, "and you'll see that even though almost all articles are freely available in ArXiv, and have done so for more than a decade, subscriptions to physics journals survive as if nothing has happened."

Now, is OA necessary for survival, or not, since there is no threat to survival at all? Are these opposing views a sign of OA-diversity, or a kind of quantum effect like Heisenberg's uncertainty principle?

Jan Velterop

Planck cheque - max. access

2008-02-04T10:23:00.001Z

The Max Planck Gesellschaft (Max Planck Society) have agreed a deal with Springer that includes immediate open access for all articles by Max Planck researchers that are accepted, after peer review, for publication in Springer journals.

This is one of a few - so far experimental - deals, similar in nature (the others are with the UKB - a consortium of the Universities and the Royal Library of The Netherlands - and with the Georg-August University of Göttingen in Germany) that aim to find a way forward in reconciling the desire for universal and immediate open access to peer-reviewed scientific journal articles with the need to ensure the economic sustainability of peer-reviewed journals.

Implicit in these arrangements is that they mix the subscription model with the author-side payment model during a transition to a fully and properly funded open access model across a whole spectrum of journals and disciplines. In the process, any differences in the ability to publish with immediate open access (the 'gold' route) between well-funded and poorly funded disciplines are evened out.

These experiments could quite conceivably see an increase in article submissions to Springer journals by authors from Max Planck Institutes, Dutch universities, and the University of Göttingen, particularly where the choice of journals for those authors is between a Springer journal which will publish with OA and a more or less equivalent journal, in terms of status, impact factor and the like, from another publisher. In fact, such an increase is expected, over time.

In any event, even without such further increases, these arrangements already entail a substantial growth in the number of high-quality peer-reviewed open access articles.

Jan Velterop

Charcuterie de science

2008-02-03T11:51:00.000Z

“Gaming the system” is something that inevitably occurs whenever the quantitative outcomes matter (such as impact factors, usage statistics, number of articles on a CV, money, et cetera). Salami-slicing, the subject of a current thread on Liblicense-l, is just one of the ways of gaming the system. I’m not completely convinced that salami-slicing (or even auto-plagiarism, though that goes rather further, of course) is all that unethical. Or rather, that it is more unethical than, say, mutual citation cliques, boosting a journal’s impact factor by publishing review articles, improving usage statistics and impact factors by publishing with open access, et cetera. In the ‘ego-system’ of science, they’re all ways of gaming the system.

The gist of the discussion on Liblicense-l is that salami-slicing is bad. The motives of salami-slicing authors are presented as suspect, and there are strong suggestions that salami-slicing is bad for science.

As always, in discussions like this, the definition of what is salami-slicing is nor clear. In other words, how thin is a slice? Multiple publication of the same article is even brought under topic. But let’s take as a definition that salami-slicing is the practice of publishing a series of articles in each of which just one, or a small number, of a larger array of connected contributions to knowledge are presented, that could have been presented in one, more substantial article. For instance, "a inhibits b" (just one finding of a set that includes "a inhibits c, and f, and n, and p, and enhances the actions of h, of k, and of z"). Is it really bad for science if these findings are salami-sliced for publication?

I’m not sure, but mining the data from such articles with small units of information may conceivably be easier than mining them from articles that present the whole lot. Or it may make no difference. In certain disciplines, where automated analysis of articles is overtaking actual reading, it may even be desirable and should be the future of science publication. Salami-slicing may come close to publishing entries one by one in a database. If peer-reviewed entries in databases were to give their authors the same sort of acknowledgement as journal articles do, and ‘the system’ (those who decide on funding, promotion, tenure, et cetera) would formally recognise such contributions to science, would we still get upset about salami-slicing?

Gaming the system is human, and it happens in all walks of life, all the time. Usually it’s the result of flaws in the system. In science it is among the survival mechanisms, an evolutionary adaptation, if you wish, to the stresses of the ego-system, and it is done in all manner of guises. Isn’t freely disseminating peer-reviewed research results that are published in journals, by depositing in open repositories, while expecting the journals to continue to be paid for via subscriptions (i.e. via mechanisms intended for and dependent on exclusivity of dissemination), also a way of gaming the system? Ideas about correcting the flaw in the system that makes this particular form of gaming it possible range from stricter copyright enforcement (i.e. abolishing ‘green’ and not publishing if copyright isn’t transferred to the publisher), to open access publishing (i.e. securing payment for the services rendered, via article processing charges, subsidies, and the like). Obviously, the second idea has my preference.

Jan Velterop

Open access and publishing

2008-01-29T12:24:00.000Z

On 24 January, the UK Serials Group (UKSG) published The E-Resources Management Handbook. I contributed a chapter to it on Open access and publishing. It is freely available from the UKSG site.

Jan Velterop

Plagiarise, don't let anything evade your eyes

2008-01-26T14:48:00.000Z

Title taken from a song by Tom Lehrer

A commentary in Nature suggested that duplicate publication is on the increase. Mostly autoplagiarism, apparently, as it seems that the majority of these duplicates share at least one author. A few studies are referenced that suggest a relatively low number of plagiarised articles, but a much higher number of suspected duplicates with the same authors. And it is suggested that those have been published simultaneously, which is, of course, not easy to achieve for alloplagiarism ("simultaneous publication is rarely observed for duplicates that do not share authors").

It also suggested that duplicate publication is bad, particularly in areas like clinical research ("Duplication, particularly of the results of patient trials, can negatively affect the practice of medicine, as it can instill a false sense of confidence regarding the efficacy and safety of new drugs and procedures"). This is no-doubt true, but one wonders if this negative effect is anything other than minor, given the rather widespread publication biases when it comes to clinical trials, such as this one regarding the treatment of depression with selective serotonin reuptake (SSRI) inhibitors: "Thirty-seven studies were assessed by the FDA as positive and, with one exception, every single one of those positive trials got properly written up and published. Meanwhile, 22 studies that had negative or iffy results were simply not published at all, and 11 were written up and published in a way that described them as having a positive outcome." (Ben Goldacre in The Guardian of January 26, 2008). Judging the scientific validity of findings just by counting articles is clearly pretty primitive.

Autoplagiarism is seen as ethically questionable, to say the least. According to the authors of the Nature commentary, Mounir Errami and Harold Garner, "it not only artificially inflates an author's publication record but places an undue burden on journal editors and reviewers, and is expressly forbidden by most journal copyright rules."

This is undoubtedly true as well, but again, placed in context it may be dwarfed by the burden on journal editors and reviewers imposed by the cascading effect of the whole publication process, with its cycle of submission, rejection, submission to another journal, rejection by that other journal, and so forth, until the article is finally published somewhere, meanwhile peer-reviewed at every stage.

What if the motives of autoplagiarising authors are more benign? What if they just want to ensure a wide dissemination of their work and they see multiple publication as a way to achieve that? One might say that publishing in a journal that offers open access would be a better way of doing that, or self-archiving in an open repository (and I would certainly be in favour of publishing with open access). But a quick look at the various open access advocacy email lists shows that cross-posting is rife, even though the archives of such lists are completely open. That complete openness is evidently not being regarded as sufficient by the cross-posting posters to get the attention desired. Multi-publication may in essence be the same phenomenon, or at least driven by the same motives. Is it so much different from having multiple versions of an article, as in one in a journal, another one in a central repository, another one in an institutional repository, et cetera? Sure, those should all refer to the same formally published article, so the authors can't get extra credits for them, so maybe it is very different. But hey, the scientific ego-system is a pretty cut-throat arena, and multiple publication seems amongst the smaller of possible misdemeanors, with a least the positive effect of wider dissemination of research results.

I am not convinced that autoplagiarism is anything other than a minor problem in science. It seems to me that non-publication of negative results is a problem of an order of magnitude greater. It is high time that this bias is addressed, and with the kind of indignation now seemingly accorded to autoplagiarism.

Interesting irony:

A Google search on 'non-publication of negative results in 2007' (search done on 26 January 2008, 16:30 GMT) shows as first result an article in the Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association, with the link:
http://linkinghub.elsevier.com/retrieve/pii/S1067502707000394 which leads to a screen saying "The article you requested is not currently available online".

Further down in the Google results is a link to an abstract that seems to be from the same article, and it is online, albeit not open. From the abstract: reasons why studies were not published range from "results not of interest for others" (1/3of all studies), "publication in preparation" (1/3), "no timefor publication" (1/5), "limited scientific quality of study"(1/6), "political or legal reasons" (1/7), and "study only conductedfor internal use" (1/8).

Jan Velterop

Reviewed reviews

2008-01-18T14:27:00.000Z

"Book self-archiving cannot and should not be mandated, for the contrary of much the same reasons peer-reviewed journal articles can and should be."
Stevan Harnad
18 January 2008
contribution to liblicense-l

I agree with him.

I think.

Why I can't be entirely certain is because by peer-reviewed journal articles he may mean the same as the NIH in the description of the types of articles that fall under the mandate, which says:

"The Policy applies to all peer-reviewed journal articles, including research reports and reviews. The Policy does not apply to non-peer-reviewed materials such as correspondence, book chapters, and editorials."

That's a mistake, in my view. Review articles belong in the second sentence, with editorials and the like; not the first. More often than not, review articles are initiated by a publisher, inviting a distinguished author to write one. More often than not the author is offered some payment for writing it. Seldom if ever is a review article the result of a funded research project.

Review articles have a lot in common with books. And if self-archiving of books "cannot and should not be mandated", the same applies, grosso modo, to review articles.

Even OA publisher par excellence, BioMed Central, requires subscriptions to access review articles, for instance in the journal Breast Cancer Research. I think they are right to do that. It will be interesting, though, to see how BMC will deal with the NIH requirement to self-archive review articles. Willl the 12 months' embargo be enough? They currently make these articles freely available after two years ("freely available online to registered users", which isn't quite the same as open access, but maybe that distinction is for pedants only). They could just avoid inviting authors with NIH grants to write review articles, of course.

Jan Velterop

Taking the trip without paying the ship? Episode 2

2008-01-08T10:57:00.000Z

Peter Suber, on his Open Access News blog, has made several comments on my previous posting. They all warrant a response, but first I'd like to make the general point that much of what separates the OA-advocacy sphere from the publishing sphere comes down to deep-rooted and stubborn differences of perception.

Such as the idea that researches 'give away' their papers to publishers. It certainly doesn't feel that way on the side of the publishers. There it feels like being asked to perform a service. That's why the process is known as 'submission' and not as 'donation'. Besides, if all this 'giving away' is a bad thing, why would scientists continue to do it? They may be many things, but they're not stupid.

Or the idea that the information in articles is being 'locked-up' by publishers for the sake of control. As far as publishers are concerned, any scientist is completely free to self-publish his articles on his own web sites or in repositories. What causes the 'lock-up' (at least until subscriptions are replaced by other ways of paying for publishers' services) is the requirement to publish in reputable peer-reviewed journals. Not a requirement imposed by publishers. That is not to say that it isn't a useful requirement. One of the main roles of publishers is to provide the structure for a professional, timely and efficient peer-review process to take place, on the scale necessary. Anybody can organise peer review of their own papers and decide not to bother a publisher with it, just as anybody can buy their eggs and wheat from a farmer and proceed to bake their own cake. Both happen, though most people have no time for it, find that they lack the requisite skills, or just find it downright boring. Publishers -- and bakers -- are there to professionalise and speed up that process, offering to take the hassle out of the hands of scientists leaving them to spend their time on where their real interests lie: doing science.

Back to Peter's comments:

"Subscription journals and mandated open access are not compatible." Jan's argument depends on the high level of OA archiving, whether that level is caused by a mandate or by a successful disciplinary culture of self-archiving. It therefore predicts that the near-100% level of OA archiving in physics would kill off subscription journals in physics. But that is not what we see when we look. On the contrary: the American Physical Society (APS) and the Institute of Physics Publishing Ltd (IOPP) have seen no cancellations to date attributable to OA archiving. In fact, both now host mirrors of arXiv and accept submissions from it. They have become symbiotic with OA archiving. We may or may not see the same symbiosis in other fields, as their levels of OA archiving rise to levels now seen in physics. But the experience in physics is enough to falsify the flat prediction that subscription journals and high-volume OA archiving are incompatible. For more on the question whether high-volume OA archiving will cause libraries to cancel subscription journals, see my article from September 2007 (esp. Sections 4-10).

First of all, my argument doesn't depend on a high level of OA-archived content to be valid. If there is a high level of OA content, then potential cancellations are the issue. At a lower level, we see an expectation -- increasingly a demand -- for reductions in the subscription fee. You could call that 'partial cancellation' if you wish. As for the idea that the field of high energy physics demonstrates that subscriptions and self-archiving are compatible, I do wonder why it is that the SCOAP3 initiative was taken. The compatibility that seems to exists in high energy physics is like the fluidity of supercooled water. SCOAP3, the idea of which is to abolish subscriptions altogether, will be the dropping in of the coin around which that water quickly solidifies as ice.

The incompatibility of subscriptions and OA (whether self-archived or otherwise) is as fundamental as the melting point is to supercooled water. In exceptional circumstances, temporary unstable states can occur. I accept that, pragmatically, this unstable state of pseudo-compatibility can occur for a while and runaway cancellations won't necessarily take place until the penny drops properly.

The second of his comments:

Jan assumes that all OA journals charge author-side publication fees. ("They don't give authors a choice and simply refuse to publish articles unless they are paid for by article processing charges....") But in fact most OA journals charge no publication fees. Last month, Bill Hooker's survey of all full-OA journals in the DOAJ found that 67% charged no publication fees. The month before, Caroline Sutton and I found that 83% of society OA journals charged no publication fees.

I'm certainly not assuming that all OA journals charge author-side fees, and I have no reason to doubt the numbers that Bill Hooker and Peter and Caroline come up with. Since the topic at hand was the NIH mandate, however, the question that I have is how many of those 70 to 80% of non-fee-charging OA journals would be acceptable journals for NIH-grantees to publish in?

His third comment:

If "paying the ticket" means paying the publication fee at a fee-based OA journal, then there are two replies. First, the NIH already allows grantees to spend grant funds on such fees. Second, but the NIH does not, and should not, require grantees to publish in OA journals. There aren't yet enough peer-reviewed OA journals in biomedicine to contain the NIH output; and even if there were, such a requirement would severely limit the freedom of authors to publish in the journals of their choice. That's why all funder mandates worldwide focus on green OA, not gold OA.

The freedom of authors to publish in the journals of their choice is important. I fully agree with that. The fact that this is seen as such an important tenet of academic freedom only serves to underscore how important journals are for other reasons than just distribution. That is why I argue that all journals should offer at least the option of immediate OA, and I do take the point of there not being enough journals yet that offer it. (By the way, a journal that offers immediate OA isn’t the same as an OA journal. Journals that offer OA include ‘hybrid’ journals. As the Bethesda Statement clearly says: “Open access is a property of individual works, not necessarily journals or publishers”.)

The NIH should indeed not require publishing in OA journals and journals that offer OA as an option. But if they are truly aiming to have, eventually, a solid and sustainable OA publishing system, they could at least advise publishing with OA and make clearer and more widely known that they allow grantees to spend grant funds on article processing fees for immediate open access.

Peter's last comment, an extensive one:

If "paying the ticket" means paying for peer review even at TA journals, when grantees submit their work to TA journals, then the reply is somewhat different. TA journals are already compensated by subscription revenue for organizing peer review. The NIH mandate will protect their subscriptions by delaying OA for up to 12 months and by providing OA only to author manuscripts rather than to published articles. In the September 2007 article I mentioned above (Section 6), I list four incentives for libraries to continue their subscriptions even after an OA mandate. If the argument is that these protections don't suffice, and that the risk to publishers is too great, then my answer is that Congress and the NIH have to balance the interests of publishers with the interests of researchers and the public. Here's how I described that balance last August:

Publishers like to say that they add value by facilitating peer review by expert volunteers. This is accurate but one-sided. What they leave out is that the funding agency adds value as well, and that the cost of a research project is often thousands of times greater than the cost of publication. If adding value gives one a claim to control access to the result, then at least two stakeholder organizations have that claim, and one of them has a much weightier claim than the publisher. But if publishers and taxpayers both make a contribution to the value of peer-reviewed articles arising from publicly-funded research, then the right question is not which side to favor, without compromise, but which compromise to favor. So far I haven't heard a better solution than a period of exclusivity for the publisher followed by free online access for the public....Publishers who want to block OA mandates per se, rather than just negotiate the embargo period, are saying that there should be no compromise, that the public should get nothing for its investment, and that publishers should control access to research conducted by others, written up by others, and funded by taxpayers.

The first two sentences sound suspiciously like "free-riding on the bus is OK, because the bus company is already compensated by the revenue from season ticket holders". I'm pretty sure that is not what he means, but what does he mean?

His reasoning on the balance struck is also shaky. Yes, publishers do add value, but why is saying so implying that they are the only ones adding value? And they don't claim to control access. They have to as long as there is no widely accepted other way for them to charge for the value they add than subscriptions. That's the beauty of author-side payment: it naturally removes the need to control access that comes with the subscription model. 'Gold' -- paying for the services you ask a publisher to perform -- is so much cleaner than messing around with compromised subscriptions and embargoes. And it would result in OA immediately upon publication as well, and not 12 months later.

Anyway, perhaps this NIH mandate is a spur for publishers and societies to accelerate moving to 'gold', at least for articles falling under these mandates.

Jan Velterop

Taking the trip without paying the ship?

2008-01-06T19:45:00.001Z

‘Twas the time of peace on Earth, making merry for some, serious contemplation for others, and infantilisation for others still, if I read the blog and list postings of the last few weeks. And combinations of all of the above, of course. Many of those who favour Open Access have reason to be happy, since the NIH mandate has passed all its hurdles in the US legislature and is becoming law. Albeit, oh irony, as stowaway in a spending bill that allocates nigh unlimited funds to war, a small fraction of which would have made the entire academic literature published since the dawn of modern science open to anyone in the whole world. A bag of sweets hidden in a barge of poison. It is a shame the mandate couldn’t make it on its own.

What is it all about?

The mandate in the bill requires researchers, authors, to deposit the articles resulting from their NIH-funded research immediately in PubMed Central and then make them open after 12 months at the latest. Read thus, the whole thing is ostensibly taking place outside the purview of publishers, as it is not they who are mandated to do anything. There’s even a positive message for many of them, if they are willing to hear it. Open access is, after all, a desirable thing, politically and scientifically. And it is not just any articles resulting from their research that grantees are mandated to deposit and make open within 12 months, it is their published, peer-reviewed articles. So what publishers have to do is make sure they offer authors open access – or at least embargoed open access – to the articles for which they, the publishers, arrange peer-review and then formal publication in a journal.

How they do that is the question. Most journals get ‘paid’ for their efforts by the authors’ transfer of copyright. This copyright they then subsequently ‘trans-substantiate’ into money via subscriptions. What an embargo does is simply to make this ‘payment’ of copyright worth less. For some journals, an embargo of 12 months will make little difference. The time-sensitive currency of the information published in those titles demands that libraries need to subscribe to get immediate access anyway. For those, the ‘value’ of copyright is not eroded. But for other journals, the ones that publish less time-sensitive material, a mandate is possibly devastating, a double whammy, removing the incentive to pay both on the part of the librarian, who judges that his or her constituency can wait 12 months for access, as well as on the part of the author, who, given the option, may judge that his or her readers can wait 12 months for access. Subscription journals and mandated open access are not compatible. Only journals run on entirely charitable support can survive this way.

Fully open access journals stand somewhat outside the pitch as observers of the spectacle, since they have already understood that being dependent on what governments may allow you as a term in which to sell subscriptions is just too risky. They don't give authors a choice and simply refuse to publish articles unless they are paid for by article processing charges, a.k.a. author-side publication fees. Subscription-based journals and hybrid journals (those that offer paid-for open access as an option) are the ones likely to suffer, although hybrid journals have the possibility too, of course, to remove the non-OA option for NIH-funded research articles and behave exactly like a full OA journal towards NIH-grantees.

Surely, the stowaway analogy doesn’t go further than the mandate simply being buried in the bowels of the bill, does it? Surely, the free-readership mandate doesn’t imply free-ridership, too, does it? Surely, the mandate doesn’t imply that NIH-funded researchers are compelled to take the trip without paying for the ticket? If so, the bill is fundamentally a dishonest one. If it isn’t a dishonest one, surely the NIH will clearly indicate that it is entirely legitimate, and advisable, for authors to spend a small percentage of their grant money – estimates range from 1 to 2 percent – on the article processing fees for publication with immediate open access?

If the bill really should be the fundamentally dishonest variety feared, one of ‘taking the trip without paying the ship’, then this OA ‘victory’ will, alas, turn out to be a Pyrrhic one. A short-term pseudo-success at the cost of a long-term open access solution. A palliative that ultimately kills instead of a treatment that ultimately cures.

Advocates of true, immediate, and sustainable open access, as an integral part of research, may still have a long way to go.

Happy 2008!

Jan Velterop

JAM tomorrow

2007-11-09T15:17:00.000Z

On Wednesday November 7, 2007, in an entry called ‘More JAM about the NIH policy’, Peter Suber alerts us all to the fact that Nature, The Washington Post, Slashdot, and many others, got it wrong: the NIH policy is not about mandating its grantees to publish in OA journals, it is just about mandating them to deposit their articles, that is to say an “electronic version of their final, peer-reviewed manuscripts” in PubMed Central “upon acceptance for publication to be made publicly available no later than 12 months after the official date of publication”.

Indeed, as Suber says correctly, "The policy would require deposit in an OA repository (PubMed Central), not submission to OA journals. It's about green OA, not gold OA."

Unfortunately, in the perception of many – Nature, The Washington Post, and Slashdot surely don’t have a subversive agenda, but just report what is widely perceived – this distinction is of a level usually associated with copyrightlawyerly hairsplitteralcy. Apart from the fact that perceptional closeness is literally the case for the colours gold and green (have a look at hex colour 999933, which is often used on web pages to depict gold), the simple fact is that ‘gold’ and ‘green’ roads to OA are just easily confused. The somewhat enigmatic sentence added in the Congressional Bill: “Provided, that the NIH shall implement the public access policy in a manner consistent with copyright law” doesn’t make it any better. Nor does the idea of an embargo. Why allowing an embargo on making an author’s manuscript openly available? Or, put in another way, isn’t allowing a 12 months’ delay tantamount to saying that making a final manuscript freely available (‘green’) is, in effect, publishing? If it isn’t, why not insist on the manuscript being made open immediately upon acceptance? And what does “official date of publication” mean? The date the author’s version of the article first appears on the publisher’s web site? The date the fully formatted and copy-edited version first appears on the publisher’s web site? The cover date of the print issue in which the article (eventually) appears?

Is it really just “ignorance and misunderstanding” that leads to this quite persistent confusion? Or is there perhaps something subliminal or too subtle in the distinction between ‘green’ and ‘gold’ that wrong-foots otherwise intelligent people?

Applied to OA, ‘green’ and ‘gold’ are qualifiers of a different order. ‘Gold’ is straightforward: you pay for the service of being published in a peer-reviewed journal and your article is unambiguously Open Access. ‘Green’, however, is little more than an indulgence allowed by the publisher. This, for most publishers at least, is fine, as long as it doesn’t undermine their capability to make money with the work they do. But a 'green' policy is reversible.

This is not to say that the NIH policy isn’t going to be effective in bringing OA closer. It may very well be. But quite possibly not via ‘green’ (is it not time to realise that ‘green’ isn’t the fast and sure way to open access that it is often made out to be?).

Embargoes are the policies that will bring OA closer. Why? An embargo carries the risk for a publisher that both the reader (read: librarian) and the author can just afford to wait. Especially if embargoes should get shorter than 12 months. And if they can afford to wait, there is no need or incentive on either side to pay anything to anybody. For publishers, there are only two ways out, and neither involves ‘green’: to refuse articles from NIH grantees unless they come with some form of cash payment or exclusive rights. ‘Gold’ publishers already do that; they get paid in cash when they accept and publish an article. No cash, no publication. Subscription publishers get paid in the form of rights that are transferred to them. Copyrights, mostly, or at least exclusive publication rights (if and where there is a difference between those two). And those rights will look a lot less exclusive and therefore lose a lot in value under an embargo regime. So actually, it comes down to just one way, since the exclusive rights route is a mere cul-de-sac leading nowhere, all but closed off by embargoes. Or perhaps the other is stopping journal publishing altogether.

For hitherto ‘green’ publishers, to turn to ‘gold’ and join the already existing OA publishers in only inviting submission of manuscripts by NIH grantees that, should they be accepted for publication, come with publication fees in one way or another, will be an increasingly attractive option.

Jan Velterop

Of publishing and marketing

2007-07-20T12:02:00.000+01:00

Recently, on Peter Murray-Rust's blog, Bill Hooker's blog, and quite a few others, the definition of 'Open Access' was discussed. In the spirit of open access and clarity we are told that "Open Access is not a marketing phrase and you are not free to use it as you see fit", "Free Advertising isn't Open Access in my book", and "Open Access cannot be used as marketing gimmick and the definition should always be clear to everyone."

It's interesting that attention should be drawn to advertising and marketing. It is advertising and marketing that most of publishing in journals is about. Researchers don't need journals if it is just to 'give away' their research to the world, if they just want to 'share' their knowledge. They can just post it on some well-read web site or deposit it in an open repository and, hey, the proverbial Bob's your uncle. But no, that ain't enough. They need to advertise their scientific prowess, their priority, to officialdom, in order to get tenure, status, future funding, et cetera, and they use formal publication in peer-reviewed journals for that.

Nothing wrong with that, but let's be straight. You wouldn't consider submitting your article to a journal that doesn't market and promote itself.

"Free Advertising isn't Open Access in my book."

No, it isn't in my book, either. Free advertising of your article is publishing it in a subscription journal, so that you don't have to pay for it, but librarians do, so it's free to you.

"Open Access is not a marketing phrase and you are not free to use it as you see fit."

Open access is just as much - or as little - a marketing phrase as 'subscription' is, in all the inherent ambiguity and variation of those terms. Or is there anybody out there who believes that the definition of Open Access is (can be) completely unique, unequivocal and impervious to interpretation? Well, some work is needed on the current definition(s),then. Even if it were enshrined in some statute book as the law, it would still be open to interpretation. Don't take it from me: ask any lawyer.

Do I think that improvements in labelling open access could be made? Of course I do. And they will be, in a process of trial and error, and rich discussion, perhaps rather like scientific insights get refined and mature. To claim that "the definition should always be clear to everyone" is naive.

Perhaps it should be clear, but it ain't. How do I, for instance, interpret the phrase "the right to make small numbers of printed copies for their personal use" in the open access definition? That's a limitation of rights, correct? So that's reflected - though not perfectly - in the Creative Commons BY-NC licence. If there were a Creative Commons licence that specifically dealt with this 'right to make small numbers of printed copies for personal use', then we could perhaps use that one rather than the BY-NC licence with its to scientific publishing irrelevant elements. But to my knowledge, at the time of writing this, there isn't one (if there is, I'd be all too happy to be enlightened). On the other hand, if you look at the 'non-commercial' restriction in the BY-NC licence, you may be forgiven to wonder what the fuss is about:

"You may not exercise any of the rights granted to You [...] in any manner that is primarily intended for or directed toward commercial advantage or private monetary compensation. The exchange of the Work for other copyrighted works by means of digital file-sharing or otherwise shall not be considered to be intended for or directed toward commercial advantage or private monetary compensation, provided there is no payment of any monetary compensation in connection with the exchange of copyrighted works."

Jan Velterop

Fly or flounder

2007-07-16T14:02:00.000+01:00

If one looks at scientific information from an economic point of view, and considers supply and demand, it will probably look like this: In an area mainly driven by readers who clamour to see the research (a 'read-or-rot' area), subscriptions make sense; in an area mainly driven by the need to publish (a 'publish-or-perish' area, arguably the most common in science), article processing charges for open access publishing makes sense; and in an area mainly driven by political or other overarching societal concerns ('fly-or-flounder'?), direct subsidies make sense.

The question is, can one, or should one, look at scientific information in this way. The answer is, in my view at least, 'yes'.

Science research activity, including the publishing of research results, is clearly an economic activity, with supply and demand, so that would definitely argue for the 'yes' vote. But are the three scenarios mentioned above of equal importance? Scientific information is to a very large degree a 'product' for which supply and demand are overlapping, suppliers (authors) being 'demanders' (in their role as readers) - and vice versa. With regard to formally publishing scientific findings, the demands placed on the system by 'suppliers' are, in general, much stronger than the demands placed on it by readers. What I've often heard in research circles is that as a scientist, you can mostly get away with reading only a selection of relevant literature (the rest being of a confirmatory nature, so seeing the abstract is enough, or even just knowing that an article exists), or rather, you must, because there's an information overload in most disciplines and you wouldn't be able to read it all anyway. As an author, though, there's no escape: you have to publish.

Of the three scenarios mentioned, the last two are arguably the most important. Yet the overwhelming majority of the economic activity takes place in the framework of scenario 1. That's an 'issue' (euphemism for 'problem') and our challenge is to make the transition to scenarios 2 and 3 while keeping the crucial elements of the system of formal publishing intact and economically viable, especially peer-review.

Jan Velterop

Mandate debate

2007-03-04T13:37:00.000Z

Peter Suber is weighing in on the mandate debate. In one of the comments on my previous post on his blog (March 3, 2007) he says the following about his own position on mandates:

"One objection is that a mandate paternalistically coerces [authors] for their own good. If true, this would be a serious problem for me, though perhaps not for everyone who defends mandates. I cannot support paternalism over competent adults....Fortunately, the paternalism objection misses the target and is easily answered....First, I only support mandates that are conditions on voluntary contracts. They might be funding contracts: if you take our money, you'll have to provide OA to your research; if this bothers you, then don't take our money. They might be employment contracts: if you work here, you'll have to provide OA to your research; if this bothers you, then don't work here....Second, I only support mandates with reasonable exceptions....Third, an OA mandate [advances other interests beyond the author's]. The [author] interest is greater visibility and impact. The university [or funder] interest is that an OA mandate will better fulfill the university [or funder] mission to share the knowledge it produces, and better assist researchers elsewhere who could benefit from this knowledge...."

Peter is a philosopher, and thus can be expected to be more careful with choosing his words than a mere mortal like me. Yet I cannot square the idea of a mandate, given its usual definition of 'an official or authoritative command; an order', with the idea of a condition, a stipulation, in a voluntary contract. If you mean starter pistol, don't say machine gun. You might confuse some people. If you mean contract stipulation, don't say mandate. Such a heavy word is, well, too 'loaded' (no pun intended).

And how voluntary is a funding contract actually? Only in the sense that if you don't sign, you have the option of leaving science altogether. In comparison, the condition in a voluntary contract that asks authors to transfer their copyright to a publisher seems a very mild and decidedly benign one, especially if the publisher is 'green'.

Jan Velterop

Challenge for open access

2007-03-03T12:19:00.001Z

(This is a long post. If you don't want to read it all, go straight to the last two paragraphs.)

Stevan Harnad has posted his “Challenge to OA Publishers” in some form or other on a number of email lists and after I responded on two lists (I chopped my response up for clarity, and to make it possible to discuss each issue he raised separately), I became aware that he has posted a similar, maybe the same, piece on other lists as well. Perhaps a response on The Parachute is more efficient than posting to all these lists. I will still separate the issues out, and my responses here will differ in some detail from the ones I have posted on the AMSCI and SOAF lists, as I now have the benefit of having received responses to my responses, as many off-line as on the lists themselves (the latter can be found in the archives of the respective lists).

I identified at least seven issues in Stevan’s piece that I think are misconceptions and misunderstandings.

Misconception 1: The idea that publishers and the research establishment are each other’s natural adversaries.

Stevan pits the interests of science publishers against the interests of "research, researchers, universities, research institutions, research funders, the vast research and development (R&D) industry, and the tax-paying public that funds the research." This seems to assume that the researchers establishment lives in a parallel universe to the one in which science publishers live – a universe which is not 'tainted' by anything that might appear to have anything to do with economics or business.

That doesn’t appear to be particularly perspicacious or observant. The interests of the global scientific enterprise and publishing enterprises are necessarily in line with one another. Stevan himself makes the point that "...research publishing [...] is a service [...]. It will have to adapt to what is best for research, and not vice versa." Quite right. Precisely because publishing is a service, the interests of the global research enterprise are in line with the interests of publishers. No service industry can survive by rendering services that are against the interests of its clientèle. In fact, publishing is so intertwined with academia that it is part of the global research enterprise. Access to – and sustainability of – formal publication channels (a.k.a. journals) are two lattices of the same clear crystal.

Somewhat cryptically, Stevan dismisses this as ideology, and adds his ceterum censeo* that an OA publisher, by definition pro-OA, cannot at the same time withhold support for a mandate to self-archive non-OA-published material. This brings us to:

Misconception 2: OA publishers opposing OA.

Stevan Harnad calls it "disappointing, if not deplorable" if OA publishers take a stance "against Open Access itself." I couldn't agree more, if that were indeed the case. But it isn't. It's an absurd notion that they are.

'Gold' OA publishers are definitely for open access. Strongly so. And they are not against 'green' (open self-archiving of authors’ manuscript versions). After all, they endorse 'green'. They are just not necessarily so fanatically for it to support a self-archiving mandate (which is not the same as an OA mandate) for non OA-published materials. Stevan seems to adhere to the idea that says: "if you're not entirely, unquestioningly, and unequivocally for an open self-archiving mandate, you're against open access." To illustrate why this is rather absurd, imagine being strongly in favour of promoting health through physical exercise. Does it follow that if you do not support a mandate for everyone to run the half-marathon every week, your health-promoting credentials are questionable?

Needless to say, Stevan’s response to the above consists of his ceterum censeo.

Misconception 3: Publishers think protecting their risks outweighs the benefits of OA.

Stevan mentions two risks that publishers face. The risk of OA self-archiving mandates undermining subscription income and the risk of authors (or their institutions and funders) not willing to pay enough for OA publishing. Perhaps unlike some tenured scientists, publishers are used to living with risk. And there are more than the ones Stevan mentions. For instance the risk of not engaging in OA at all.

When Stevan talks about the 'benefits of OA' he means the benefits of having open access to the formally published, peer-reviewed and certified literature. OA to research results themselves is easy enough. Authors can just post their work on n'importe quel web server.

Outfits that are asked to arrange this formal publication process are known as 'publishers'. The benefits of OA are the benefits of access to the formal literature. Without 'publishers' (who are not necessarily the ones currently in existence, of course), there is no formal literature. The risk to publishers (or rather, the journals that they publish) is the risk to the benefits of OA.

Stevan’s response to this point? You guessed it: ceterum censeo.

Misconception 4: Articles are a 'product', presented as a 'gift' to publishers.

Though the difference between 'product' and 'service' is somewhat artificial (some speak of a 'service product'), what publishers have provided has always been a 'service'. The service consisted - and still consists - of arranging all that's necessary to make a scientifically non-recognised piece of work (pretty much 'worthless' for the scientific establishment), into a scientifically recognised addition to the knowledge pool (a valuable piece of work, identifiable as such by the fact that it is formally published in a peer-reviewed journal).

For the purpose of communicating information it may be good enough, but for the purpose of constituting the scientific record what the author delivers is only raw material, at best a semi-product, an intermediate good.

I was criticised by Andrew Adams (of the University of Reading in the UK) for the use of the word ‘worthless’ here. He has a point and I haven’t been clear enough why I used that word. Andrew thought it was an indication of my "contempt for the scientist as author and communicator." Let me categorically say that I do not harbour the least contempt for scientists as writers and communicators. Far from it. I used the word 'worthless' in inverted commas. Informal research papers are far from worthless in my opinion. But scientific culture insists on formally published research papers for things like priority, tenure, funding, recognition of researchers and recognition of the scientific record (at least in many disciplines, and there may well be exceptions, where formal journals are indeed not necessary). If they are not formally published, they simply don't count. So informal publications are not at all worthless per se; but they are seen as pretty 'worthless' in the context of career advancement in science. Most scientists are not fortunate enough not to need to have a list of formal publications to their CV in order to earn the approbation of their fellow-scientists.

The prevailing scientific culture, world-wide, is extremely conscious of, and sensitive to, 'brand identities' of journals. Isn't that at the heart of the matter?

The author doesn't 'give' anything to a publisher, but instead, asks for a service. Stevan thinks that such a service should be delivered at “vastly reduced costs” (whatever that means). He is most welcome to set up as a publisher and do just that (in fact I think he has done so a long time ago already). There are virtually no barriers to entry for would-be publishers. Even less so for the minimalist 'administrators' of the publishing process if that is what he thinks publishing entails (the word ‘administrators’ was actually Andrew’s). Why is it, then, that such an approach hasn't taken over the position of the existing publishers like a storm?

But Stevan doesn't seem to like the risk that's associated with setting up such a service to replace existing journals, so he tries to off-load any risk to the existing publishers by getting politicians to mandate subversion.

OA publishers already offer the service he seeks. Authors have by now a wide range of journals with OA to choose to submit to. What is he waiting for? Well, authors' uptake. We all do.

Stevan responds to this point with:

It is interesting how Jan's financial analysis fits, indifferently, the writings author sell to their publishers for a fee, or against royalties, on the one hand, and, on the other hand, the writings in question here, where the author gives them to their publishers, the peer review is likewise done for free, and all publishers do is administer it, paying no fees, no royalties.

I note that the authors of fee/royalty-based writings are not interested in making their writings OA. Researchers, the authors of the give-away writings in question, are.

He misses the point. Sure enough, the content of their articles is ‘given’ to the world by researchers in the same way that this piece I’m penning here on this blog is my ‘gift’ to the world (magnanimous of me, isn’t it?). But the ‘gift’ of an author is only accepted by the scientific establishment if it comes with a ‘certificate’. If it comes with proof that it has undergone peer-review and that it has been formally accepted for publication in a journal.

Oh, and of course he adds his ceterum censeo.

Misconception 5: Expecting non-OA journals to suffer from self-archiving mandates is hypothetical, but expecting subscriptions to continue to be paid for by institutions when the content is openly and freely available is evidence-based.

In fact, both are hypotheses, the former just more logical than the latter.

The 'evidence' that subscriptions will continue is based on the situation that subscriptions to physics journals, on the whole, seem to be co-existing with their free availability in Arxiv. As evidence goes, it doesn't deserve that moniker. It's the equivalent of saying that driving under the influence is safe, just because you've done it for years without having an accident. Or giving a number of unsupervised toddlers a packet of matches and when none of their houses have burned down by the end of the week, infer that matches are safe in the hands of toddlers.

The hypothesis that subscriptions will suffer is based on the mainstream economic observation that if goods or services are easily available for free elsewhere, it will be very difficult to sell them.

Stevan response is this:

Fact (not Hypothesis): Research today is losing access, usage and impact daily, weekly, monthly, because not all researchers can afford access to all the research they can use.

I agree. I never questioned that. He also poses this:

Fact (not Hypothesis): Journals today are not losing subscription revenue because of OA self-archiving, not even in the fields where OA has been at or near 100% for years.

I agree, too. But Stevan makes it sound a rather more generally found fact than it is. He really speaks about physics and physics alone. OK, some maths as well. Long before the web, perhaps even before Tim Berners-Lee was born, physics already developed a culture of communicating via preprints, not journals. For decades, journals have been seen as the formal record only and if they communicated anything at all, it was primarily the fact that a certain ‘label of acceptance’ (the journal reference) could be added to a given article. Arxiv, now seen as a self-archiving repository, is really the electronic manifestation of the preprint circuit that was part of the physics culture.

This ‘fact’, however (which I accept as a fact), has no predictive value. Just like the fact that not having had an accident while driving under the influence cannot be taken as evidence that you never will. The fact that physics developed a preprint culture didn't mean that most other scientific disciplines developed it, too. So why would one now believe that something that might work in physics would necessarily work elsewhere as well?

Misconception 6: If an author 'pays' for the services of a publisher by handing over rights, that payment is in addition to subscription charges.

Stevan Harnad must not have understood what I said, and it's entirely possible that I wasn't clear enough. Mea culpa. (He subsequently assured me he did understand.)

No, Stevan, you can't just add these. When an author 'pays' by transferring rights, these rights only represent 'potential' money. This 'potential' money has to be converted into 'actual' money for the publisher to be able to pay his bills. That's what subscriptions do, they convert rights into money.

Why exclusive rights? 'Exclusive' here means that the same article may not be published in more than one journal. Virtually everybody in the scientific establishment agrees with that principle. Well, not absolutely everybody. Some articles appear in more than one journal. When this happens, it is frowned upon, even regarded as scientific fraud.

The notion of an author paying seems to be anathema for Stevan. He justifies this by saying that authors ‘give’ their articles away; they are not given royalties, and not even expect to receive them.

As for royalties to the author, of course they are given, and they make sense if the publisher really wants to publish the work because in his judgement he can sell it well. For instance text-books or good review-articles. For research articles this doesn't apply, because the judgement of sales potential isn’t there. In fact, it's not up to the publisher at all to decide which article to publish and which not. Just as well. Editors and editorial boards - scientists - decide, on the basis of scientific merit, not financial potential. This is as true for subscription-based journals as it is for OA journals and hybrid ones.

Stevan responds to that with this question:

“And because referees referee (for free) and editors decide, it follows that the author should not self-archive his article?”

Did I say that it did? He then continues:

“Or that the author's funder or employer should not mandate that the fundee/employee self-archive his article?”

Did I say that it did? Funders and employers can mandate what they like. And if they are aware of the potential consequences of what they’re doing, it’s entirely up to them. If they realise the value of formal, peer-reviewed journals, as an increasing number of funders do, following the lead of the Wellcome Trust, we are finding that they are prepared to create other ways to keep the journals going than via the traditional subscription system, as long as these journals offer open access. That's the way to go.

What Stevan asks – demands – is that the publishers of those journals lobby for a mandate that articles that do not contribute to the support of these journals are nonetheless self-archived in open repositories. I refer to what I said above about healthy exercise and the compulsory half-marathon.

Stevan also says

“The logic of "excluding" the right to self-archive, or to mandate self-archiving, continues to escape me. (Could it be because I keep thinking of access and impact, and you keep thinking of funding and revenues? But then why do you portray yourself as being for OA?)”

This is a version of his ceterum censeo, of course, but who is actually excluding the right to self-archiving? The publishers, who are virtually all ‘green’? There is a difference, though, between the right to self-archive and the compulsion to do so. Stevan equates ‘OA’ to ‘a mandate to self-archive’. ‘Healthy exercise’ to ‘a compulsion to run the half marathon every week’. He’s taken his eyes off the ball of the ‘end’ and fixed them firmly onto the ‘means’.

Misconception 7: The notion that OA publishing takes away from scarce research funds.

I'm tempted to start believing in one of the religions of the physics domain, parallel universes. Stevan seems to live in the universe where OA publishing - 'gold' - costs money and subscriptions don't.

In the universe where I live, formal publishing in peer-reviewed journals costs money. Luckily, Stevan agrees. In that universe, research budget allocations and research grants typically include earmarked overhead charges. These overhead charges are taken by the research institution to pay for all manner of infrastructural costs, including the library budget. From which subscriptions are paid.

Formal publication is part and parcel of research, and thus the cost of publication is part and parcel of the cost of research. Any kind of formal publishing 'eats away' a portion of scarce research funds. But unpublished research is pretty much regarded as research not done, so money on publication is generally well-spent.

Compare:

-OA publishing, with an aggregate cost to the scientific establishment of X per article published (total per article: X);

-OA via self-archiving of non-OA articles, with an aggregate cost to the scientific establishment of all the subscriptions taken (necessary in a self-archiving model), amounting to X per article published, plus the aggregate cost of thousands of institutional repositories and the staffing to keep them going, amounting to Y per article (total per article: X+Y).

Which is the greatest drain on scarce research funds?

Stevan doesn’t really respond to this, but he says:

“… until and unless subscription money is no longer paying for non-OA publishing (as it is now), and can be redirected to paying for OA publishing (Gold OA), there is no payment issue in connection with OA self-archiving mandates (Green OA): The publications that are being self-archived today have been paid for. This remains true until and unless OA self-archiving ever actually does cause cancellations and makes subscriptions unsustainable. Till then, it's Green OA and nothing more to pay.”

Sounds a bit like if your parachute fails, don’t worry about it until you hit the ground. Till then, you’re alive and well. Exquisitely logical. Yet some of us would rather like to try and pull a couple of cords here and there to see if we can manage to make a soft landing after all.

Now, a challenge to Stevan Harnad cum suis. Would he be campaigning for a mandate imposed by funders, that institutions, when paying for published research literature out of any budgets that benefit from overheads taken from research grants, pay only for article charges for OA and not for subscriptions anymore?

Mandates are of course last-resort measures and my liberal inclinations would prefer persuasion over mandates any time. But should mandates really be the only possibility, the advantages of this mandate would be clear, and these are just some of them: structural open access, no 'double' payment, only e few tens of thousands of institutions to deal with instead of millions of researchers, no need for self-archiving mandates, no multiple-version publishing.

Jan Velterop

* ‘Furthermore I am of the opinion’, from Cato the Elder, who famously ended every speech with “Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam” – “Furthermore I am of the opinion that Carthage must be destroyed.”

Failing business models

2007-02-22T10:29:00.000Z

Dana Roth writes that "The primary problem with the current system is the failing business model followed by many commercial publishers."

I presume she means the subscription model. Which, incidentally, is not just used by commercial publishers but also by not-for-profit ones.

I agree with her. But it's not the use of the subscription model by commercial publishers that is the 'primary problem'. It is the fact that the subscription system cannot cope with the unrelenting growth of scientific articles that is being produced worldwide.

Before the internet, the subscription model had increasing problems, but it was probably the least worst solution, by no means ideal. Now, with the internet working and pretty mature, we can have better systems. There definitely are publishers, for-profit as well as not-for-profit (just look at the recent press release of the DC Principles Coalition), who seem to be wedded to the subscription model, but not only publishers. Libraries, too, do not seem to be too keen on replacing the dysfunctional system with a better one. And even a school of thought in the OA advocate camp, the self-archiving champions, argue that the subscription system will continue to sustain journals.

Of course there are difficulties to overcome if one wants to make the transition from one system to the next, and let's concentrate on overcoming those difficulties.

The subscription system has the following problems (and quite possibly more):

The price to readers/libraries bears no relation to quality. This needs no further explanation, I guess.

The price to readers/libraries bears no relation to the amount per article that's taken out of the academic market. A 'cheap' journal can, on a per-article basis, take more money out of Academia than an 'expensive' journal. This is more common than is perhaps realised. A substantial number of not-for-profits have seemingly low subscription prices, but take more money per article out of the academic market than even the most expensive commercial publishers (where it hovers in the $5000 range). I know of several cases where it is twice or even three times as much, and if someone would care to analyse this information (it often is available, for not-for-profits), one might find even higher multiples.

The price to readers/libraries bears no relation to the cost of publishing, but rather, to the numbers of subscribers. This is the origin of the price spiral. Journals were cancelled, and for some reason commercial journals suffered more than not-for-profit journals, on the whole (with exceptions), as a result of which subscription prices went up. This caused further cancellations and thus the vicious cycle was created. One of the reasons why some not-for-profits have been able to maintain lower prices is the existence of cancellation-resistant compulsory member subscriptions.

The cost to libraries of subscriptions that are needed bears little relation to the size of the actual research or teaching efforts at the institute in question, but instead, reflects the width of the range of disciplines researched or taught. A specialised institute (take CERN as an example) needs no more than a handful of journals. On the other hand, a university where the name 'university' still relates to 'universal' knowledge, and where a wide range of subjects are taught and researched, needs vastly larger numbers of journals to satisfy the needs of its constituents.

Subscription price stability can only exist in an environment of stability of the number of subscriptions, and of articles published. But that environment doesn't exist. Library budgets have been under pressure for the longest time, which is especially apparent if they are expressed as a percentage of the research budgets. And the number of articles keep on growing.

Most of these problems are solved in a system in which the 'publish or perish' culture (which is definitely not of the publishers' making) is reflected more transparently. A system in which research articles are seen for what they are: a kind of 'advertisement' in which the author 'advertises' his scientific prowess, in order to get acknowledgment, citations, leading to tenure, future funding, for a few the Nobel Prize, et cetera. That doesn't mean that articles aren't full of information useful to readers. But so are conventional advertisements.

The advertising analogy is not perfect, but I'm using it to illustrate the point that there is logic in the system that levies charges for the processing and formal publication of research articles and subsequently makes them universally available with open access. Open access publishing.

Jan Velterop

It's about copyright, right?

2007-02-21T08:44:00.000Z

Wrong. Copyright is widely misunderstood. Particularly the role of copyright in science publishing. First of all, there is this idea that some journals and publishers don't require copyright transfer, but 'just' the exclusive dissemination and exploitation rights. To all practical intents and purposes, that is exactly the same, and 'copyright' is just shorthand for 'exclusive dissemination and exploitation rights'! So if it helps to drop the word 'copyright' then that should, and easily can, be done.

Secondly, transfer of exclusive rights to a publisher is a form of 'payment'. Payment for the services of a publisher. The publisher subsequently uses these exclusive rights to sell subscriptions and licences in order to recoup his costs, in a rather roundabout way. This form of payment – as opposed to cash – has advantages and disadvantages. The advantage is seemingly for the author, who (mistakenly) has the feeling that he doesn't have to pay for the services of formal publication of his article, but who seldom realises why he is asked to transfer exclusive rights. The disadvantage is that payment in the form of exclusive rights limits access, because it needs a subscription/licence model to convert this form of 'payment' into money. And subscriptions/licences are by definition restrictive in terms of dissemination. Article fee supported open access publishing, where the transfer of exclusive rights is replaced by the transfer of money, consequently doesn't have the need for subscriptions and can therefore abolish all restrictions on dissemination.

Stevan Harnad c.s. will argue that none of this matters, because there is 'green', meaning that whatever 'exclusive' rights have been transferred, authors can still disseminate their articles via self-archiving in open repositories. In that model, having transferred 'exclusive' rights is meaningless, and that implies that the 'payment' that exclusive rights transfer actually is, has become worthless. In mandates with embargos, the 'payment' may not be completely worthless (depending on the length of the embargo) but is at least severely devalued.

I am a great fan of open access, but not a great fan of 'green'. 'Green' is a kind of appeasement by publishers (some of who, it must be said, themselves didn't – sometimes still don't – realise the 'payment' nature of exclusive rights transfer). Appeasement is often regretted with hindsight. Instead of allowing the nature of exclusive rights transfer to be compromised, publishers should much earlier have offered authors the choice of payment – either transfer of exclusive rights, or cash. The appeasement, the 'green', now acts as a hurdle to structural open access, perhaps even an impediment.

Harnadian orthodoxy will dismiss this. It holds that subscription journals will survive, that they will be paid for by librarians even if the content is freely disseminated in parallel via open repositories, and that it doesn't matter anyway (the guru is tentatively beginning to admit that large scale uptake of self-archiving, for instance as the result of mandates, may indeed destroy journals) because a new order will only come about after the complete destruction of the old order. After all, morphing the old order into the new, without complete destruction, entails a cost in terms of money, which "isn't there", and anyway, the cost that comes with complete destruction of the old order is preferred to spending money on any transition, in that school of thought.

I doubt that a complete wipe-out will come. But there are quite a large number of vulnerable journals and a partial wipe-out as a result of mandated self-archiving is entirely plausible. Although there seems to be a myth that journals are very, even extremely, profitable, the fact is that a great many journals are not profitable or 'surplus-able' (in not-for-profit parlance). In my estimate it is the majority. Within the portfolio of larger publishers these journals are often absorbed and cross-subsidised by the journals that are profitable. Smaller (e.g. society-) publishers cannot do that. Marginal journals do not have to suffer a lot of subscription loss before they go under. Some of these, especially society ones, will be 'salvaged' by being given the opportunity to shelter under the umbrella of the portfolio of one of the larger independent publishers. Others will just perish if they lose subscriptions. They could of course convert to open access journals with article processing fees, but setting those up is no sinecure, and requires a substantial financial commitment, as the experience of PLoS and BMC has shown. Journals that are run for the love of it, by the commendable voluntary efforts of academics, are mostly very small, and are the first to be affected, unless, of course, they do not need any income because they are crypto-subsidised by the institutions with which their editors are affiliated. Such journals have always been there and there are probably more now than ever (and some are very good indeed, or so I'm told), but to imagine scaling them up to deal with the million plus articles per year published as a result of global research efforts seems far-fetched, indeed.

Open access is the inevitable future, and it is worth working on a truly robust and sustainable way to achieve it.

Jan Velterop

Value perception

2007-01-30T19:38:00.000Z

This is not so much about open access per se, but about the perceived value of journals, or, more precisely, the perceived value of articles published in journals.

From comments I come across on email lists and blogs, I detect two – conflicting – trends. One is the growing tendency to put a value on a journal according to the number of article downloads; the other a desire to base journal pricing on the actual production cost, i.e. the actual cost to the publisher of publishing an article.

Why are these trends conflicting? If it’s not immediately clear, let’s look at the logical consequences of these trends. If the value of a journal depends on the download figures (often, but in my view erroneously, called usage figures), it seems to come with the expectation that if downloads are low or decreasing, the value, i.e. the price, should be low or go down. This would be fine, were it to mean that a high or increasing number of downloads makes a high or increasing price the logical and acceptable consequence. I’m afraid I don’t see comments in this vein in the email lists and blogs I follow.

But this is not really the conflict I had in mind. That lies in the fact that production costs and downloads have no relation whatsoever. If they seem to have one, it’s not unlike the relation between the human birth rate and the stork population (currently declining in both cases, in any case in Western Europe). The cost of coaching an article through the peer-review process and of publishing it is independent of the number of downloads or other usage metrics it clocks up once published. It can be argued that one of the woes of the current subscription model is that it already has some characteristics of a cost-based model. Those characteristics are largely responsible for the price spiral of the last decade. There hasn’t been a concomitant income spiral for publishers. Due to unremitting annual cancellation rounds, if publishers wanted or needed to maintain the same income to keep a journal going, they had to secure that income from fewer subscriptions. Year on year. Voilà, the serials crisis. Not to be repeated or exacerbated, I would have thought.

The problem with value based on downloads or usage is different. The beauty of journals is that the decision to publish any given article is purely a scientific one, taken by the editors. Commerce doesn’t come into it. Should value be defined by downloads, then it is inevitable that decisions to publish will be influenced by the perceived ‘download potential’ of articles. Which is not the same as scientific significance. A glimpse of what could happen can already be seen from the effect of impact factors. Only the rather long timeline and slow effect of impact factors keeps unwanted developments in check, but there have been several cases of editors insisting that in their submitted articles, authors must cite other articles from the same journal as a condition of getting accepted for publication. The current journals system is rightly criticised for its built-in conservatism and the fact that unconventional science is difficult to publish. Imagine the consequences of difficult or esoteric concepts and theories experiencing such difficulties, too, just because they may only be understood by a limited number of scientists and are thus expected to have less than average downloads. Not a prospect to relish.

Open access publishing offers solutions. The process of peer-reviewing and formal publishing is valued, rather than usage. Costs are proportional to research activity. Esoteric and difficult to understand science has no problem being published. And, most important of all, anybody, anywhere, who wants or needs the material, has unimpeded access to it.

Jan Velterop

Enemy?

2006-12-17T12:37:00.000Z

In Why I Am The Enemy (Caveat Lector), Dorothea Salo says "I am the enemy because I will become a publisher." (Unfortunately, Caveat Lector doesn't allow comments, so that's why my response is here.)

Enemy? Perhaps I'm disappointing you not to regard you as the enemy. Quite the contrary, welcome to the world of publishing, Dorothea. Please do become a publisher. Many have come before you, and many are successful. And please don't think of becoming a publisher as being 'the enemy'. There's more than enough enmity in the world and we don't need more of it. Why don't you just become a competitor? That's possible, you know; publishing is a completely free world. You won't need a diploma or licence or permit to publish. And you'll no-doubt make a success of it. Welcome again – the more the merrier.

You're right, authors "have absolutely zero duty to journal publishers", as you put it. Why should they, anyway? They just use publishers to their own ends (you'll find out when you become a publisher). And rightly so; that's what publishers are for. Publishers just want to be paid for what they do. Though I sometimes get the feeling that that is considered exceedingly outlandish and strange. May I ask if you want to be paid for your job, Dorothea? Still, when you've become a publisher?

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year! Peace be on Earth!

Jan Velterop
PS. The exchange between Stevan Harnad and myself that you are referring to is not a dust-up. It is just an exchange of opinions. A 'rich exchange' perhaps, and we certainly do have different views on how to get to open access (not on open access itself), but I object (as I'm pretty sure he does) to seeing such exchanges described in terms of enmity and dust-ups.

Scale and scalability

2006-12-12T19:53:00.000Z

Scholarly publishing is a pretty large-scale pursuit. The results of every serious research project outside the intramural confines of industrial R&D must be interpreted and published, or the research is deemed not to have taken place. Even a lot of industrial research is published – though some, mainly in the more obscure journals, purely for the purpose of ‘prophylactic disclosure’, in case an invention is not deemed worthy of patenting, yet if patented by anyone else, could become a ransom threat (an invention that has been disclosed can never be patented anymore, a trick also used by ‘open sourcerers’ to ensure that their code cannot be appropriated). But I digress. If the estimate of 25,000 journals is in the right ballpark, and each publishes 40 articles per year on average, about a million new articles is being added to the literature every year. It’s probably even more than that. And if the average rejection rate is 50%, these 25,000 journals actually process at least 2 million articles per year. A number of these articles will ‘cascade’ through the journal pecking order and finally be published somewhere, having been processed and peer-reviewed several times (let’s hope the resulting fine-layered publication hierarchy is worth such a waste in the system).

A veritable industry, this scholarly publishing. Good that there are professional, independent organisations that take on the drudge of all that work. Perish the thought that researchers would have to organise it all by themselves.

So everybody is thankful for what the publishers do? No. There is a problem: they want to be paid for what they do, and they don’t even do what we want them to do, which is to give everybody free, open access to whatever research they publish.

Two ‘solutions’ have been proposed. One that deals with the cost of publishing only; and one that deals with open access only, ignoring any issues of cost.

The solution that deals with cost only is the one that holds that the costs are too high and it’s all the fault of ‘commercial’ publishers. Instead, all scientific publishing should be done by not-for-profit scholarly societies. On the face of it, journals published by these NfPs (NfP journals don’t exist – just NfP publishers, who still wish to see their journals turn a surplus – the non-tax-payer's equivalent of, or euphemism for, profit) do seem to have lower subscription charges. Which is sort of easy, if one makes a subscription a compulsory part of membership. And levies page charges. And pays no tax. Many society publishers can offer relatively low-priced subscriptions, and still make revenues that on a per-article basis, are similar to what is being realised by commercial – I prefer to call them independent – publishers. Or more, which is, given their NfP status, kept in reserve or spent on good causes, of course.

It certainly works. The point, however, is that such publishing is not scalable. If it would just be the NfP status of society publishers, an increase of scale would have happened long ago. Nobody has ever tried to stop NfPs from cheap journal publishing. But it isn’t the NfP status that is the cause of lower prices; it is the fact that the membership yields much of the revenues needed to support the journals. And imagine 25,000 journals each sustained by enough society members to result in low subscription prices. It just doesn’t stack up. Otherwise we should have seen strong growth in NfPs. Interestingly, the contrary took place. Independent publishers started to flourish because societies couldn’t deal with the growing volume of articles and the increased international and interdisciplinary nature of science. Many still can’t – particularly the ones with relatively low membership or relatively voluminous journals – and testimony of that is that a growing number of societies are ‘outsourcing’ their journal publishing to independent publishers.

Cheap subscriptions do work for some journals, but cannot work for all, and it has precious little to do with the NfP status of the publisher.

The ‘solution’ that deals with open access only, ignoring any issues of cost, is of course what is known as ‘self-archiving’. Self-archiving assumes that librarians paying for subscriptions that are not necessary anymore, keep journals economically viable. Self-archiving, after all, is only meant to “fulfil the access-needs of would-be users who cannot afford access to the proprietary journal.” So here you are, librarians: even though it’s all freely available, if you can afford to take a subscription, please do. Charity is a good thing, of course, but not exactly the most robust foundation for an activity that is so much part of research and without which much of the academic world would be lost: recording research results in peer-reviewed journals.

I couldn’t have said it better than Stevan Harnad himself, on 10 December 2006, on the AMSCI Open Access Forum (not yet archived there as I'm writing this): “I, for one, have never doubted that [publishers making journal articles open after a short embargo] could cause cancellations. But anarchic author self-archiving, of each author's postprints, in each author's own IR, in uncertain proportions and at uncertain rates, are [sic] another story”. Precisely.

Which means that self-archiving is also not scalable. As long as there is only a small number of authors engaged in self-archiving, and it is done anarchically and unpredictably, it will work. Publishers will have little practical problem with it and librarians will not cancel subscriptions on that basis alone. Take the anarchy and unpredictability out of it, however – for instance via self-archiving mandates – and it would all be, to borrow Stevan’s phrase, another story.

Putting it another way: if self-archiving were to succeed, it would fail. Succeeding, after all, means sufficiently increasing in scale to provide open access to a meaningful proportion of the literature. Which would, of course, lead to cancellations. No publisher, be it an independent or NfP, could afford to allow authors to self-archive in such circumstances, and ‘green’ would fade out of existence.

It is possible, of course, that the chaos of self-archiving leads to a phase transition to a stable and truly scalable method, open access publishing, a.k.a. ‘gold’, but it seems a rather circuitous and acrimonious route to take. Why not stimulate ‘gold’ straight away, especially since a rapidly increasing number of publishers offer it? Why not lobby for an open-access-mandate, instead of for a self-archiving-mandate? It can’t be the money, though it would change the relative proportion of costs, between institutions, and that’s probably where the rub is. It's understood that it needs to be done, but “you first, sir!” A sur-place as it’s known in track cycling, where whoever moves first lessens his chances of winning.

The advantages of ‘gold’ are huge. Immediate open access to the research literature; costs move – up or down – with the research activity itself; a functional market, with fair price levels as a consequence; discouragement of spurious, speculative, or ‘ultra-light’ submissions; elimination of visibility as an element in perceived quality; and I’m probably forgetting to mention a few.

Jan Velterop

Access matters?

2006-11-22T11:32:00.000Z

A question mark? Strange perhaps, to put a question mark in the title. When I posed the question at the recent RIN/DTI/RCUK scholarly journal workshop in London, a possibly stranger thing was that the resounding 'yes' that I expected didn't come. Instead, all that Richard Charkin (of Macmillan, Nature), who chaired the meeting, could come up with was "You've got us [the panel] stumped."

That being so, it is still a valid question. If we don't understand to whom access matters and why, we are not likely to achieve much. I can see two levels on which the question applies: one practical and one principle.

On a practical level, self-evidently, access matters to users. No access, no users, after all. But does it matter to authors, librarians, publishers, funders? If so, why? If not, why not? The question is also important. It is not users who are in a position to drive OA. Authors, librarians, funders, and perhaps publishers are.

Users find access important. Do authors, too? Although they are also users and thus part of the user community, I'm not sure. They should find it important, given that exposure of their articles is a prerequisite for being cited, which is the 'currency' that 'buys' them their future career and funding prospects. Various studies demonstrate that open access (i.e. increased - even vastly increased - access) enhances this exposure and results in increased citations. But do they care? Do they even think about access to their articles? It wouldn't be the first time that people react differently depending on the hat they're wearing at the minute. Some authors clearly do care, but it does appear to be a small minority growing only ever so slowly. Could it be that access and citations to their articles are being seen as a given, an environmental factor that's just there, like the weather, and just as impossible to influence? Or are the enhanced exposure and increased citation levels of OA regarded as no more than 'promise-ware', delayed gratification at best, in the 'am I bovvered?' category?

And librarians? I'm not sure they all find it important, either. The overriding concern that I hear seems to be about their budgets, not about access. In fact, I've even heard the argument that "less usage should mean lower bills." (Without the corollary, of course, that in such a model, increased usage would justify increased bills.) If one wants to go there, usage should logically be discouraged. Hardly the direction open access advocates will have in mind.

What about funders? They should have the strongest incentives and face the lowest hurdles. They spend money on research for the benefit of progress of scientific insight and, subsequently, of society as a whole. The widest possible access to the results of research they have funded, naturally matters to them. They don't even have to worry about cost. They pay for the traditional model of publishing, via the institutional overheads that are taken off every research grant, and earmarking a portion of those overheads for the purpose of providing open access to the peer-reviewed and formally published articles resulting from research they fund seems a no-brainer. Even 'prisoner-dilemmatoid' issues to do with a redistribution of costs that individual institutions worry about, shouldn't present a big problem for them, detached as they usually are from any given institution. They can afford the 'helicopter-view' – or if they prefer hot air over noise, the hot-air-balloon-view.

Where do publishers stand in this? There is a strand in OA-land that holds that the provision of open access has nothing to do with publishers: the self-archiving strand. They are right in some ways. Researchers can of course publish and self-archive to their hearts' content when it concerns so-called pre-prints (which doesn't mean pre-prints at all, but more something like pre-formal-publications). As soon as they involve publishers, by submitting their article for peer-review and formal publication – in order to make the article worth something for their careers and future funding prospects, for instance – the publishers are, well, involved. In a 'publish-or-perish' environment, this involvement is the difference between published and not published. Even though a 'pre-print' is published as soon as it is posted in a repository, in usual academic parlance – in the eyes of tenure committees, for instance – 'published' means 'formally published in a peer-reviewed journal'. The idea that publishers aren't involved at that stage, and therefore no party to the discussion, is nonsense.

Open access through self-archiving presents a dilemma for publishers. They fear for erosion of subscriptions. One of the self-archivers' responses usually is that there clearly isn't any issue because the vast majority of publishers allow self-archiving of the 'post-print' (another one of those strange words). They seem to be right, because indeed, most publishers do. They feel they ought to, as a gesture towards authors. But the way they usually phrase it – something like "authors are allowed to post the published article on their personal home page" – betrays that it is not exactly their intention to provide open access to the formally published literature in this way. The fact that a 'personal home page' or a public server makes no difference in a web environment is beside the point. They phrase it the way they do in order to try and keep a modicum of control. Because control is part and parcel of a subscription model.

Most open access advocates (moi incluis – mea culpa) have initially counted on authors to want open access. Elaborate arguments, some stronger than others, but clearly none of them 'killer-arguments', have been developed to present the benefits of open access to authors. From the hitherto slow and low uptake, it seems that most publishers, betting on the fact that authors probably can't be bothered, may have been right, at least so far. That's why the focus of open accessors is now on mandates.

Mandates express the funders' interest and may indeed accelerate the process. Ironically, to publishers, access only matters in a subscription model. In a 'payment for publishing services' model, access is irrelevant for income and can therefore be completely open. Publishers understand this and they are already offering more and more hybrid models, although until now few offer the open access choice for all their journal titles like Springer does, but this can be expected to continue to grow. At one point some will be in a position to make their journals OA-only, which entails being able to reject any articles that do not come with payment for the service of open access formal publication, much like OA-born journals like the PLoS and BMC ones do. Publishers have to concentrate on getting paid for the actual services they render. In the subscription model they get paid with copyright or exclusive distribution rights that authors transfer to them. In the article processing fee model they get paid with plain cash. Provision of access is becoming a very minor aspect in such a service model, as anybody can take the articles and run with them. Open access publishers differ from traditional publishers not because they 'provide' open access – what both provide is formal publication. They differ in that they do not rely on controlling access to secure their income.

On a principle level, access matters because knowledge generated with public funds is meant to be public. It certainly is by public funders. Why else would they spend the money on research if not for the common good? And isn’t the common good best served by the maximum possible access to the results and interpretations of that research? The access provided in the traditional subscription system is just not satisfactory, because it doesn’t ensure that anyone has it. The natural access limitations that come with subscriptions are a vestige of the print-on-paper past. Now that the means exist to achieve maximum access – the internet – it becomes an imperative. If a common disease hitherto could be kept in check by lifelong taking of medicines, that may have been a burden, but there was no alternative. If the same disease could now be completely, securely and quickly cured, and the average cost per patient of the cure would be the same as the average cost per patient of providing lifelong disease management, would we spend years discussing the price of the cure rather than go for it and deal with issues of cost later? Hard to imagine. And yet it seems that we are in precisely such a discussion with regard to open access.

We need the consensus that open access, in principle, is a good thing, and then focus our energies on finding ways to make it systemic and sustainable. Not on fudges.

Jan Velterop

Ego and Economics

2006-11-21T12:39:00.000Z

Richard Poynder has recently (November 20, 2006) published a well-written essay entitled 'Open Access: Beyond selfish interests' (you can download the pdf via his blog). Because it is so well-written – he is a journalist after all – one may not easily spot that some of his observations are presented as foregone conclusions, yet are not supported or warranted. I must point out at least two of these red herrings, as they seem rather fundamental to the line of thought that is the leitmotiv of the essay.

In the very last paragraph of the essay, Poynder talks about “incumbent publishers intent only on preserving their hegemony over scholarly communication.”

Preserving their hegemony?

Publishers hold no more hegemony over scholarly communication than bakers hold over making bread. Anybody can choose to bake their own bread. Any researcher can choose to communicate with their peers themselves, as indeed they often do. There is no hegemony for publishers to preserve. Researchers do not ‘have to give away’ their articles to publishers – they can “just plonk their articles onto the internet”, as intellectual property law professor Dirk Visser of Leyden University recently put it (in Dutch, but I trust he agrees with my translation). And if they do have to publish, it is not publishers who compel them. Publishers provide services that enable researchers to attach credibility to their articles, so that they can be used to further their career and future funding prospects. The model to pay for such services in a roundabout way, via subscriptions, is a relic of the pre-internet past and an impediment to open access. Unfortunately, publishers are just as much locked into that model as the other actors on the academic stage, though an increasing number of publishers are keen to move on and try to support the provision of their services in a way that makes structural open access – immediate and full open access at the point of publication – economically viable.

Which brings me to the other observation that is unjustifiably presented as a foregone conclusion in Poynder’s essay. Some five pages before the end, he writes

“If funders were to mandate OA publishing those prices [the article processing charges – APCs – that OA publishers currently levy] would be locked in. And if APCs were treated as "part and parcel" of research, as Velterop proposes, there would be no mechanism for regulating prices — since researchers would be running up a bill at someone else's expense.”

He supports his observation by a quote from Harnad: “[no organisation] would not be happy to become a subsidised oligopolist, guaranteed its asking price by the government. McDonald's could make the same offer to lower and phase out the payment for its hamburgers if the government simply agrees to pay for them up-front, so every citizen can have a Happy Meal." And one from Roth: “[if politicians mandated OA publishing it would lead to] funding agencies being required to pay publication charges based on publisher demands, rather than economic reality."

Really?

This presumes that researchers, since they would be ‘running up a bill at someone else’s expense’ would just pay anything. They are running up a bill at someone else’s expense (their funders’) when they buy reagents, mouse strains, glassware, other assorted laboratory necessities. Do they really pay the providers of these goods based on the providers’ demands, rather than economic reality? Not when they have the choice of providers, one would imagine. This is where Poynder, Harnad, Roth, and I’m afraid many others, go wrong. They forget – or ignore – that unlike for subscribers, for authors there is a real choice of journal in which they publish, or at least to which they submit their articles. Where the party who pays (even if with 'someone else's money') is the party with the choice, the laws of economic do function, copyright becomes irrelevant as an economic factor, and the fact that information is a peculiar economic commodity becomes inconsequential. In that system, the tradable commodity is ‘service’, not information, and is subject to conventional market forces.

Jan Velterop

Price & Value

2006-11-17T11:34:00.000Z

A lot of the criticism of science publishers is often reserved for ‘commercial’ publishers (I prefer to call them 'independent'), and a lot of that criticism takes the form of ‘too expensive’. Everything is ‘too expensive’ if the value to the potential buyer of something he desires doesn’t justify the price. In a normal functional economic system, the potential buyer just doesn’t buy in that case, or buys something that can be regarded as a substitute for what he initially desired, elsewhere, at a lower price.

Academic journals with their subscription models are not functioning along those lines, as they are monopoloid, i.e. non-substitutable, non-rivalrous. The paying party doesn’t have the choice. A subscribing library can’t just cancel an expensive journal and buy a cheaper one instead, because what his patrons find in one, they will not find in the other and vice versa. That’s why the model should be ‘flipped’, from a ‘user-side’ payment, to an ‘author-side’ payment.

In contrast to users, authors do have the choice. They can, in almost all cases, decide to go to another journal with their paper. And if price becomes a factor for them or their backers, they can weigh that in their decisions. For them, journals are substitutable, rivalrous. Even at the highest levels: if Science and Nature were to offer paid-for open access, at different fees, authors could simply choose to go to the cheaper one (supposing their article is acceptable for publication). It’s easy to see that in such a system the fees will experience pressure to settle on a level that is regarded as value for money.

Not everybody gets this, unfortunately. Disappointingly, Walt Crawford, in his December 2006 Sights & Insights, says, on page 24,

Velterop wants to “flip the model” and makes the highly questionable claim that assured funding for high-priced author-pays publication would cause “real competition” and “put downward pressure on prices and upward pressure on efficiencies.” How so? Journals don’t follow standard economic models, because each one is a monopoly.

It looks as if he has firmly planted the notion in his mind that journals are monopolies, always have been monopolies, always will be monopolies, and that there’s nothing that will change that. And he completely misses the point of the claim I make, which is simply that changing to a standard economic model – which is what author-side payment for publication (i.e. payment on behalf of the party with a choice) entails – will offer us a chance to create a functional market environment and to converge the perceived value and the fee (the definition of a fair price). If that’s a ‘highly questionable’ claim, then most of market economics is.

Those who see open access simply as a way to pay less are free to do so, of course, but it makes open access a mere negotiating lever with publishers. Haggling about prices is a time-honoured practice in just about any walk of life. It has little to do with the principle of open access. It would seem that lower subscription prices than the current ones would be an acceptable outcome to them, even without open access.

The problem really is that for non-substitutable, non-rivalrous, material, the market for subscriptions is intrinsically dysfunctional. It may sometimes look as though high prices cause cancellations, but low-priced journals have suffered cancellations as well, and what’s more, there is no discernible pattern that reliably shows a distinction between higher priced and lower priced journals in that regard. Certainly there is no evidence that lowering subscription prices result in a higher take-up of the journals for which that has been tried, and without such higher take-up, there is no improvement of access. In a functional market one would expect such cause and effect.

Open access is more fundamental than about price. It is also more fundamental than increased usage figures or citation counts. It is about the notion that results of research carried out with public money are public goods. Doing the research costs money. Publishing the results is imperative, regardless of usage or citations. It’s public availability that counts. Like the minutes of important public meetings. They are validated and recorded; and only read again and quoted if and when necessary. That doesn’t make them any less valuable. Publishing the results is part of research itself. Therefore the cost of publishing is part of the cost of research.

Should the cost of publishing be scrutinized? Sure. In the same way as the cost of research is scrutinized. We, society at large, justify paying more for top researchers than for beginning ones; we justify putting more expensive equipment in one laboratory than in the next. We balance the price and the value we perceive to be getting. If we give ourselves a chance to come to fair prices for the services of publishing, then we have gained a lot.

The current subscription system doesn’t give us that chance. Nobody knows what a fair price is. We are, absurdly, measuring ‘cost per download’, ‘cost of citation’ and the like and believe we are measuring value. Has anybody ever approached, say, the proceedings of a parliamentary debate in that way? Even just as a thought experiment? What is 'usage' anyway? Scientific articles are important documents. The only thing that valuing them by their usage and citation does is to make the usage and citation potential of articles into criteria for publishing them, instead of their intrinsic scientific merit. Thus making a brilliant article that few understand seem pretty worthless. And – possibly worse – making a poor, but controversial, popular, and fashionable article seem the more valuable of the two. Surely, that can't be where we want to go.

Jan Velterop

Subsidy or not to be

2006-11-06T13:39:00.000Z

Subsidise, subsidise - but don't let the real issues evade your eyes (free after Tom Lehrer).

Recently, early November 2006, a quick thread was spun on the AMSCI open access list about subsidising journals (though the title of the thread is 'What Can and Should Be Mandated').

I've looked in Wikipedia for a definition of subsidy: "...generally a monetary grant given by a government to lower the price faced by producers or consumers of a good, generally because it is considered to be in the public interest". Would this also cover situations in which governments are the ones that provide the funds for consumers - because it is in the public interest - to buy the goods or services in the first place? I think it does, and that this provision of funds in the first place is a form of subsidy.

Ergo, all journals are subsidised. Although, a lot of microsubsidies could perhaps be seen as constituting a 'market'. The money for journals comes, to a very large degree, from governments. If not directly, then indirectly, via the circuitous route of research and learning institutions with their librarian gatekeepers and content collectors. The subsidy is just misdirected. And ill-suited to what the intention is: serving the public interest.

Why is that so? Subsidising the consumer, in order to be able to buy scholarly journals, is accepting the premise that a journal's value is primarily in its content. It isn't. While that perhaps used to be so, it isn't any longer as a result of the internet. The content can be found elsewhere, and for free. In a preprint repository, for instance, or even in a postprint repository. The internet has made one of the classical functions of publishing - dissemination - exceedingly easy to do by anybody else as well, and particularly by the author. Journals are no longer needed for dissemination per se.

The function of a journal was always much wider, even when all its economic value was bound up with just dissemination. Journals organise the formal acceptance and embedding of the literature in the record. They keep the 'minutes of science' as I mentioned in an earlier post.

This is a very important function of journals, as I argued in the same earlier post. And that's the function that needs to be 'subsidised'. If the same money that's now sloshing around in the L-sphere (licence sphere) were used to enable peer-reviewed articles to be added to the free and open Noösphere (knowledge sphere) by paying for the service of formal publishing rather than for access, we would have so much more 'bang for the buck': open access.

Here's an illustration why formal publication is important: for the UK Research Assessment Exercise (RAE), the Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE) has negotiated a licence with the Publishers' Licensing Society (PLS) to gain access to the formally published literature (only the "authoritative final version" will do; so they're not after the content, but after its label of authoritativeness, established by being published in formal, peer-reviewed journals), "only for the purpose of conducting the RAE." The licence is free of charge. Somewhat perverse, in my view: the system pretends to pay for access to the content per se, yet wants to have access to the real value of formally published literature for free. If HEFCE supported open access at source - the article processing charge model - then it would have free, open access to the material without any need for a licence and so would everyone else.

Jan Velterop

Nephelokykkygia

2006-10-31T15:04:00.000Z

Bill Hooker has written a fine piece on open access. His exposé of the benefits of open access is convincing (not that I needed to be convinced any further). Unfortunately, he does repeat some of the misconceptions that have crept into the debate.

Open access is easy enough to arrange. As a researcher, you just deposit your article in an open repository of some sort and, as they say in England, “Bob’s your uncle!” So far, so good – no publisher involved. So where’s the problem? Well, it’s here: “[large publisher] won’t let me use their pdf versions…” Duh, as my teenage kids would say. Why would publishers let you? Or the question that should come before that: why did you bother a publisher with your article in the first place?

“Well, if I don’t have it published formally in a journal, then I won’t get the recognition I need for my tenure and future funding prospects” you might be inclined to answer. Right answer! After all, it’s ‘publish or perish’. So, ‘giving away’ your article to a publisher is not entirely without ulterior motives, it seems. Nothing wrong with that, but let’s be honest about it, you are not so much ‘giving away’ anything to a publisher than asking for a service: "please organise for my article to be peer-reviewed and published in the journal whose title will make it worth a lot more for me than the not-formally-published version could ever be."

And what does the publisher get in return for doing that service? Ideally, he should simply be paid for it, after which the formally published article, with the imprimatur that gives it ‘authority’, is as open as you, the author, choose. This concept is known as Open Access Publishing and is now (hooray, finally) offered by many a publisher, large and small, society-linked or independent.

But, as long as there are many authors who like to have the imprimatur and the formal publication, but don’t want to pay for it, it’s offered as an option. For those who don’t wish to pay, there still is the old way of paying, namely by transferring their copyright (or exclusive publishing rights, which amounts to pretty much the same thing). The publisher can then subsequently sell the article (mostly via subscriptions) and recoup his cost that way. This concept is known as traditional publishing, basically a relic of the print era, when it was realistically the only possible way and libraries indirectly paid the publishers for publishing services rendered to the authors. Allowing you to freely post the formally published pdf, is not a good idea in that model, certainly not without a reasonable embargo. Traditional publishers have already gone quite far by allowing the authors’ versions to be posted with open access.

Many publishers, though, are offering the open access publishing option – so it’s time, dear authors, for you to choose.

Another misconception in Hooker’s piece is “For you as a taxpayer, this means that you are denied access to information you've already paid for (since I've always been funded by government grants).” The publisher doesn’t ‘deny access’ to the information. If anybody does, it’s the author. What stops an author from just posting the research results on some freely accessible repository and let the taxpayer have the benefit he deserves for putting up the money that sustains the author’s research? If he pays the publisher for the service of organising peer-review and attaching the formal imprimatur of a journal to his article, to give it the credibility and certification it needs, then he can also post the formally published pdf anywhere he likes. Payment could come out of the research grant. After all, publishing research results is part and parcel of research itself, so the cost of publishing is logically part of the cost of doing research. If the author ‘pays’ by means of transfer of copyright, then he must understand that such ‘payment’ can only be meaningful if the publisher is able actually to sell the article. Unless he believes, of course, that publishers ought to do whatever they do for nothing. This concept is known as the proverbial free lunch. Or as ‘cloud cuckoo land’ (after Aristophanes' classical fictional Nephelokykkygia or Nephelococcygia).

Jan Velterop

The use of usage

2006-10-16T15:16:00.000+01:00

I came across an interesting article by John Ewing, Executive Director and Publisher of the American Mathematical Society, published in the Notices of the AMS this month (October issue). The article is entitled "Measuring Journals" and discusses impact factors and usage statistics.

Statistics are funny things. The decline of the birth rate in Western Europe coincides with the decline of the stork. Imagine the possible conclusions if you don’t understand the statistics (though they may confirm long-held beliefs). Usage statistics have to be understood before they can be used to come to any meaningful conclusions, if ever.

Even if we do understand user statistics sufficiently, how reliable can they really be? Not very, is Ewing’s conclusion. We have to be extremely careful when we use such ‘objective’ quantitative data for qualitative conclusions. Ewing further says that “Distrust of ‘subjective’ scholarly judgment is a modern disease – one that is profoundly anti-intellectual.” I would add that blind trust in ‘objective’ measurements is equally profoundly anti-intellectual.

Suppose we can be confident that we understand the statistics, does usage determine the value of journals and articles in the first place? I’m aware of the adage publish or perish, but not of one that says read or rot or download or be damned. Isn’t the value therefore more in the availability of a publication than in its usage? Isn’t there a strong value element of ‘just-in-case’ in scientific literature (like the value of insurance – where you’d probably avoid actual ‘usage’)? Isn’t there a strong value element in just making sure that research results are properly recorded (like the minutes of important meetings – they are not often read a lot, but it’s crucial that they are made)? The ‘minutes of science’ as I used to call it in the mid-nineties?

Isn’t it so that a manuscript with potentially interesting information is only made actually interesting if the outcome of a process of peer-review shows that it’s been formally accepted and acknowledged by the scientific community as worth adding to the body of literature, and labelled as such (with a journal imprimatur)? And isn’t there then more value in the label it carries (imprimatur, certification, however one calls it) than in the information itself (which may well already be out there in cyberspace and often is)? And isn’t that mainly a value for authors (remember: publish or perish) and their careers and future funding prospects rather than for readers (remember: there’s no read or rot)?

As an information exchange, many journals may already have lost their role. The internet is definitely taking over. But ‘usage’ of a journal as a formal recording and validation service has not disappeared. Arguably, that service is more valuable now than ever, given the difficulty of establishing the integrity of information available on the web.

In my view that means that the economic underpinning of journals by placing a monetary value solely on download usage is outdated. Much of the monetary value should, instead, be placed on the service of formally publishing the material. In an ‘author-side-payment’ model that is explicitly the case and such a publishing model also means that open access, i.e. universal availability, can be the natural condition of the formal, officially published articles.

Jan Velterop

Perelmanian Probity

2006-10-02T14:11:00.000+01:00

On Saturday September 30, 2006, there was an item on Peter Suber’s Open Access News blog about Perelman, the reclusive Russian mathematician who published his proof of the Poincaré Conjecture not in a formal peer-reviewed journal but just in arχiv. That’s very nice of him, because arχiv is open access so the entire world can see what his proof is. He clearly doesn’t need to have his work formally published, and he doesn’t seem to need money either, having refused the Fields Medal and the material rewards that come with it.

Why don’t more physicists and mathematicians do this – publishing just in arχiv and not in a formal peer-reviewed journal? Why don’t researchers in other disciplines do it – publishing just in an open repository and not in a formal journal?

Well, Perelman is a pretty unique individual. A giant on whose shoulders to stand. Licet Jovi non licet bovi. Few researchers can afford not to publish in formal journals. For most researchers the adage is ‘publish or perish’. And ‘publish’ here means publish formally in a peer-reviewed journal.

It used to be so that in order to avoid perishing, most ‘non-perelmanic’ authors had to strike what has been called a ‘Faustian Bargain’. As in any bargain, it involved receiving and paying. An author could get published, but had to ‘pay’ with giving up the right to distribute the article himself, and give the journal publisher that exclusive right. I use the past tense, because there is an increasing number of possibilities now to make the bargain less of a Faustian and more of a fair one: get published in a formal peer-reviewed journal and pay the publisher for the service of arranging it all.

And there is of course what might be called the Mercurian Method of having one’s cake and eating it: publish in a traditional formal journal and subsequently in an open repository without paying anybody in any way, and taking the gamble that someone else – anybody else – will keep alive the formal peer-reviewed journals that most researchers continue to need as long as ‘publish (in those formally peer-reviewed journals) or perish’ remains the rule. It's possible of course that someone will. It's also possible to win the national lottery. If one is not prepared to pay in any way, Perelmanian Probity is better than a bet.

Jan Velterop

Research is research

2006-10-02T11:39:00.000+01:00

I wasn’t there, but I understand that one of the main topics discussed at the recent JISC conference ‘Moving Towards Open Access’ was the question whether open access was suitable for all disciplines. Bit of a funny question, this. All scholarly research worth publishing is worth publishing with open access, I would have thought. Research is research. The question that should have been asked (and it may indeed have been the intended question), is whether there are, or should be, different ways of funding open access publishing in different disciplines.

The clearest way to think about the funding of the formal research literature, as the Wellcome Trust for instance does, is to see publishing as an integral part of doing research and therefore the cost of publishing as an integral part of the cost of research and thus entirely logically payable out of research grants. We hear quite often that such funding of the formal literature from research funds is not feasible in some disciplines – e.g. social sciences and humanities – simply because much research in those areas is not funded. Not funded? I wonder how social scientists survive. Maybe what’s meant is ‘not funded in the same way’.

No, the real difference between disciplines is the amount of money spent on the formal literature as a percentage of the amount of money spent on research. The 1-2% quoted by the Wellcome Trust probably doesn’t apply in the social sciences.

The money is clearly there; also in the social sciences and humanities. How else would subscriptions to journals in those areas currently be sustained? And there also is no difference between disciplines in that regard. Virtually all subscriptions, in all areas of research, are currently sustained via library budgets – money streams that are separate from research funds, but nonetheless available in 'the system'.

The central idea of ‘author-side’ payment in order to secure open access for the formally published research literature (and as a side benefit, transparency of the proportionality between the amount of research done and the cost of the literature) is to use the same money now used for subscriptions (reader-side payment) in a different way. Not extra money; the same money. Once that insight has broken through, we can start overcoming the practical (bureaucratic?) difficulties.

Jan Velterop

LivRe

2006-07-18T09:06:00.000+01:00

Nuclear Information Center (Brazil) maintains a portal to easy the identification and access to free journals available on the Internet. It is the Portal LivRe!(Free !), nowadays registering 2,525 free journals. I am announcing the implementation of a multilanguage searching interface. LivRe! now can be accessed in Portuguese, English and Spanish.

Portal LivRe! - http://livre.cnen.gov.br

About LivRe!
LivRe! is the portal developed by CNEN - Comissão Nacional de Energia Nuclear(Brazilian National Nuclear Energy Commission), through its CIN - Centro de Informações Nucleares (Nuclear Information Center), aiming to ease the identification and the access to free journals available on the Internet.

The Portal covers scientific journals, magazines, bulletins and newsletters.

Free access journals are spreaded over several categories:

- free access to all the issues and articles. Great part of the titles are included in this category;
- free access requiring mandatory registration;
- free access only during a pre-established period from the publishing on;
- free access only after a period following publishing;
- partial free access, that means, only part of the articles are available for free.
The following data are available for each title: time coverage, language, secondary sources indexing the title, if it is a peeer reviewed journal, optional comments and contents description, as supplied by the publisher.

Beyond displaying journals by initial letter of its title, searches can be done by title words and by subject field.

Searches can be refined selecting only peer-reviewed journals or only journals indexed by any secondary source.

Your collaboration by sending us comments or suggestions is essential to improve the LivRe! Portal. Talk to us, pointing out new journals for inclusion, suggesting new features or amending mistakes you have detected.

Regards,

Luiz Macêdo

Nuclear Information Center
Brazilian National Nuclear Energy Commission
macedo@cnen.gov.br

Open access, quo vadis?

2006-07-12T11:13:00.000+01:00

Now that alternatives for the term 'self-archiving' are being suggested -- presumably in an attempt to increase the number of self-archivers -- it may be time to face up to some uncomfortable truths. Let's be honest, open access is just not all that attractive to individual researchers when they publish their articles. I say that with pain in my heart, but we have, as proponents of open access, singularly failed to get enough support among researchers. Not for want of trying. The proposition is simply not strong enough.

That doesn't, of course, make open access any less desirable. But researchers, as we all, do live in an ego-system and the strength of a person's interest in anything seems to diminish with at least the square of the distance (metaphorical or otherwise) to his or her id. The benefits of open access 'to science' are apparently pretty distant to an average researcher. Now, I know that the case has been made that there are benefits at closer proximity to researchers' ids, such as increased citations to their articles, but they seem, grosso modo, wholly underwhelmed by those. Is it with the benefits of open access rather like with the benefits of dramatically reducing our energy consumption? Reasonable on a super-ego level, but not convincing enough for our id, or so it seems.

So what now?

Mandates, it appears. From the funders -- organisations in charge of the scholarly super-ego, as it were. They have the power to impose OA on their grantees, and maybe the duty. And as they mostly pay the bill for library subscriptions anyway (indirectly, via overhead charges of institutions, but they pay nonetheless), they could simply re-route that money to OA article processing charges and reform publishing in the process. They may still, and follow the excellent leadership of the Wellcome Trust in this regard.

There seems to be one thing standing in the way. Conflation of financial concerns with open access is, unfortunately, a major barrier to open access. If open access were a real priority, in other words, if the starting point would not so much be cost evasion, but the principle that for the amounts now spent on scholarly literature one could, and should, have open access, and if a widespread willingness were displayed on the part of funders and librarians to help flip the model, then I'm thoroughly convinced we would be much, much further with open access. And as for financial concerns, inherent in an author-side payment model is a much clearer scope for real competition, and that will put downward pressure on prices and upward pressure on efficiencies as any economist will tell us. Putting the horse before the cart might be a good idea, for a change.

There is of course the hypothesis, consistently put forward by Stevan Harnad (and Stevan is nothing if not consistent, you have to give him that), that we can have OA without reforming publishing and without damaging journals. Consistent, but unfortunately, that doesn't make it right. In his world of self-archiving, all peer-reviewed and formally published articles would be freely available with open access -- although perhaps in an informal version, but still -- and librarians would continue to pay for subscriptions to keep journals afloat. As evidence he puts forward that having effectively had a physics archive in which published articles have been available freely for a decade and a half or so, this has not discernably reduced the willingness of librarians to keep paying for subscriptions to the journals with the very same material. And indeed, he makes very plausible that in physices, over the last decade and a half, there has been no damage to journals. But then he extrapolates. This always makes me think of Mark Twain, who says in Life on the Mississippi (1884):

"In the space of one hundred and seventy six years the Lower Mississippi has shortened itself two hundred and forty-two miles. That is an average of a trifle over a mile and a third per year. Therefore, any calm person, who is not blind or idiotic, can see that in the Old Oölitic Silurian Period, just a million years ago next November, the Lower Mississippi was upwards of one million three hundred thousand miles long, and stuck out over the Gulf of Mexico like a fishing-pole. And by the same token any person can see that seven hundred and forty-two years from now the Lower Mississippi will be only a mile and three-quarters long, and Cairo [Illinois] and New Orleans will have joined their streets together and be plodding comfortably along under a single mayor and a mutual board of aldermen. There is something fascinating about science. One gets such wholesale returns of conjecture out of such a trifling investment of fact."

And although Stevan may even turn out to be right -- only hindsight will tell and we have to keep an open mind on that -- for societies and other publishers just to take his word for it or even his 'evidence' that his extrapolations are valid, would be a serious dereliction of fiduciary duty, and sooo unnecessary. Because with some political will, publishing can be reformed, and reformed very quickly, without damage, or even the threat of damage, to anyone. And thus the problems could be fundamentally solved instead of treated with sticky-plasters such as OA through self-archiving (great as institutional repositories otherwise are).

Jan Velterop

Hooker on OA

2006-06-28T10:22:00.000+01:00

In a comment on my last post, Bill Hooker makes the point that I mis-represented Stevan Harnad's position on peer review. I don't think I did, but for the avoidance of any doubt, I know that Stevan is a very strong supporter of peer review and so am I. In a way, that is precisely the problem. Stevan wants peer review, but not to pay for the process of formal publishing in peer-reviewed journals. That, he argues, should be done by librarians. I wouldn't dispute that, but according to him librarians should (or is it just will?) keep the subscription model going and in that way provide sustenance for the formal peer-reviewed journal system.

But why would librarians do that? If the articles published were freely available from elsewhere - institutional repositories - buying what looks like access to the formal peer-reviewed journals, but what is a donation to support them seems a rather convoluted idea.

Would it really not be better to sustain the system and secure OA by directly paying for the publishing services rendered rather than via subscriptions to access that can be had for free elsewhere anyway?

Bill Hooker also makes the point that "... it could conceivably become attractive for researchers - perhaps through the NIH, or professional societies, for instance - to co-ordinate the review process themselves, construct a robust search architecture that encompasses the vast majority of institutional repositories and thumb their noses once and for all at the STM publishing industry." Become publishers, in short. He is absolutely right.

Three comments:

1. Yes please. History is littered with groups of researchers that have organised themselves to do just that. Mostly in the form of a scholarly society expressly established for the purpose. And subsequently they have become publishers and joined the STM publishing industry, or outsourced the publishing of their journals to independent publishers.

2. If anybody has problems with the harnadian solution, it's scholarly societies that publish journals.

3. It is just possible that there may be reasons why researchers are researchers and publishers publishers. Everbody can sow the seed to grow the wheat to grind the flower to bake the bread. Who, after all, needs farmers, millers and bakers?

Jan Velterop

(Bill Hooker has followed up on his blog 'Open Reading Frame')

An 'Alms Race'?

2006-06-27T13:33:00.000+01:00

In a posting entitled Mandating OA via Paid Publisher-Archiving (PPA) versus Author Self-Archiving (ASA), Stevan Harnad states "If research institutions and funders have the spare cash to pay whatever publishers ask today for PPA without having to take it away from research allotments, then the outcome (100% OA) is welcome and optimal for all."

I'll comment on PPA in a moment, but let's first look at this extraordinary statement. It reduces science publishing entirely to an 'alms race'. Publishers stretching out their hands in the hope that some benevolent librarian or funder will throw in a few coins, thus enabling the publishers to go on publishing. It beggars belief, if this expression was ever appropriate to use. What a way to sustain the formal peer-reviewed journal literature! The formal peer-reviewed journal literature is clearly worth very little. In his view.

Those with a 'harnadian' inclination should really not bother publishers at all with their articles. They should just 'archive' (read 'publish') them in some repository and move on. Shame the articles can't be labelled as having been published in a peer-reviewed journal, which would make them more valuable and be noticed and taken seriously, but hey, everybody can see them and the publishers just haven't been able to beg enough cash to publish them.

For those who do think that there is something of value in having a system of journals in which the peer-reviewed scientific literature is formally published, it is probably worth looking for more robust ways of economically sustaining them than just scrambling for alms.

Subscriptions, on the whole, currently sustain the journal system. But they have a downside. They do not, by definition, provide open access. So that's why new publishing models have emerged that do.

Unfortunately, Stevan derisorily calls these new publishing models PPA, for 'Paid Publisher-Archiving'. As if 'archiving' is what publishers do. Nobody pays a publisher for archiving and no publisher asks for payment for archiving. Publishers ask for payment for having an article peer-reviewed and formally published in a reputable journal. By having an article peer-reviewed and formally published in a reputable journal, it becomes worth a lot more than if it were just self-published. Worth a lot more to the author (or would some informally published article be seen in the same light by your tenure committee as one that's published in a journal with an impact factor?), worth a lot more to the reader (or would a citation to some informally published article be taken as seriously as one that's published in a journal with an impact factor?), worth a lot more to the funder, worth a lot more to science, and worth a lot more to society at large. If that were not the case, why should authors want to publish in journals? Why should funders and institutions expect (read: require) them to? Why should fellow scientists be keen to know where an article is published? Because there is no value in the formal peer-reviewed journal publishing system?

If there is value in the system, however, it needs to be properly sustained. Not with alms.

Jan Velterop

On the road

2006-06-23T10:56:00.000+01:00

To Sally Morris's post on the SOAF list saying that she has "difficulty envisaging how the 'no-fee' OA model, dependent on (conscious or not) institutional or other subsidy, could possibly scale", Matt Cockerill responded:

"I think a reasonable analogy here would be to ask: can a road system scale without charging tolls? I think it is clear that road systems can scale without tolls. But on the other hand, tolls can certainly play a role, and play a bigger role in some countries than others. Non-toll roads can't be written off simply as 'unsustainable'. No one is arguing that building and maintaining roads doesn't have costs - just that there is more than one way in which they can be funded, and some forms of funding may have practical/convenience benefits (no one wants to have to pay 10 different tolls just to get to the supermarket)." End of quote.

We could take this road analogy further. Roads are not paid for by tolls at every turn, as that would disrupt the flow of traffic (though the technology to introduce just that via satellite tracking is advancing fast). So tolls are only used for 'premium' roads (and tunnels, bridges, et cetera). Instead, the vast majority of the road infrastructure is usually paid for by state subsidies, which in turn, we must assume, are funded by road taxes and fuel excise taxes. These excise taxes are interesting, because it means that there is already an element of 'user pays', as more road usage means more fuel consumption means more excise tax paid. But that user-related charge is just part of the road payment structure. Every potential road user also pays via road tax, levied on the owners of cars whether they use them or not. They pay for access.

Would something like that work in science publishing? And would it be desirable?

To a degree, and in a way, the road tax simile is already there. Institutions pay for subscriptions for potential users. It's a 'just-in-case' provision. They pay for access, not usage. It is often said that payment for usage would be fairer. But we have to be very clear as to what usage and who the user actually is. It's certainly not just the reader. It's definitely also the author, who uses publication in a journal to give his article the formal status he needs for career advancement and impact. And it's also the institution itself, depending for recognition and reputation on the formal publication record of its research population.

So it would be fair were they all to pay their share. Practically all of the money streams involved would come together on an institutional level. The purse is filled with overhead charges on research grants, and for the purpose of sustaining scientific journal literature the funds could be disbursed partially via the library (subscriptions, i.e. reader-usage charges) and partially via the authors (article processing charges, i.e. author-usage charges). But one might want to be pragmatic here. Disbursement via library subscriptions inherently limits access to the journal literature, because that is the basis on which the whole concept of subscriptions is built. Disbursement via article processing charges makes open access economically feasible. Could the reader-side charge and the author-side charge perhaps be rolled up into a single charge, on an institutional level?

Could that be a way forward? Would it be possible to come up with a charge that reflects the total usage of a journal, by its readers as well as its authors, in a given institute? A way to sustain the formal peer-reviewed journal literature that balances the need to publish (publish or perish) with the need to have access (read or rot)? Or would it be a road to nowhere?

Jan Velterop

On donation and midwives

2006-06-16T10:43:00.000+01:00

The notion that scientists ‘donate’ their research articles to journals is one that seems fairly widespread and it pops up in official reports such as lately in the “Study on the Economic and Technical Evolution of the Scientific Publication Markets in Europe” (download PDF). The context in this report (and often elsewhere) is concern about cost-effective use of public funds. On page 16 one can read “…the output of research is typically not bought by journals but ‘donated’ by publicly-funded researchers…” At least ‘donated’ is in inverted commas. Between the lines one reads “this is a problem”.

It is an interesting notion indeed, this laudable collective philanthropy. Scientists usually do not expect royalties from journal articles. Two, closely related, questions arise: why do they donate to journals, and why do they not expect royalties? Are they truly that unselfishly concerned with journals?

Would the problem not be instantly rectified if scientists stopped donating articles to journals? Who knows? Maybe the best thing is to try?

Or are they not donating to publishers, but to the world? How can that be a problem? To my knowledge there is not a scientific journal publisher in the world who would dream of standing in the way of a researcher donating his or her research to the world. Publishers are simply not involved if researchers just get on with donating, for instance by publishing their article freely available on the web, such as I’m doing now with this blog entry.

But perhaps it’s not that simple. Research donated that way may not be taken that seriously by the world. And particularly not by tenure-committees and the like. Unless, of course, it has the formal imprimatur of a peer-reviewed journal. In science, publishers are not, strange as it may sound, needed so much for publishing per se. But they are for formal publishing. The formal publishing process makes a potentially worthwhile article an actually valuable one. That’s the added value of publishing. Which scientists ask a publisher to add. Without the journal imprimatur, label if you will, the article is grey literature at best. The publisher is therefore a provider of a service to the scientist – not quite the receptacle for donated articles as portrayed.

To perform this service of adding value, a publisher needs to invest. Hire people; rent an office, set up systems and an organisation. That’s why he has to charge money, one way or the other. One way – the traditional way – is via subscriptions or licences; the other is via article processing charges. Both have their advantages and disadvantages, but only the latter is an economically sustainable model to provide open access. And it’s not about keeping publishers in business; it’s about keeping a system of peer-reviewed journals going. And about providing sustainable open access to this peer-reviewed literature.

Not everybody agrees. Some believe that we can have free, open access and get institutional libraries to pay for subscriptions and so sustain the system of peer review journals. And they have evidence: the physics community. So it must be universally valid, mustn’t it? A brief digression: when an unsupervised toddler gets hold of a box of matches, lights them one by one, and blows them out again, it is entirely conceivable that the house does not burn down. Nonetheless, a sensible person would take the matches away as soon as he spots the toddler doing this. He would certainly not conclude that there is evidence that toddlers with matches do not burn down houses and proceed to give all toddlers a box of matches.

“We don’t need publishers to keep the peer-reviewed journals going” is a sentiment often expressed, “because we do all the work, such as peer review, ourselves anyway”. The story of the midwife comes to mind. Publishers are no more than the ‘midwife’ in the publishing process. Mark Patterson of PLoS used this analogy to great effect in a few recent presentations, when he pointed out that it would be absurd if the midwife were to restrict access to the child. He’s right. But without stretching the analogy too far, we do need and use the services of midwives widely. (And of course there are large areas of the animal kingdom where births always happen unassisted. But that’s the equivalent of just publishing on the web, without involving a publisher. Do Orang Utangs have the equivalent of midwives? I wouldn’t even be surprised if they do, actually.)

Midwives need sustenance, and so do publishers. Anybody can become a publisher (publishing is not regulated, unlike midwifery in most countries). Those who believe they can do it all themselves, without sustenance, ought to do it all themselves, without sustenance. But please, do make it more than a short-lived hobby-of-the-day. For the sake of science.

Jan Velterop

On the Bill

2006-05-16T15:26:00.000+01:00

The Cornyn-Lieberman Bill, a.k.a. the Federal Research Public Access Act or FRPAA, has evoked some strong reactions. Many - perhaps most - publishers are dismayed; many - perhaps most - open access advocated are delighted.

Yet I'm afraid I see the FRPAA as a bit of a dogs dinner. Fish nor fowl. The six months' embargo is a perilously short period of time for most publishers to recoup their costs via subscriptions. And it is useless as a stimulus to the development of sustainable open access publishing.

Of course, I know of assertions that a six months' embargo poses no threat to subscriptions; even that immediate open self-archiving is safe. The example ('evidence') invariably given is that of physics and the effect ArXiv has had on subscription [at least so far]. Evidence? Perhaps. But without a mechanism, or even hypothesis, that might possibly be seen as explaining the phenomenon. Not even like evidence that extremely diluted potions still seem to provide a cure for some diseases in some people. For that we have at least a hypothesis: placebo-effect. Even if publishers do not entirely reject the evidence, they simply cannot afford to bank on its broad and sustained validity. Hence, publishers' anxiety.

The only reason why there possibly is a six months' embargo in the Bill is a realisation that publishers need to be able to recoup the money they put into publishing. Given that Messrs. Cornyn and Lieberman realise this, it would have been better to require immediate open access and to acknowledge that publishing is part of doing research, and therefore the cost of publishing part of the cost of research, thereby stimulating publishers to seriously develop open access publishing models based on article processing charges.

Of course, I know of assertions that not all OA journals charge authors anything at all. This is undoubtedly so, but a quick look at those journals leaves one with the inescapable impression that ideas about scaling up that mode of operation to anywhere near the bulk of the serious journal literature firmly belong in the realm of unlimited impossibilities.

The whole world of scientific and scholarly research benefits from having robust and reliably sustainable open access publishing structures. Politicians do, too, because society as a whole does, too. And yes, publishers do, too.

Jan Velterop

Of free riders and bad pennies

2006-05-02T10:44:00.000+01:00

In the open access debate, 'free riders' keep popping up like the proverbial bad pennies. Free riders are those who profit from open access to research articles, where in the subscription model they had to pay for access. Even UK parliamentarian Ian Gibson, in the last paragraph of his recent foreword to Neil Jacobs' book, sees free riders as problematic.

But are they? Once research results are published (i.e. made public), in any model, whoever sees a possibility to benefit (or profit) from applying the knowledge found in these research results, is free to do so. In fact, a strong commitment to and concomitant spending on research in a country is usually seen as closely associated with a strong economic performance and development of the economy. So why is it that free use of the results themselves, representing 99% of the cost of research, is not problematic but, instead, is rightly seen to stimulate the economy, yet free access to the published results, representing a mere 1% of the cost of research, is regarded as a problem?

Jan Velterop

Back to nature

2006-04-06T10:44:00.000+01:00

Information, in its natural state, flows freely. It spreads to wherever it can go, like water. It grows even in the process. Like the biblical loaves and fishes, which fed thousands and when everyone was satisfied, the remains amounted to more than the original basket full. Substitute 'food for thought' for 'food' in that story, and it doesn't sound so miraculous at all anymore. This is not an argument in favour of open access along the lines of "information wants to be free", since information has no mind of its own and doesn't want anything. Instead, it's just an observation. We have to do almost nothing for information to flow freely. Especially not now the internet enables that flow so easily. We do, however, need to employ all manner of artificial constructs if we want to restrict its flow: legal ones, such as copyright; technological ones, such as authentication procedures; and cultural ones, such as censorship.

For information and knowledge, open access is nature. Unfortunately, the second part of this sentence cannot be reversed and still be true, but that may yet come. Also unfortunate is that considerable amounts of intellectual efforts as well as financial resources are devoted to keeping the constructs needed to restrict information up to the task and enforceable. This is particularly unfortunate in the academic realm, where information and knowledge is primarily generated to be added to the 'noosphere', the knowledge sphere on which the whole world should be able to draw.

The reason why so much effort is being spent on restricting the free flow of information is clear, of course. Validating, organising, and disseminating information and knowledge is costly, is a value added to make the information and knowledge usable and reliable, and needs to be paid for somehow. Restrictions make it possible subsequently to require payment for lifting them.

It is widely understood – and rarely contested – that the tremendous value added by the science publishing industry to organising and providing ways to validate scientific information and knowledge and make it reliable, needs to be paid. However, the question that needs to be asked is, shouldn't the formidable intellectual efforts and resources that are now being spent on maintaining and refining the ancient restriction regime, be better spent on finding new ways to financially support the free flow of information and knowledge, suited to the circumstances of today? Especially since, ironically, that regime was developed centuries ago when copyright was conceived as a way of supporting the technology of its day in order to make the information flow more freely.

Open access is nature. Is it not better to harness and use the forces of nature to our benefit, rather than to fight them?

Jan Velterop

Of profits and surpluses

2006-04-02T18:19:00.000+01:00

The same review by Kate Corby that I referred to in my previous post, reports that "Willinsky makes a strong case for the contention that the aggressively competitive role commercial publishers play in academic publishing has had a negative impact on access for everyone."

What is interesting is that Willinsky (or is it Corby?) inserts the word 'commercial' here, as if not-for-profit publishers, mainly societies, generally support open access and are not 'aggressively competitive'. He doesn't seem aware of the fact that they generally don't and are. He also doesn't seem aware of the fact that a great many society journals are published on their behalf by commercial publishers. And he clearly has never sat in on negotiations between societies and the publishers who publish their journals.

If he had, he would realise that not-for-profit journals do not exist in any numbers. Most so-called not-for-profit journals are expected, by their not-for-profit owners, to make a handsome return (often called ‘surplus’, which is distinct from ‘profit’ only in that it is not taxable), an expectation which is passionately pursued (let's not call it 'aggressively'). Sure, this surplus is mostly being used for good purposes of the society's choosing, but these good purposes seldom have anything to do with the journals themselves or with open access.

There is nothing wrong with surpluses. Or with profits, for that matter. It's the way the free world works. And even the not-so-free world. It would, however, behove scholarly societies to support economically sustainable open access business models for the publication of their journals and make their surpluses that way. For the benefit of science. For the sake of enabling academic researchers to be "in the business of growing the world’s knowledge base", and yet thrive in the cut-throat environment of the 'ego-system' that the global scientific enterprise is, with its relentless 'publish-or-perish' culture. 'Aggressive competitiveness' is all around us, I'm afraid. Or is it 'passionate competitiveness'?

Jan Velterop

Of cost and value

2006-04-02T12:46:00.000+01:00

Peter Suber's excellent blog Open Access News drew my attention to Kate Corby's review of John Willinsky's book The Access Principle. She says that "Perhaps the strongest point this book makes is that openly accessible scholarly information is more valuable [than] information published in journals with limited access."

On this point, I couldn't agree more with Willinsky. Yet if his point is valid, why is it that there are still plenty of members of the academic community, including OA advocates, who somehow balk at the idea of willing, OA-conscious publishers charging for the service of open access publishing? Isn't what one is prepared to pay for something an expression of its 'value'? So why is Academia prepared to shell out for subscriptions, but reluctant to pay for the article charges that come with OA publishing? In the aggregate, and in the traditional subscription model, Academia spends an amount far exceeding $3000 for every single article published in established journals. Why not spend that money on publishing all those articles with open access? And get more value to boot? Or is Academia just too anarchic to be sensible about this?

Jan Velterop

R.I.P.?

2006-03-31T14:51:00.000+01:00

When I was looking in my thesaurus for an alternative to the word 'repository', I was given 'sepulchre' and 'tomb'.

Never realised that. Is that why one calls them Repositories of Institutional Publications? What's in a name? Or is there perhaps a subconscious message here? An element of 'nominative determinism'?

Jan Velterop

Of value and money

2006-03-27T15:06:00.000+01:00

In a recent missive to all ACS (American Chemical Society) members, the Society’s President, E. Ann Nalley, warned against the dangers of jeopardising the tremendously useful, yet complex, journals-based system of publishing scientific research. In an open letter on her blog, OA activist Heather Morrison reacted to this, extolling the virtues of barrier-free access to the scientific research literature.

One might be forgiven for getting the impression that the two are at odds with one another. They might even think so themselves. However, both are right, in their own ways.

The journals system is tremendously useful. The validation and certification through critical peer-review, the stability it lends to scientific communication by providing a unique citation for each article – thus making it the version of record, the structure journals give to archiving, they all add great value to orderly scientific discourse and to maintaining the integrity of ‘the minutes’ of science. What Nalley fails to address – though it can be read between the lines – is the matter of cost. Nalley fears that if articles published in the ACS journals are made freely available elsewhere, their economic basis is seriously undermined.

Morrison doesn’t refute this. Instead, she is addressing a different point. It is evident that unhindered access to scientific research literature is beneficial for science, and hence for society. Not a word about cost, though. Who is she expecting to pay for it all?

If researchers want to communicate their research results, it is perfectly possible for them to make it all available to anyone in the world for free. All they have to do is post their material on a on a web site or to deposit it in an OA repository. Why don’t they just do that? Why bother a publisher? Or is the publisher perhaps providing them with something that makes their articles more valuable – to them and to science – than they would be if just published unofficially on the web?

That, of course, is the key. Journals (and thus: publishers) make unofficial, grey literature white, so to speak. Golden, even. They organise, operate and maintain a system that results in the ‘attachment’ of a journal ‘label’ to an article, which all of a sudden turns what is hitherto grey into a fully recognised publication, the version-integrity of which is guaranteed, and which is fully embedded in the official literature. That process adds tremendous value. But it carries costs.

Nalley’s letter is prompted by the NIH policies and Congressional draft bills that move towards requiring open access for federally funded research. The anxiety of the ACS and other publishers is justified as long as the NIH and congressional bills do not address the issue of costs associated with the tremendously useful journals system. They should take a leaf out of the Wellcome Trust book, which does address the issue with exemplary clarity. On their web site one can read that "…the Wellcome Trust […] will provide grantholders with additional funding to cover the costs of page processing charges levied by publishers who support the open access model" (my emphasis). The ACS should ask for that kind of commitment and clarity from the NIH, from other federal funding bodies, and from Congress. When open access is economically supported, Nalley and Morrison may find themselves on common ground after all.

Jan Velterop

What is an OA journal?

2006-03-08T11:32:00.000Z

"Currently, the ISI Web of Knowledge includes 298 Open Access journals", according to Thomson Scientific. We also have the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ), reporting (March 8, 2006) that it includes 2089 OA journals.

What, however, are 'Open Access Journals'? Do they exist? What's the definition? Journals that publish OA articles, or journals that publish only OA articles? Same question with regard to Open Access Publishers.

What does exist is publishers who publish journals in which open access articles appear. Not necessarily all the articles in a journal and not necessarily all the journals in a publisher's portfolio.

Why the distinction? Well, by focussing on exclusively OA journals or OA publishers one risks overlooking - no, one overlooks - all the open access articles that are published in journals that are not exclusively open access. This was already foreseen in the Bethesda Statement on Open Access Publishing, in which the definition of open access carries the following rider: "Open access is a property of individual works, not necessarily journals or publishers."

There is a fundamental issue here. Thinking in terms of 'journals' can be rather misleading, simply because of their extreme variability. (In the UK one measures one's weight in 'stones'. Stones? Any stones? No, of course not, stones with a defined weight.) It can mislead to notions such as 'OA journals are less/more prestigious than non-OA journals', or 'one is used less/more than the other'. It can mislead to the perceived importance of notions such as 'average price of journals', or even 'journal impact factor'. Journals are 'tags', 'labels', classifying, organising, tools. Lumping them and counting them and averaging them is fine as long as we realise that what we are concocting is a potage that may actually obfuscate rather than elucidate what the situation is regarding the constituent 'molecules' of scientific discourse: the articles.

Jan Velterop

Tie rituals

2006-02-22T11:55:00.000Z

Minutes after I posted 'Rituals', I saw this: What's the point of a tie?

JV

Rituals

2006-02-22T10:59:00.000Z

On the Liblicense list, Heather Morrison addresses 'The Religion of Peer Review' and refers to an article by Alison McCook: Is Peer Review Broken? The Scientist, 20:2 (February 2006), page 26.

To ask if peer-review works is probably asking the wrong question. It's a ritual, not a scientific method. It's a cultural expectation. Just like wearing a necktie is in certain circles, and nobody asks whether they actually work. (They would, as a noose.) And to expect peer-review to act as an almost infallible filter is wholly unrealistic. If it is a filter of sorts, it is one that helps journal editors to maintain their journals' biases. If peer-review were a method of only ascertaining an article's scientific validity, we would neither need, nor have, so many journals. One in every discipline would suffice. But the ritual reaffirms bias. The bias of 'quality', for instance, or 'relevance' (though the question could be asked to what, exactly?). And why not? Just as bio-diversity is a good thing, 'publi-diversity' may be as well.

She also asks, in the same posting, if there is "scientific proof that current methods [of publishing] will work?", saying that the "...current approach has [...] led to the serials crisis." She has a point, asking about proof, as the question is being asked of open access publishing, so why not of traditional publishing. But talking about rituals, isn't it a ritual, too, to complain about prices increasing faster than library budgets? Nothing remotely scientific about it. There would be a point if library budgets had broadly stayed in line with research spending. But they haven't. Isn't it an article of faith that the budgets "could not conceivably rise" in line with the production of scientific literature?

Open access publishing, in addition to all the other benefits it has, also keeps the cost of scientific literature in line with research spending. This isn't, of course, proven yet, let alone scientifically. But how would one prove it without doing it in the first place? The proof of this pudding, I'm afraid, can only be in the eating, as the saying goes.

Jan Velterop

Too many papers, too many journals

2006-02-21T16:16:00.000Z

The complaint is already an age old one, but it still does rear its head regularly. There is a thread on the Liblicense-list called 'Does More Mean More?' and David Goodman expresses concern about journal fragmentation on the SPARC OA Forum (SOAF).

Are the complaints and concerns justified? In just about every walk of life there is more information than one can comfortably deal with; the phenomenon is not limited to the academic world. It is pretty much a fact of life. There is not much one can do about the existence of ever more information in science, except perhaps to halt scientific inquiry and research. Few would argue that it would make sense to go down that route. So the question is: how much scientific information should be made available, i.e. published?

I think it should be as much as possible. There is no place for 'quantity control' of information. Perhaps someone can come up with a way to control duplication, that would be useful, but true duplication doesn't occur all that often, is my impression. There are many articles that could broadly be called 'confirmatory', but they do usually introduce a different angle, population, dataset, or other variable. And if they don't, and just verify research carried out by others, that, too, serves a purpose. If anything, not enough information is being published. Think about clinical trials, for instance, or negative results, which aren't published anywhere near often enough, even though their publication could save a lot of research effort, time and money. Often enough, negative results are simply not being published because journals won't have them.

But 'information' is not the same as 'amount of articles'. We all know about 'salami-slicing', when a given amount of information is published in a number of articles, where putting them in just one article would be perfectly reasonable and possible. This is of course a consequence of the 'publish-or-perish' culture that has taken hold of science.

'Publish-or-perish' may be considered necessary in the scientific 'ego-system' to drive research forward, but it does have some uncomfortable side-effects, of which driving up the cost of maintaining 'the minutes of science' is perhaps even one of the less serious. It also drives a major inefficiency in the system, namely the quest for getting associated with the highest possible Impact Factor (IF). (I say 'associated with', because having an article in a journal with a high IF doesn't mean that the article in question will have a high number of citations. The IF is an average - many articles have lower citations and many have higher ones -, the IF a historical figure - past performance is no guarantee for the future -, and the IF covers a specific time-window - cycles of citations are rather different in different areas -, and yet it is 'attached' to an article the minute it is accepted for publication.) Whence the inefficiency? Well, it used to be so that articles were mostly submitted to a journal that was considered most appropriate by the author, but the quest - or ego-systematic necessity, perceived or real - to get associated with the highest possible IF has lead to speculative submissions to journals with such an IF. This in turn has lead to overburdening of peer-reviewers, high rejection rates, time-wasting, increasing risk of ideas being purloined or priorites snatched, and general inefficiencies to do with the consequent 'cascading' of many articles through the system.

As for the idea that there should be too many journals, that's a different kettle of red herrings. In the modern world, journals are just 'tags', 'labels' that are attached to articles. These labels stand for something, to be sure, and not just for quality and relevance, but many also indicate a school of thought or a regional or national flavour. As such they are an organising mechanism for the literature, a location and stratification method if you wish. As fragmentation is not a problem in itself anymore with the availability of aggregators in most areas and link-outs to the actual articles on the Web, only extreme serendipitous browsing might conceivably suffer. We have to realise, however, that this was only ever possible in journals with the widest scope (serendipitous browsing that is facilitated by having journals with just a wider - as opposed to the widest - scope is also achieved by following a few more specialist journals rather than one wider title, and that's not a materially greater chore with electronic alerting systems in place). Inevitably the likes of Science and Nature are always mentioned, even though they represent a tiny proportion of the total literature and scaling up their publishing formula to the whole - or even a substantial part - of the literature is simply not possible, and hasn't been for at least the last 50 years or so due to the sheer weight of published research.

A curious argument is to blame journal speciation on the problem of vanity-publishing, as David Goodman does. Curious, because he is right, although I suspect he might not have the same reasons in mind as I do. In my view, just about all journal publishing is vanity publishing. Or maybe I should say 'career-advancement publishing'. Forced upon researchers by the tyranny of 'publish-or-perish', impact factors, and all manner of research assessment exercises.

Was Einstein right when he said that "not everything that counts can be counted and not everything that can be counted, counts"?

Open access publishing, paid for out of research funds, as a cost of research, does not solve all these issues, but it does allow more information to be published while the cost of publishing stays in line with the research effort. I wonder if the problems of more articles and journals discussed on the email lists mentioned would be seen in the same light if the link between the amount of literature that is generated and its cost were restored.

Jan Velterop

Does more mean more?

2006-02-09T09:48:00.000Z

This is a discussion thread on the Liblicense list, and David Goodman just posted an exceptionally good comment. Here it is, in full:

Perhaps the need for publishers to be in the filtering process at all, goes back to the days of print journals which had a fixed number of pages that they could afford to print. There was then an absolute need to select, and an obvious justification for author fees for excess pages. There was also a great temptation
to accept too many articles, and many had a waiting list, sometimes of more than a year.

Especially after the web developed, such waiting lists very often led to the extensive circulation of what we now call "Accepted preprints," to the extent that the actual publication is a merely a matter of record, every one interested having already read the preprint. Having read the preprint, most of us are most unlikely
to also read the article.

Now essentially all science journals are published in both print and electronic, and this page limitation no longer applies to the electronic version, though there is still a limitattion in processing costs. Many publishers are in fact publishing
immediately the final electronic version, such as Elsevier just announced. Everyone (with a subscription) can now read the final version right away, and the print will appear eventually.

If the electronic version were the only version, and if gold OA were adopted for paying "on behalf of the author" then a publisher could afford to publish everything that met the quality standard of the journal. The quality standard of the journal
could be determined in a number of ways.

When I was still a molecular biologist, the most prestigious journal for a article after Nature was PNAS, and printed anything sent by a Member of Academy, (there was also a page charge.) One did not want to ask one's friendly Member except for the very best work, and that was the QC.

Members themselves could publish what of their own work they pleased, and were given an allowance for page charges. Their having been chosen Members was the QC. (This is why the eccentric work of some senior scientists was published in PNAS.) The practices have been progressively tightened very much since then, but page charges remain.

There is little aggregation of content in PNAS, and none at all in Nature or Science, or, within medicine, in JAMA. This too is a possible publisher's function, but not a necessary one. Reading every article that cites one's own, is a widely used filter and removes the need for an aggregator. The widespread use of both
toll and non-toll A&I services is not journal dependent, and such services in their printed form have had a useful role for centuries.

We should all welcome the current acceptance of change in the publication system--from Peter and from other publishers.

Dr. David Goodman
Associate Professor
Palmer School of Library and Information Science
Long Island University
and formerly
Princeton University Library

The joys of choice

2006-02-04T13:52:00.000Z

In the previous post I questioned the validity of ‘number of journals’ as proof for the amount of publishing activity in open access. A follow-up question I have is this: why is all this a priori ‘proof’ necessary in the first place? What ‘proof’ is needed to show that open access articles are accessible to more people? It is in the very concept! What ‘proof’ is needed to demonstrate that paying an amount upfront for the service of publishing is worse, or better, for its economic sustainability than paying for subscriptions? The proof of that particular pudding is simply in de eating.

Any choices between open access and non-open access will be made by those who actually have the choice: authors and their (financial) backers. The latter (the backers) can even impose that choice. Publishers can't – and shouldn't. The only thing to do for publishers – be they societies or independent outfits – is to offer the choice.

Jan Velterop

Sizing up opponents

2006-02-04T13:26:00.000Z

A slight sense of despondency overcame me when I saw in a number of recent posts on various discussion fora about open access, that the fallacy of the number of journals being a measure of size (of activity or the amount of article published in a certain area) is alive and well. The fallacious argument is used by members of the pro-open-access camp as well those from anti-open-access circles. The pros are saying “look how many open access journals there are!” and the antis “look how few open access journals!”, either of them proving or disproving exactly nothing.

The number of articles different journals publish in a given period of time can vary by an enormous amount – a factor of 100 is relatively common. There are plenty of journals that publish 20 or fewer articles a year, and quite a number that publish 2000 or more.

Even if journals were more uniform in size, counting open access journals to establish how much peer-reviewed material is available with open access is flawed. It is with very good reason that the Bethesda Statement says “Open access is a property of individual works, not necessarily journals or publishers.” Some BioMed Central journals have non-open-access articles and an increasing number of journals will publish open access material (e.g. Springer’s 1250 odd titles and a growing selection of OUP's and Blackwell’s titles, among others).

Number of articles is a better measure than numbers of journals, but what seems more important to me is the number of opportunities that authors have to publish with open access. They have grown dramatically over the last year.

Jan Velterop

Open access: facts and experiments

2006-01-22T17:16:00.000Z

In a discussion on the liblicense list, Joe Esposito recently made an interesting comment :

"... the perception that [OA has a great deal of momentum] is causing some publishers to move more aggressively into OA "experiments" than they might otherwise if they had their facts straight."

Though perhaps many facts are probably there as a result of experiments, he is specifically referring to recent measurements of the number of articles that are available with OA, which seem to support the notion that there is a growing momentum.

I can reassure him. Publishers (at least the ones I regularly talk to), do not 'aggressively' move into experiments. Quite the contrary, is my impression. The 'facts' he is talking about are also rather difficult to establish without experiments, so any confusion about them may be caused precisely because publishers do not move more aggressively into experiments.

What are some of the facts at hand that justify experiments?

1. A very small proportion of the officially published peer reviewed scientific literature is freely available with open access;

2. Much of the officially published peer reviewed scientific literature that is in some way available with OA, is OA only in the unofficial authors' versions;

3. Being peer reviewed by and officially published in scientific journal is what gives most articles their 'authority';

4. This 'authority' also cleaves to unofficial authors' versions on open repositories, when the bibliographic reference of the official article in the journal is given;

5. The economic viability of traditionally published journals is almost entirely dependent on income from the dissemination function of the official publishing process (i.e. on the subscription income);

6. Unlimited dissemination is precisely what authors can achieve without the official publishing process and without appreciable cost, just by depositing their articles in open repositories.

Based on these facts, one could perhaps envision a set of experiments taking place. Before describing the experiments, though, I am making a few assumptions: a) conditions remain such as the social imperative 'publish or perish' and the need for peer review, and b) desiderata remain such as the economic self-sustainability of journals and the stability of the system.

Experiments that could be done:

I. Co-existence
Can a journal thrive economically on subscription income if the total content is available with open access? Variables: author's version vs. published version; immediate OA vs. delayed OA; different disciplines.

Given that such experiments measure the willingness of librarians and their superiors to maintain paid subscriptions in the long term, even though all content is freely available with open access, they can potentially take a long time to yield conclusive results, if ever.

II. Article charges
Can a journal thrive economically solely on processing charges per article, paid by or on behalf of the authors, and thus deliver full and immediate open access? Variables: different fee levels; different disciplines.

Such experiments measure the willingness of funders and institutions to re-direct the money that is now spent on behalf of the readers on subscriptions, to spending it on behalf of the authors on article processing charges, thereby gaining the benefit of open access. At the same time they measure the willingness of institutions to accept a redistribution of the costs for scientific literature in a way that may make these costs higher than they were for research-intensive institutions (more authors) and lower than they were for teaching-intensive ones (more readers).

III. Transitions and hybrids
Can a journal thrive economically by giving Academia (via the authors) the choice, per article, of either paying article charges for those to be published with open access, or transferring exclusive rights to the journal so that the cost of articles to be published traditionally can be recovered via subscriptions?

IV. Scale
This is perhaps feasible as thought experiment. If I, II, or III succeed on the scale of one or a few journals, can it succeed on the scale of the majority of peer reviewed scientific journals? Thoughts and comments are eagerly awaited.

Jan Velterop

Open fight against AIDS

2005-11-22T06:42:00.000Z

Fight AIDS@Home is a project to harness the power of personal computers to create a 'super' computer working to develop new potential drugs to fight HIV. Individuals can donate idle time on their computers - you need to download the drug design software AutoDock, from here, it will be running in the background on your computer and studying the structure of molecules that could be candidate drugs against HIV. Visit the FightAIDS@Home website for more info about this project.

SPARC OpenData

2005-10-28T04:48:00.000+01:00

SPARC has launched a new list, to discuss issues around access to digital data associated with scientific research: SPARC OpenData email discussion list - "The list’s emphasis is on defining the scope of Open Data and collecting examples of desirable and undesirable practices."

According to the founder and moderator of the list, Peter Murray-Rust, “The emerging Open Data movement shares many goals with the Open Access and Open Source movements, but encompasses its own distinct issues that are in need of examination by the scientific community. This list is intended to facilitate that important discussion.”

To sign up: send an email to SPARC-OpenData-on@arl.org

For more info: http://www.arl.org/sparc/opendata/index.html

Open Access and the developing world

2005-10-27T19:54:00.000+01:00

The Salvador Declaration on Open Access was written on the 23rd September during the ICLM in Salvador de Bahia, Brazil. It voices the developing world's perspective on Open Access to scientific research:

"Scientific and technological research is essential for social and economic development.
Scientific communication is a crucial and inherent part of the activities of research and development. Science advances more effectively when there is unrestricted access to scientific information.
More broadly, open access enables education and use of scientific information by the public.
In a world that is increasingly globalized, with science claiming to be universal, exclusion from access to information is not acceptable. It is important that access be considered as a universal right, independent of any region.
Open Access must facilitate developing countries' active participation in the worldwide exchange of scientific information, including free access to the heritage of scientific knowledge, effective participation in the process of generation and dissemination of knowledge, and strengthening the coverage of topics of direct relevance to developing countries.
Developing countries already have pioneering initiatives that promote Open Access and therefore they should play an important role in shaping Open Access worldwide."

and urges governments to "make Open Access a high priority in science policies including:

requiring that publicly funded research is made available through Open Access;
considering the cost of publication as part of the cost of research;
strengthening the local OA journals, repositories and other relevant initiatives;
promoting integration of developing countries scientific information in the worldwide body of knowledge"

Peter Suber and Subbiah Arunachalam review the situation of open access in the developing world in a paper to be published in the InfoPaper of the World Summit on the Information Society in Tunis in November. They answer the big question "Doesn't the digital divide interfere with these plans? [of providing OA to boost research in developing countries]"with: "Yes and no. First, internet access is improving rapidly in many developing countries and equipment costs and connectivity charges are coming down. Second, we should work now on the content side of the divide in order to take full advantage of every increment of progress on the hardware side. Primarily, this means educating scientists about the benefits of OA and persuading universities, libraries, funding agencies, and governments to adopt OA-friendly policies."

In support of PubChem: towards open chemical information

2005-07-20T08:50:00.000+01:00

Public release date: 18-Jul-2005

Contact: Juliette Savin

juliette.savin@biomedcentral.com

44-207-631-9931

BioMed Central

XML architecture provides a new way of publishing chemical information

An XML-based approach to the communication of chemical information in the biomedical literature would prevent the loss of crucial information and facilitate the re-use of data - and would be easily achievable using existing open tools and resources. A commentary article published today in the Open Access journal BMC Bioinformatics argues that it is time chemistry followed in the footsteps of bioinformatics and structural biology and moved towards the creation of an open semantic web facilitating access to chemical information.

In the article, Peter Murray-Rust, from the University of Cambridge, UK, and John Mitchell and Henry Rzepa from Imperial College London, UK argue using three case studies that conventional methods such as cutting-and-pasting chemical information are time-consuming and introduce errors. The authors argue in favour an open XML architecture linking to connection tables or open databases such as PubChem, to identify chemical compounds mentioned in the biomedical literature. This comes as additional support for open chemical databases like the NIH's PubChem, which is currently at the centre of a legal battle between the NIH and the American Chemical Society (ACS). The ACS runs the very lucrative Chemical Abstracts Service and is directly threatened by public databases.

Murray-Rust et al. explain that an open XML-based architecture would provide a cost-effective and user-friendly way to publish chemical information.

Such a structure would avoid the loss of data - currently 80-99% of chemical information is never published due to the lack of a simple technical protocol to access it. It would make chemical information easier to read, save time, and would allow published data to be aggregated and re-used. Murray et al. recognise that implementing such as system might take time and money and might not be supported by all publishers. However "if publishers adopt these tools and protocols, then the quality and quantity of chemical information available to bioscientists will increase and the authors, publishers and readers will find the process cost-effective", write the authors. They add that most chemical information already exists in electronic format in the chemists' computers and could be converted into XML format very easily, without any loss.

Murray-Rust et al. used three recent articles containing chemical information, and published in journals of the BMC-series published by BioMed Central, as the basis for case studies on the usefulness of an XML-based tool for the identification of chemical compounds in biomedical literature.

Chemical compounds can be listed using connection tables and associated chemical structure diagrams, but also by structural information such as that provided by IUPAC-NIST Chemical Identifiers (INChI). They can also be found using open semantically free identifiers such as those provided by PubChem or based on their common names using Open lexicons; or by systematic chemical name. XML-based information embedded in the text of digitally published chemistry documents could refer to one or more of these, to help readers identify the compounds.

In their first case study, Murray-Rust et al. coded each molecule mentioned in the article in a simple conversion protocol: XML-based Chemical Markup Language (CML), giving the molecules their PubChem Ids. They estimate that the entire coding process took them the same amount of time as it would take a reader to look up the molecules in chemical databases. In addition to the PubChem ID, CML could contain the INChI identifier and meta-data for each molecule. For the second article, they show that, even using an automated system, looking for information about chemical compounds mentioned in the article takes around 45 minutes. This could have been avoided if the compound had been marked up and linked to connection tables and open databases. In the third article, the name of one compound had been misspelt and others were unclear. This made it difficult for text-mining robots to find information about the compounds, and not all the data needed was retrieved.

###

This press release is based on the article:

Communication and re-use of chemical information in bioscience

Peter S Murray-Rust, John BO Mitchell, and Henry S Rzepa

BMC Bioinformatics 2005, 6:180 (18 July 2005)

This article is available free of charge, according to BMC Bioinformatics' Open Access policy at: http://www.biomedcentral.com/1471-2105/6/180/abstract

In lieu of flowers

2005-07-18T10:33:00.000+01:00

A rather poignant open letter from Heather Morrison to the American Association of Cancer Research:

Dear Margaret Foti, CEO, American Association of Cancer Research,

According to the SPARC Open Access News of July 13, AACR is one of a group that has signed a letter on July 7 to Senator Arlen Specter, expressing "significant concerns about the National Institutes of Health duplicating private sector on-line publishing".

The banner at the top of your website this morning does not say: defending the interests of the private sector in the publishing industry.

What your banner says is quite different. It is "Saving Lives Through Research".

This is a noble reason for the existence of your association. My request is that AACR review its mission, and reconsider its position on the NIH Public Access Policy. I cannot see how such a review could possibly come to any other conclusion than that your mission compels you to fully support and participate in Public Access.

Change is difficult for anyone, and I have no doubt that the small changes needed for Public Access will be a little bit uncomfortable for your association. I urge you, however, to consider how many families, not only in the U.S. but throughout the world - have asked for donations to cancer research in lieu of flowers. How many have wanted to set aside their own comforts in bereavement to speed the research, so that others would be spared the agony that they and their loved ones went through. When so many are seeing the need to speed the research and placing it above their own comfort, surely your association can, too.

Surely you realize that the best way to "accelerate the dissemination of new research findings" - to borrow a phrase from your mission statement - is for cancer researchers to share their findings as openly as possible, as soon as possible. The ideal is to post the findings openly on the web, just as soon as the quality control process (peer review) is complete - generally before
publication. Imposing any delay, or any restrictions on dissemination, is contrary to your mission statement.

Your mission also says that you will "advance the understanding of cancer etiology, prevention, diagnosis, and treatment throughout the world." Outside the wealthy nations, there are many universities with no journal subscriptions at all; and, many places where lack of funds to purchase resources is a deterring factor to education, period. Participating in the NIH Public Access program clearly advances your mission. Lack of access is a factor in the U.S. too, of course; not all states are equally wealthy, and not all can afford all the journals for their university libraries.

Please share this message with your Board, and your members. If your basic mission has changed from saving lives to private sector profits, your mission statement needs updating. If your mission continues to be to accelerate cancer research, then you need to reverse your stance on the NIH's Public Access Policy, from opposition to enthusiastic support and
participation.

To facilitate dissemination and encourage other associations to consider their missions when thinking about open access, this is an open letter, copied to the SPARC Open Access Forum.

I congratulate the U.S. National Institute of Health and the U.S. Senate for their support for Public Access. This is one policy area where many, myself included, see the United States as providing an example of visionary leadership, which other nations would be well advised to follow.

best wishes,

Heather G. Morrison

Duelling Databases

2005-07-07T10:19:00.000+01:00

From The Scientist:
Can companies still make money selling genomic and molecular information?

Celera Genomics made hundreds of millions of dollars by selling access to its proprietary genome sequence information. But this month, Celera discontinued its database subscription service and made its 30 billion base pairs of genomic data of humans, rats, and mice freely available through GenBank, operated by the US National Center for Biotechnology Information.
Some see Celera's decision to exit the sequence business as proof of the adage that information wants to be free, and yet another sign that selling access to data is no longer a viable business model. "The trend is perfectly clear. It would be surprising to find any company setting up a business plan that was based on a subscription database of precompetitive information," says Francis Collins, director of the National Human Genome Research Institute and leader of the Human Genome Project, Celera's publicly funded rival in the race to sequence the human genome.

More (including about PubChem, CAS, et cetera)...

Free software for everyone in India

2005-06-30T09:59:00.000+01:00

India is expanding a government-led program to provide free, local language software to all of its citizens, as it tries to broaden computer use in the country.

The project was initiated by India's Ministry of Communications and Information Technology, which aims to take computing to the country's masses in the language they are most familiar with.

The CD contains productivity software such as a browser, e-mail client and word processor, as well as tools such as a dictionary and spell-checker. While many of the productivity applications are open source and run on both Linux and Microsoft's Windows operating system, some of the utilities are closed-source and run only on Windows. The software can also be downloaded at http://www.ildc.in/

More...

Microsoft and Apple

2005-06-30T09:14:00.000+01:00

Tangential to the topic of this Blog, but a delicious exchange on the CNI-Copyright list:

On 29 Jun 2005, at 22:55, Terry Carroll wrote:

On Wed, 29 Jun 2005, David Dailey wrote (about IP protected plants):

A wee bit of digging on the net tells me it is really neither copyright nor patent but plant law. Chapter 57 of Title 7 specifically deals with the 1970 Plant Variety Protection Act which provides legal intellectual property rights protection, to developers of new varieties of plants that are sexually reproduced.

Wow. I guess Microsoft could get a patent on an Apple, then.

Oh, wait, see Plant Patent no. PP14,757 at
:

Apple tree named 'Burchinal Red Delicious'

Abstract: A new and distinct variety of apple tree which originated as
a sport limb mutation of 'Wells and Wade cultivar' Oregon Spur.RTM. of
red delicious apple tree (U.S. Plant Pat. No. 2,816), characterized by
a more uniform deeper red color, developing much earlier than fruit of
other red delicious varieties, and having a thicker stem and longer,
deeper red leaf midvein.

Inventors: Burchinal; Robert (East Wenatchee, WA)
Assignee: Microsoft Corporation (Redmond, WA)
Appl. No.: 313685
Filed: December 6, 2002

(Actually, while this is a real patent and Microsoft *is* listed as assignee, the assignee listing appears to be a clerical error on the part of the office of the patent attorney whose does work for both the inventor Mr. Burchinal and Microsoft. See here... But it's a golden delicious mistake, if you'll pardon the pun.)

UK Funding Councils back Open Access

2005-06-30T08:33:00.000+01:00

Donald MacLeod in The Guardian
Wednesday June 29, 2005

Thousands of British academics in every subject from art history to zoology will soon be required to make their research freely available online, the UK research councils have announced.

The move flies in the face of government reluctance to offend the publishing industry and is a victory for proponents of open access to research findings. By making free access a condition of grants, the research councils, which control billions of pounds worth of funding, hope to give British research more impact worldwide as it is taken up and cited by other researchers.

University libraries will benefit from an easing of the financial pressure to acquire more, and ever more expensive, journals as scholars can consult research for free. Read more...

Also look here: Research Councils UK

The Tropical Disease Initiative

2005-06-27T20:38:00.000+01:00

The Tropical Disease Initiative (TDI) is a decentralized, community- wide, 'open source' alternative to drug development. A description of the project was published in PLoS Medicine in December 2004. For the moment it is really just an idea, with as its aim to fill gaps in drug research and development. TDI would opts out of the patent system by putting all data in the public domain straight away - it is an experiment in Open Science and we'd love to see it take shape and succeed. TDI has a website with a Wiki, in which the founding members of TDI discuss the project and exchange ideas. We'd love to get comments from supporters of projects such as TDI, as well as from anyone really against such initiatives. Anyone?

Past, Present, and Future of Research in the Information Society

2005-06-23T06:26:00.000+01:00

This event will examine the role of research and the production of knowledge in the information society, with special emphasis on developing areas of the world. “Past, Present, and Future of Research in the Information Society” (PPF) is a three day conference that immediately precedes the second phase of the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS), in Tunisia (November 2005). Read more

The lateral view

2005-06-19T14:53:00.000+01:00

From a creative ACS member, who likes PubChem:

By the way, as far as I can see all this, with the ACS/CAS irrational, unfounded, undocumented, unsubstantiated comments about being put out of business, PubChem would still be pretty much unknown to the chemical community. I think PubChem should give Bob Massie the "2005 PubChem Marketing Award" for all his efforts. Considering that PubChem can't advertise or market, the ACS/CAS efforts really need to be properly acknowledged.

Biting the dust?

2005-06-17T16:02:00.000+01:00

From: Information World Review - London,UK - June 2005

US Congress fails to back ACS

House Appropriations Committee refuses to censure or pull funding plug on NIH PubChem operation
By Bobby Pickering 16 Jun 2005

The American Chemical Society has put a brave face on a snub it has received from the US Congress, which has refused to take its side in a dispute with the National Institutes of Health (NIH).

At the eye of the storm is a freely accessible database of small organic molecules, PubChem, made available as part of the NIH Molecular Libraries Roadmap Initiative.

The ACS claims the database competes with its Chemical Abstracts Service (CAS) publishing operation, from which it made the majority of its $410m revenues last year.

In a statement, the ACS said: "The NIH has created a mini-replica of the CAS Registry, and a replica poised to expand. That replica will, over time, pose an insurmountable threat to CAS' survival for the very reason that it is a taxpayer-supported resource."

But critics were quick to point out that the ACS, as a not-for-profit organization, has itself benefited from substantial tax concessions over the years, as well as an establishment grant from the National Science Foundation, awarded in the late 60s/early 70s.

However, the ACS maintained in a published statement that "the fact that NSF turned to CAS to develop the Registry in no way justifies NIH replicating it today".

Supporters of PubChem insist that the two resources are entirely of different scale, with a CAS Registry budget at around $260m compared to PubChem's $3m annual budget, and CAS staff numbering 1,300, while PubChem has a mere 13.

The ACS had hoped to put pressure on the NIH through Congressional supporters, but last week the House of Representatives' Appropriations Committee approved the annual NIH budget with only the slightest admonishment that both parties work together. The committee said it "urges NIH to work with private sector providers to avoid unnecessary duplication and competition with private sector chemical databases."

The ACS declined the opportunity to speak to IWR this week, but issued a statement that it is "very pleased that the House Appropriations Subcommittee expressed concern about PubChem replicating private scientific information services. We will continue to work diligently with NIH toward a collaborative model and solution."

Yet it is now difficult to see how it can develop a dialogue with the NIH and work towards a compromise solution, having already adopted such heavy-handed tactics.

The ACS is noted for taking a bullish stance over the threat to its revenues from open access publishing. In December 2004, it filed a complaint in the US District Court of DC against Google for alleged trademark infringement of the CAS SciFinder Scholar brand and for "unfair competition".

The US organisation is also under fire from some parts of the academic community for the levels of remuneration it awards employees. The not-for-profit organisation paid out 46% of its total expenses of $404m in salaries and fringe benefits last year, with its executive director receiving a total compensation package of over $1m.

ACS-NIH; 'The Chronicle' weighing in

2005-06-16T19:48:00.000+01:00

With this article (subscribers only):

Quote (from Francis S. Collins, director of the National Human Genome Research Institute at the NIH): "Precompetitive data, data of fundamental significance that doesn't justify strong intellectual-property protection or secrecy, this is data that wants to be public," he said. Scientists have reached a "pretty strong" consensus about this issue."

(For a limited time, the full article is accessible to non-subscribers)

"Chilling effect"

2005-06-14T21:23:00.000+01:00

Letter from the University of California Academic Council to:

The Honorable Ralph Regula
Chairman, Subcommittee on Labor, Health and Human Services,
Education, and Related Agencies
Committee on Appropriations
United States House of Representatives
Rayburn House Office Building, Room 2358
Washington, DC 20515-6024

Dear Chairman Regula:

I am writing on behalf of the University of California’s Academic Council and its Special
Committee on Scholarly Communication. We want to express our enthusiastic support for
continuation of PubChem, an immensely useful project underway at the National Center for
Biotechnology Information (NCBI) in the National Institutes of Health (NIH). It has come to
our attention that during the markup of the FY 2006 Labor-HHS Appropriations bill the
Subcommittee may consider language that would restrict PubChem.

In discussion with colleagues at the University of California and elsewhere we have come to
understand that PubChem represents a vital next step for NIH in leveraging its investment in the human genome project, filling in the picture of small molecules. It is a powerful tool that enables medical researchers to harness NIH-funded and other public resources about chemical structures so that they can advance development of new medications. By simply clicking on links, researchers navigate through the range of information resources—for example, searching on a chemical name, viewing its structure in PubChem, and finding articles that refer to it in PubMed Central. By ensuring that publicly financed knowledge is broadly accessible on the Internet in this way, NIH is enhancing the return on public investment in research and stimulating further innovation by public and private scientific enterprises. As you may know Nobelist Richard Roberts and other renowned chemists have spoken in detail about these benefits of PubChem
(see http://osc.universityofcalifornia.edu/news/acs_pubchem.html#positions).

Equally important, we believe that PubChem is an important initiative in the NIH’s program to
provide broad access to scholarship. The NIH is providing much needed leadership to accelerate the advancement of knowledge through experiments in the rapid delivery of the results of science and scholarship to the widest audience at the lowest cost possible.

It is our understanding from press reports that the American Chemical Society (ACS) has called for NIH to unreasonably restrict PubChem. ACS claims that PubChem competes with its Chemical Abstracts Service (CAS), a well-known, high-quality, and expensive database, to which only about 1,000 U.S. universities can afford to subscribe. However, there is evidence that PubChem and the CAS databases are, and can continue to be, complementary, not duplicative.

As you know, PubChem is a critical component of NIH's Molecular Libraries initiative, which in turn is a lynchpin of the NIH strategic Roadmap to enhance health care and speed delivery of new medical treatments. Indeed, the directors of the NIH institutes unanimously rank the Molecular Libraries initiative as the highest priority of the NIH Roadmap. It is a mistake to endanger the promise of the Roadmap by imposing restrictions on PubChem that fundamentally undermine its utility. There is simply too much at stake.

We also are worried about the chilling effect that the ACS campaign might have on creative
attempts to increase access to science. We wonder whether the Society’s position has been
thoroughly vetted with its membership. A number of eminent library and public interest
organizations have expressed their belief that science and the American public are well served by continued development and maintenance of PubChem. University of California faculty members have authored or co-authored over 2,300 articles in ACS publications in the last 2 ½ years alone. Seventy-two UC faculty hold ACS journal editorial positions and a number serve on ACS committees and sections. We are encouraging these faculty members to discover the facts, discuss the issue with colleagues, and let ACS know their preference.

Meanwhile, we are grateful for your leadership on the recent NIH Public Access Policy, which
offers immense potential to advance science. In the same vein, we encourage you to support
PubChem and the broader Molecular Libraries initiative at NIH.

Thank you for the opportunity to share our perspectives with you.

Sincerely,

George R. Blumenthal, Chair
UC Academic Council

ACS to lawmakers: "rein in the NIH!"

2005-06-14T17:52:00.000+01:00

From FCW.com

Publishers make appeal to lawmakers in NIH dispute

BY Aliya Sternstein
Published on Jun. 13, 2005

American Chemical Society officials are asking lawmakers to rein in those responsible for a federal database of molecular structures because they say it will cut into the society's income from the sale of similar information.

The National Institutes of Health created PubChem in 2004 as part of NIH's Roadmap for Medical Research initiative to speed the discovery of new medical treatments. PubChem has a list of names and structures of 850,000 chemicals.

ACS officials fear that PubChem will duplicate the society's Chemical Abstracts Service (CAS). NIH and ACS officials have exchanged letters, meetings and phone calls since 2004. Now because of an impasse in those discussions, ACS officials are urging lawmakers to put restrictions on NIH's development of PubChem.

"ACS believes strongly that the federal government should not seek to become a taxpayer-supported, competitive scientific publisher," ACS said in a statement last month. "By collecting, organizing and disseminating small-molecule information, whose creation it has not funded and which duplicates CAS services, NIH has started, rather ominously, down the path to unfettered scientific publishing."

Brian Dougherty, senior adviser to the chief strategy officer at ACS, said the society suggested forming a technical working group to set parameters for PubChem. "NIH has been unwilling to put anything in writing," Dougherty said. "We think this is going to put us out of business if it keeps growing and no parameters are set."

NIH officials said they are confused about why ACS insists that PubChem will harm the society's business interests. "What is in common is a relatively small number of compound structures and names," said Christopher Austin, senior adviser to the translational research director at the NIH Chemical Genomics Center at the National Human Genome Research Institute.

"ACS has gotten hung up on this," he said. "CAS has 25 million structures. PubChem has about 850,000. PubChem is a subset. Not everything that is in CAS is relevant to biomedical research."

NIH officials said narrowing PubChem's focus could slow medical progress. "It would have profoundly negative effects on this new paradigm of making medical discoveries," Austin said.

Larry Thompson, chief of the communications and public liaison branch at the National Human Genome Research Institute, said biomedical researchers could discover biological relevance in any small molecule. "That's why it's called research," he said. "No one knows what molecule will be the next blockbuster drug."

Thompson said NIH officials have no desire to undercut CAS, and they are willing to work with the society to ensure the viability of both information services.

A cauldron bubbles; (over?)

2005-06-09T21:49:00.000+01:00

A freely accessible public database of chemical information, produced by a division of the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH), is at the center of a controversy over publicly subsidized data competing with commercial information providers. The American Chemical Society (ACS), said to be the largest scientific society in the world, has voiced strenuous objections to the creation and availability of PubChem. The PubChem database provides information on the biological activities of small molecules. It is designed for medical researchers and is a component of NIH’s Molecular Libraries Roadmap Initiative. Since it was unable to resolve the controversy directly with the NIH, ACS has met with members of Congress about the issues. Read more...

NIH overstepping its function, or CAS failing to adapt?

2005-06-06T08:35:00.000+01:00

In "Database Debate," C&EN noted controversy over the National Institutes of Health's database of chemical structural information, PubChem (April 25, page 5). The article reports statements by officials of Chemical Abstracts Service that "PubChem has overstepped its function" in producing this publicly accessible online database.

I presume that NIH would like to associate CAS Registry Numbers with the substances in this database and that CAS not only has refused to provide them, but views PubChem as a turf incursion.

The world has changed since CAS was the best source for abstracts of the chemical literature. We no longer require leagues of abstract writers, since most journals require submissions to include an abstract. Even interpreters, although still essential, have a diminished role with the advent of language-conversion software.

Our library has dropped its subscription to hard-copy Chemical Abstracts and funnels requests for literature searches through a single subscriber. For most purposes (in a health department), services from other search providers such as Ovid and ISI overlap what would be provided by CAS, and the expense is one we can do without.

In general, the American Chemical Society has done an admirable job of adapting the literature under its control with the advent of the Internet. Most, if not all, issues of the society's journals are accessible to subscribers under terms that compare favorably with those offered by other publishers.

This enlightened use of the Internet is not entirely true of CAS, which jealously guards every bit of information under its control. It could be argued that the CAS number is the most important unique descriptor of a substance and is thereby public currency which should be granted freely. It is a datum that can provide a link to all scientific literature for a substance and thus will bring people (not just chemists) to the ACS publications pertinent to their needs; these people could purchase that information for a small fee.

CAS has the ability to provide a database, not unlike PubChem, and the question becomes not one of NIH overstepping its function, but of CAS failing to adapt to potential new markets for its information. I pose this question: Why won't CAS provide me, a dues-paying chemist, with the information that PubChem is offering to the public? A follow-up question is this: Why won't CAS open to every person that portion of its database which would increase the accessibility of the chemical literature? This would not only benefit the public, but also the publishers of that information.

Robert G. Briggs

Albany, N.Y.

A game named "Sue"

2005-06-03T21:23:00.000+01:00

Those who have followed the activities of ACS and its Chemical Abstracts Service division over the years will recall that on 7th June 1990 the online service Dialog made a 36-page complaint about ACS to the Washington DC Federal Court, alleging unfair competition, and seeking $250 million damages.

The action related to CAS' Chemical Registry Structure Database, and followed the withdrawal by CAS of the full Registry Structure File from Dialog on 1st January 1990, thereby denying Dialog the ability to offer graphical substructure searching on its service (a feature available on a competing online service jointly operated by CAS).

Dialog argued that CRSD "has no substitutes and thus constitutes a separate and distinct market" which CAS was monopolising in contravention of anti-trust laws.

Amongst the 10 claims made by Dialog were five alleging monopoly practices, one alleging unfair competition, and one relating to a subsidy of $15 million plus that had been provided by the National Science Foundation at the time the CAS database was being created, and which Dialog claimed obliged ACS to license all data at a fair price. This obligation had been
breached by CAS, alleged Dialog, both by its withdrawal of connection table data essential for graphical structure searching, and because CAS had for some years refused to licence its abstracts of the chemical literature.

The Dialog lawsuit also claimed that its revenues from the CAS database had fallen 45% between 1984 and 1988, partly due to steep rises in CAS licence fees and royalties, and partly because of data being withheld.

ACS responded to the lawsuit by countersuing on issues of accounting. As I recall the case was eventually settled out court.

Richard Poynder
www.richardpoynder.com