Access to the literature and peer review
According to an article in Wired news on 14 March, the "$10 billion science publishing industry hasn't heard the last of a bill that would make publicly funded studies available for free. Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas) has pledged this year to resurrect the Federal Research Public Access Act (S.2695), which would require federally funded research to become publicly available online within six months of being published."
The Wired article refers to a news story in Nature of 24 January, which describes how a group of journal pubishers have employed a public relations firm to "take on" the 'open-access' movement, to help communicate that the issue is not only about preserving profits, as some of the open-access proponents claim. From Wired :
"Our core message is that we believe in the integrity of the peer-review system and the investments in it," said Brian Crawford, chairman of the executive council of the Professional and Scholarly Publishing Division of the Association of American Publishers. "It's inappropriate for the government (to interfere)."
Later in the article: "A few traditional subscription publishers are also experimenting with open access, making more research freely available after a certain amount of time or if authors pay extra fees. Nature, for example, is experimenting with a free journal and allowing some authors to pay to make their findings publicly available. And earlier this month, the Howard Hughes Medical Institute announced it would pay the large Elsevier publishing house to make institute-funded research available to the public for free after six months. The change will take effect on Sept. 1, affecting research published after that date.
"But it is already clear that a journal like Nature would struggle under an open-access business model," said David Hoole, head of brand marketing for the Nature Publishing Group. "We reject 90 percent of the articles we receive, and spreading the cost of peer review over the few authors who do get published would be very unfair (and would probably deter submissions). We [Nature] have approximately 1,000 authors, and 60,000 subscribers [a year]. It seems fairer to spread the costs over the subscribers." "
Comments
spreading the cost of peer review over the few authors who do get published would be very unfair
What costs? Last time I checked, we (researchers) were doing that work for nothing.
That is, of course, an unfair oversimplification. But so is pit-bull rhetoric about the "costs of peer review" and "government interference".
Posted by: Bill Hooker | March 16, 2007 03:33 PM
Note added by Maxine to Dr Hooker's comment: As has been independently reported in several studies providing details, the monetary costs of peer-review are far greater than those of writing the report, although the peer-reviewer is the most intellectually valuable part of the process of course (and costs some money!). The financial costs of employing editors, administration, tracking systems and so on are very high, particularly (as pointed out by David Hoole in the quote here) for a journal like Nature that experiences vast numbers of presumbmission enquiries, submissions, appeals, revisions, resubmissions and so on.
In addition to the peer-review process itself, but somewhat off-topic for this blog, a journal like Nature adds a great deal of value to the papers it publishes via secondary comments (eg News and Views), press releases and so on. All these issues have been debated in Nature's two online "access to the literature" debate, see sidebar of Nautilus, the author blog (http://blogs.nature.com/nautilus), including cost estimates, for those interested in a full account of the various views on this question.
Posted by: Maxine | March 16, 2007 05:54 PM