ENHANCING SCHOLARLY COMMUNICATION AND SCIENTIFIC DISSEMINATION
Frederick J. Friend
OSI Open Access Advocate
JISC Consultant
Honorary Director Scholarly Communication University College London f.friend@ucl.ac.uk
The spirit of culture is the spirit of freedom. Culture begins with the germination of seeds of the spirit, growing in soil open to the elements, unrestricted, growing wild. Culture is at birth an individual plant reaching for the light, wishing to grow as tall as its strength will allow. In community the plants of culture grown from the seeds of individual spirits will either flourish as part of a flowering of common aspirations, or they will be stifled and choked by the aspirations of those who would dominate, as in a forest some plants are choked by the dominance of the taller trees. Culture begins with spiritual freedom; its development depends upon the social environment within which it grows. In his book
“Free Culture” 1 Larry Lessig describes how technology and the law are being used to choke the development of culture that should be free, “free” that is in the sense of “free speech” not “free beer”. He makes clear that “a free culture is not a culture without property”, but a culture in which creators are able to create without seeking the permission of the powerful to build upon past creativity.
Larry Lessig’s book is primarily about artistic and musical culture but the situations he describes are equally valid in respect of academic culture. The story of academic research illustrates both the growth and the stunting of cultural development, growth where researchers are free to build upon the creativity of their predecessors and stunting where awareness or re-use of past research is restricted for whatever reason.
Academic research starts with the inspiration of an individual researcher, and for research in the humanities often continues as an individual process, the seed of inspiration growing as the researcher explores original sources and develops conclusions which will lead to the publication of research results. Even the individual humanities researcher, however, builds upon the work of previous researchers, and new creativity is sparked from the research of predecessors. For the researcher in science or medicine, the individual inspiration is contained or channelled at an early stage, as most scientific and medical research is conducted by teams of researchers, still contributing their own individual inspiration but risking the stifling of that inspiration as part of a community. The benefit to balance the risk is that an individual’s inspiration may grow as a result of contact with other individuals. Research communities can encourage cultural growth as well as stifle it.
All academic research should be disseminated to a wider community, and most researchers welcome that opportunity to display the fruits of their work. Some would argue for a place for “pure” research conducted for its own sake, which can lie hidden from view, but if academic research is to benefit community it has to be revealed. More worrying is the attitude that some research should deliberately be hidden from view for political or economic reasons. Governments may wish to hide from public view research results they find embarrassing or which contradict their policies. Commercial interests may wish to hide from public view research results which will damage the sale of their
1 Lawrence Lessig “Free culture: how big media uses technology and the law to lock down culture and control creativity” Penguin Press, 2004 (available without payment at http://www.freeculture.cc/freeculture.pdf
).

products, for example if tests on use of a drug show that it can be dangerous. This potentially very sinister aspect of ownership of cultural works comes through the right of an owner to determine the level and nature of dissemination. The owner of a work can decide not to disseminate it at all, or to restrict its dissemination through price, licensing conditions or technological protection measures. An owner may decide to restrict dissemination not only for economic benefit, as publishers do, but also for ideological reasons. In the United States, members of the “religious right” have wished to restrict the availability of texts supporting the Darwinian theory of creation. Whatever the truth or otherwise of various views of Creation, cultural growth in respect of human understanding of the world in which we live is not progressed through such restrictions.
An open debate depends upon open access to information. Freedom to grow ideas depends upon freedom of access to ideas.
Commercial interests may also restrict or delay access to research results in order to gain financial advantage from the publication process, as we have witnessed recently in the lobbying of publishers to secure a 12-month delay in the deposit of research articles in the National Institutes of Health database. A key question is this: who owns the fruits of academic research? Behind the issues addressed in this paper is the question of ownership. Many aspects of modern society are determined on the issue of ownership.
As individuals we aspire to own property, including intellectual property, but how does individual ownership relate to community ownership? In respect of academic research funded by tax-payers, we need to explore the relationship between individual ownership of creative works and community ownership resulting from the sponsorship of research.
If the entire community decides that academic research is important for its well-being, and is willing to provide the resources to enable academic research to be undertaken, surely the community can claim as much ownership as the individual conducting the research? In North American and European countries ownership brings a bundle of rights, and the rights the individual creator should have as a result of her or his creativity need to be identified in relation to the rights the community should have as a result of the community commitment to academic research.
The most common right ownership conveys is to economic benefit. In the case of some cultural activities, such as the performing arts, this economic benefit can be vital to the individual creator, but in respect of academic research the economic benefit is at best indirect, i.e. through benefits to career prospects rather than through immediate financial reward. In modern society the most direct economic benefit from academic research goes not to the individual creator – who usually receives no payment for her or his work
- but to commercial agencies. Some commercial publishers make substantial profits through publishing the work of individual researchers funded by the world’s taxpayers.
This economic benefit can be justified if publishers add sufficient value to the dissemination of academic research. Publishers do add value to creative work, but increasingly this value is being questioned in relation to its cost to the community, at least in respect of the publication of scientific and medical journals. How much should the world’s libraries have to pay for the role publishers play in the peer-review and editing of the results of academic research? Is there a way of disseminating research results which provides greater value to the community? Open access advocates argue that both academic repositories and open access journals are more cost-effective and generate greater benefits to human society. Open access to publicly-funded research enables more use by more people, allowing more research to be built upon completed research and stimulating more creativity from existing or new authors.

Unless checked through competition from open access outlets, the control exercised by commercial publishers over academic publishing could stunt future cultural growth.
Access to publications derived from academic research is controlled through price, licensing conditions and technological measures in order to protect the profits enjoyed by the publishers. These controls prevent many potential readers from gaining access to the results of academic research, and thus limit the ability of other researchers to build upon research already undertaken. Cultural growth depends upon a healthy relationship between individuals working in the same cultural field. Cross-pollination of ideas cannot occur when barriers are placed between creators of ideas. One example of the effect of barriers set up by publishers is the effect upon student learning. If students can only read the texts their libraries can afford to purchase, their creativity will be built upon what they can read and not on what they could read. The open availability of all academic texts over the Internet would enable students to develop their own creativity from a far wider base of knowledge.
Another economic benefit is created through the registration of a patent. It is one of the ironies of life that the word “patent”, derived ultimately from the Latin word for “open”, should in modern society have come to represent all that is not open, all that is restricted by commercial and legal constraints. The immediate response of the owner of a patent to a fellow-worker is not to welcome the flourishing of an alternative growth but to attempt to stifle the flourishing. “Do not” rather than “do” is the terminology of the modern patent-holder. Patents are seen as an economic benefit and not as a stimulus to further growth. They protect existing creation rather than stimulate future creation, and because patents are registered for a wide range of creations in every aspect of life, their effect upon individual and community development is profound. The well-publicised effect upon developing countries of drug patents illustrates the failure to improve human health that can result from over-protection of patents. More generally the way in which society balances the needs of patent-holders with the needs of those who can use and develop the innovation of others will determine the kind of society we wish to become.
This is not to argue against the principle of patent registration but to argue for more discussion of the effect of patents upon cultural development. As communities we need to find ways of allowing legitimate economic benefit from the registration of a patent while not stifling future inspiration building upon past discoveries.
The concern about the current ways in which research is disseminated and the wish to adopt new means of scholarly communication is being expressed by communities right across the world. The developing countries know that the current publishing system not only restricts their access to research conducted in the richer countries but also reduces the opportunities their own researchers have of being read and cited outside their own countries. Excellent research from developing countries cannot get published in a world of scholarly communication dominated by the high-impact factor journals. Researchers in developing countries cannot develop ideas from research published in those journals because they cannot afford to purchase them. Arrangements to supply free or low-cost copies of expensive journals only meet a very small part of the demand. Researchers in richer countries may in relative terms have greater access to research publications but too often see the words “access denied” against a journal article they need for their research. We will never know what research breakthroughs have not been made or have been made more slowly because of those words “access denied”. The publisher’s answer that individual article purchase is always available is no solution on a large scale, and anyway should not be necessary when the world’s taxpayers have paid for the research to which access is denied.

The problems with the current scholarly communication system are all too clear. The transmission of text, images and data over the Internet provides an opportunity for the academic community to make changes in the way in which research is disseminated, changes which are not only technological but also cultural and economic in nature. The road from the old world to the new has to be travelled in collaboration with all stakeholders in scholarly communication. Change has to begin with the policies adopted by universities and research funding agencies, encouraging authors to disseminate their work in ways which enhance access and benefit human society. Authors then have to take responsibility in choosing to publish with publishers who have user-friendly copyright policies and business models that open up access instead of restricting access. Authors also have a key role in depositing their work in an open access academic repository. These changes are beginning to take place in many countries in the world, as the advantages of the new open access model are recognised, but further collaboration between universities, authors and publishers is needed if the advantages are to be realised. The contribution of academic research to human society can increase if a sharing environment is created in which the seeds of inspiration can grow and flower without restriction, researchers having free access to the inspiration of earlier authors.
The benefits to humankind from changes in scholarly communication and scientific dissemination are huge. We have the opportunity to make those benefits real.