Open Access: where you publish
makes a difference
Ginny Barbour
Senior Editor PLoS Medicine
vbarbour@plos.org
www.plosmedicine.org
Göteborg, Dec 9, 2004
www.plos.org
Today’s circulation-based
publishing model
What’s wrong with the current model of
medical publishing?
It is based on a print model of publishing
So:
Can only read articles if you or your library have a
subscription to the journal
Libraries are struggling to provide access to all
required journals
Even if patients could read them, many wouldn’t be
able to understand them
ie, access to knowledge is restricted both physically
and intellectually
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The internet provides the means to
revolutionise publishing
Cost-effective
Global distribution
Ease of searching
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Why market forces don’t work
Each paper is unique and every
journal a monopoly
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Papers published from Göteborg in
PubMed 2004
224 papers
6 had full access to free text
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Why does access matter?
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Do you think patients and their families
should have free access to the latest
peer-reviewed medical research?
over 100 000 doctors on
www.doctors.net.uk
2329 responses
Yes
67 % No
33 %
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“In the Middle Ages, clergymen
denied lay people access to
bibles.
As society develops, information
about all sorts of issues becomes
easier to obtain and medicine
should be no exception.”
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Why market forces don’t work
Researchers and physicians are
cushioned from the real cost of
publication
Funding for research and research
output often split between different
organisations and funding agencies.
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£
Subscription journals
Gov
Funders
Institutions
Researcher
£
Publisher
£
Pay-per-view
£
Library
£
Subscription
Reader
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Things are getting worse: the journals
crisis
300
Journal
prices
250
150
100
CPI/inflation
50
0
19
8
6
19
8
7
19
8
8
19
8
9
19
9
0
19
9
1
19
9
2
19
9
3
19
9
4
19
9
5
19
9
6
19
9
7
19
9
8
19
9
9
20
0
0
20
0
1
20
0
2
Percent change
200
-50
Journals
Purchased
1986-2002
Year
Source: Association of Research Libraries
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What is open access?
Free, immediate access online
Unrestricted distribution and re-use
Author retains rights to attribution and
copyright
Papers are deposited in a public online
archive such as PubMed Central
Bethesda Principles, April 2003
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Copyright: © 2004 Moorthy et al. This is
an open-access article distributed
under the terms of the Creative
Commons Attribution License, which
permits unrestricted use, distribution,
and reproduction in any medium,
provided the original work is properly
cited.
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Benefits of open access
Every paper has the maximum possible impact
Authors reach largest possible audience
Readers (scientists, physicians, teachers,
public) have access to entire literature
Allows text and data mining and analysis that is
not possible unless full text and data are in one
information space
An effective publishing market
market forces keep prices in check
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£
Subscription journals
Gov
Funders
Institutions
Researcher
£
Publisher
£
Pay-per-view
£
Library
£
Subscription
Reader
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Open access journals
Researcher
Publishing
is the final
step in a
research
project
£
Gov
Funders
Institutions
£
Publisher
Public
Digital
Library
Reader
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Practicalities of open access
Electronic submission
Peer review - electronic
Publishing paid for via one off
publication charges on acceptance;
$1500 at PLoS
Edited and placed on line
Whether 1 or 1 million people access
the article, there are no further
charges
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Myths about open-access
“I can’t pay, so I can’t get published”
Fee waiver, JISC, Institutional memberships
“It’s vanity publishing”
Peer review is the same or better than
conventional journals
“These journals are new and won’t have good
enough impact factors”
ISI believes that OA journals are at least
comparable to subscription ones; the increased
availability of articles ensures they are cited if
appropriate
“Funders won’t support me if I publish in an OA
journal”
The Wellcome does, other are thinking about OA;
if you’re concerned, ask them directly!
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What is the Public Library of
Science?
A nonprofit organization of scientists
committed to making the world’s
scientific and medical literature a public
resource by driving a change in the
publishing model to open-access
publishing and generating tools for
mining the scientific literature and for
making it comprehensible to the nonspecialist
Nine editors; offices in San Francisco and
Cambridge, UK
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PLoS Founding Board of Directors
Harold Varmus
PLoS Co-founder and Chairman of the Board
President and CEO of
Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center
Patrick O. Brown
PLoS Co-founder and Board Member
Howard Hughes Medical Institute
& Stanford University School of Medicine
Michael B. Eisen
PLoS Co-founder and Board Member
Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory
& University of California at Berkeley
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First journal - October, 2003
High volume
traffic - more
than a million
unique IP
addresses
Increasing
submissions
Attracting high
number of
citations (ISI)
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PLoS Biology - one author’s tale
“The bottom line is that what got me the job is
the PLoS (Biology) paper on the Plasmodium
falciparum transcriptome! As you know, it is
extremely difficult to get noticed among a slew of
applicants for any position and certainly an
academic one. Since this is actually the only
major publication from my postdoctoral work, it is
what carried me in the door.”
Manuel Llinas, Princeton University
PLoS Biology author
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Barriers to open access
Publishers - commercial success
Scientific Societies - publishing supports
them
Authors - submitting to a new journal
Funding agencies - don’t fund publishing
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Changes over the past 12 months:
funders
Support from funding agencies (Wellcome Trust,
HHMI, MPI, DFG, INSERM, CNRS)
Outside analysis by Wellcome Trust:
“The current market structure does not operate
in the long-term interests of the research
community.”
NIH is waking up:
“The status quo is not an option.”
--Elias Zerhouni, August 2004
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Changes over the past 12 months:
politicians
UK Parliamentary enquiry:
• The House of Commons Science and Technology
Committee recommended that all UK higher
education institutions establish electronic
repositories where their published output can be
stored and read, free of charge.
• encouraged further experimentation with OA
models
EU Parliamentary enquiry under way
Appropriations Committee within the US
House of Representatives
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Access to scientific information
“It is not for either publishers or academics to
decide who should, and who should not, be
allowed to read scientific journal articles. We
are encouraged by the growing interest in
research findings shown by the public. It is in
society’s interest that public understanding of
science should increase. Increased public
access to research findings should be
encouraged by publishers, academics and
Government alike”
HoC S&T Committee Report, July 2004
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Changes over the past 12 months:
publishers
Open access publishers increase journals; BMC,
PLoS
Some publishers experiment with open-access
(PNAS, Development, NAR, Nature, Wiley)
Elsevier allows personal and institutional archiving
(not PDF of journal article, not deposition in
public repository or wider dissemination )
Cell Press will make archive free
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Changes over past 12 months:
scientists
Pioneering authors and other supporters vote with
their feet and support open-access journals by
submitting papers and serving as editors and
reviewers
Universities rebel against publishers’ squeeze
(UCSF, Cornell)
Open-access summits, sessions, seminars
Remember: scientific publishing is a service
industry; you need to push for the service you
want
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Authors care about
increasing access
“Faced with the option of submitting to
an open-access or closed-access
journal, we now wonder whether it is
ethical for us to opt for closed access
on the grounds of impact factor or
preferred specialist audience.”
Costello and Osrin. The Lancet 2004; 364:24
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What makes a journal what
it is?
Editorial process, production quality
(what we can control)
Content (what the scientific community
can control)
This is your opportunity to create the
journals, and the publication model,
that is best for your community
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"We just can't throw away a business
model developed by Thomas Edison
in 1880 based on `Trust me, it will
work.' "
Dr. Alan I. Leshner, chief executive AAAS
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For if writing is placed on skins, it can last for a thousand years; but
print, when it is a thing of paper, how long will it last?'
Johannes Trithemius 1492 (de laude scriptorum)
the world has got along perfectly well for six thousand years without
printing, and has no need to change now.
Filippo di Strata (Dominican Friar late 15th C)
The internet is a revolutionary technology
but can be hard to predict
There is no reason anyone would want a computer in their home.
Ken Olson, 1977
President, chairman and founder of Digital Equipment Corp.
640K ought to be enough for anybody.
Bill Gates, 1981
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"Surely the combination of uncertainty
and hope associated with this
unproved model is vastly superior to
the certainty and hopelessness that
surrounds the current and
failed commercial one,"
Daniel Greenstein, University of California Librarian
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Each author's choice of where to publish adds
another brick to a complex publishing
structure. Your choice may have a dramatic
effect on how accessible, or inaccessible,
your research is. Your decision can limit or
facilitate others' digital access to significant
research.
The stakes are high for all.
Stanford University Lane Medical Library
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There are lots of inequalities in science,
medicine and health care.
Access to the latest peer-reviewed research
results doesn’t have to be one of them.
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The NIH debate hots up
“NIH intends to request that its grantees and supported
Principal Investigators provide the NIH with electronic
copies of all final version manuscripts upon acceptance for
publication if the research was supported in whole or in
part by NIH funding.
Six months after an NIH supported research study’s
publication—or sooner if the publisher agrees—the
manuscript will be made available freely to the public
through PMC. If the publisher requests, the author’s final
version of the publication will be replaced in the PMC
archive by the final publisher’s copy with an appropriate
link to the publisher’s electronic database.”
NIH Press release Sep 2004
The APA has attacked the NIH's core argument: that
taxpayers should have access to taxpayer-funded
research.
The Alliance for Taxpayer Access (ATA) comprised of libraries
and patient and health policy advocates support the plan
25 Nobel Prize winners have signed a letter to Congress
supporting the plan.
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U.S. House Appropriations Committee adopted
a set of recommendations that the National
Institutes of Health (NIH) put a condition on
its research grants so that articles based on
NIH-funded research would be deposited in
PubMed Central (PMC), the NIH's openaccess digital library. In most cases, the
articles would not become OA through PMC
until six months after publication in a
journal. But if NIH paid any part of their
publication costs, they would become OA
immediately.
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Medical Publishing
(or dirty little secrets)
Who are the authors?
− Physicians and Scientists
Who reviews the work?
− Physicians and Scientists
Who has to pay to read the work?
− Everyone, including…the authors and reviewers
Who benefits?
Er…
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STM publishing is BIG business
$ 9 billion/year
6,000 journal titles
740 articles per day (270,000/year)
Publishers
Commercial: Elsevier, Springer, Wiley,
Blackwell
University Presses: OUP, CUP
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Societies