Open Access - feasting on knowledge like manna

Yes, yes, we know it's been a while since Schmatler and Waldhead graced these digital pages with our sagely words of wisdom, but after the last series of articles we needed to take some time out to smell the roses and think about what big topics to tackle next. We actually had a great escape plan in place to get us out of the old age home, but then Waldhead tripped on the catheter tube, and the plan, but thankfully not us, went out the window. Some think he did it on purpose, because he felt guilty about leaving the lovely iConvent ladies without anyone to keep an eye on them to ensure they don't get into too much mischief. Well, okay, so maybe we didn't want to be left out of the mischief either. Anyway, we have decided that the next topic to come under our bespectacled scrutiny is the wild world of academic and scientific publishing and the term "Open Access". Now we realise that many other people in the Commons movement (especially the long beards in the Science Commons who are possibly even more eccentric than ourselves) are actively involved in this field but we couldn't understand anything they were saying (e=mc square and so on) and decided to put things into plain and simple (and delightfully obscene) language. We are relying on the lab coats to jump in and comment should we miss something important in the translation.

Before we get into what exactly open access is, let's sit back in our rocking chairs, light up cigars and reflect on the sorry state of affairs that much of academic publishing is in these days. We were given an overview of all this by a lovely Dutch scientist who will remain nameless, and she explained that basically scientists do all the work but then pay someone else to get access to the published results. This had us gawping incredulously that such an arrangement exists and is accepted by the people publishing within it. It also made us wonder why we did not come up with this ourselves. Last but not least, it left us feeling embittered at the thought of how our tax money ends up flowing in some very strange directions. So, in a nutshell, here is how the current publishing system "works" for publicly funded research...

It starts off with the government getting a wad of money in the form of taxes, some of which it decides to spend on research by funding academic institutions (usually universities), research councils (which may in turn fund universities) and the like. These institutions then spend the money on the research itself as well as various related overhead costs (like athletic teams and cheerleaders). Years pass and the researchers beaver away and do all their impressive data gathering and analysis and eventually reach a point where they want to publish their findings to the world. Bearing in mind that the research was funded by the public, one would expect that the findings would be easily and freely available to all so that it could be used by governments to formulate policy, by other researchers to improve their knowledge and so on. But no - far from it! What happens next is that the researcher submits their work to a journal (which is just another name for a magazine but scientists invented a different word for it so as not to be confused with Cosmo). The journal then makes sure that the work undergoes peer review - this involves other scientists reading over the work and offering criticism. Here things start to look a bit strange as these "peers" are normally not paid for the reviews and often end up doing this during "work time", and as most of them are themselves researchers being funded by grant money, this is another avenue down which the tax money trickles. The peer review step is vital to ensure the quality of the work so we are not suggesting it should be skipped, but we are pointing out that it introduces further costs into this system which aren't often explicitly taken into account.

So the journal has now received an article for which they have paid nothing, they have got a bunch of other people to review the article and perform quality control on it for free, and now for the cherry on top - they put the article in their journal and then charge a whole lot of money to anybody who wants to read it. This leads to the bizarre situation where a university has to pay in order to read the published results of its own research. This is where Schmatler, who had nearly nodded off, woke up with an indignant grunt and demanded to know whether he would also have to pay seeing as his tax money helped fund it. The answer is again, yes, the general public also have to pay to read the results of the research they indirectly funded. If you draw this situation out on a piece of paper and follow all the money flows, an awful lot of arrows end up pointing in the direction of the journal so it's quite easy to work out where in this system there is room for improvement. Obviously journals have their own costs to cover (printing, distribution, staff and so on) but surely there has to be a better way to do this?

The implications of these inefficiencies are not just theoretical, but keep relevant research out of the hands of those that need it. There are now so many journals and they are so expensive (with prices increasing faster than inflation) that many university libraries can simply not afford to subscribe to even just the ones they are most interested in. As a result, more and more people are realising something is wrong and are lobbying for "open access", and coming up with ideas on how to use technology and those nifty Creative Commons type licences to provide alternative models. The Internet has emerged as a publishing medium which by its very nature lowers the barrier to entry for would-be-publishers and reduces costs, while delivering a potentially huge global audience. In our next pamphlet in this series, we will look at some examples of innovation in publishing and dissemination of research.

We are not the only ones who would like to see some change - and we'll talk about some of the others next time - but we'll round things off with an example from an EU petition for "guaranteed public access to publicly-funded research results". One of the petition’s signatories, Richard J Roberts (a past Nobel Prize winner) sums it all up rather nicely when he says: "Open access to the published scientific literature is one of the most desirable goals of our current scientific enterprise. Since most science is supported by taxpayers it is unreasonable that they should not have immediate and free access to the results of that research. Furthermore, for the research community the literature is our lifeblood. By impeding access through subscriptions and then fragmenting the literature among many different publishers, with no central source, we have allowed the commercial sector to impede progress. It is high time that we rethought the model and made sure that everyone has equal and unimpeded access to the whole literature. How can we do cutting edge research if we don't know where the cutting edge is?” Quite.

Here ends our whirlwind tour of the sorry state of scientific publishing in 2008, obviously we have had to make some sweeping generalisations and have undoubtedly left out factors and issues, and this has hopefully offended at least a few people and the odd small nation (like France). Please feel free to voice your concerns by commenting on this article below, safe in the knowledge that your words will be publicly available and we won't charge you a cent for it (until we find out how to do that). Check in next time when we will be looking at the Open Access movement in more detail, and how up-and-coming publishing models are moving online to offer some light at the end of tunnel for researchers and those wanting access to the fruits of their labour.

tags: London and Johannesburg South Africa science-research

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