Here's the text of my short essay from the inaugural issue of BioMed
Central's _Journal of Biology_. Free registration is required to read the
essay at the journal site. --Peter.
HTML edition
http://jbiol.com/content/1/1/3
PDF edition
http://jbiol.com/content/pdf/1475-4924-1-3.pdf
Journal of Biology
http://jbiol.com/
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Abstract
None of the advantages of traditional scientific journals need be
sacrificed in order to provide free online access to scientific journal
articles. Objections that open access to scientific journal literature
requires the sacrifice of peer-review, revenue, copyright protection, or
other strengths of traditional journals, are based on misunderstandings.
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Open access to the scientific journal literature
Open access to scientific journal articles means online access without
charge to readers or libraries. Committing to open access means dispensing
with the financial, technical, and legal barriers that are designed to
limit access to scientific research articles to paying customers. It means
that, for the sake of accelerating research and sharing knowledge,
publishers will recoup their costs from other sources.
Open access to the scientific journal literature would be hard to defend if
its obvious advantages required sacrificing any of the obvious advantages
of traditional journals. But it turns out that no sacrifice is necessary.
Open access to scientific journal literature is compatible with all of the
major advantages of traditional journals; here, I identify eight.
Peer review
Researchers could put their own articles on their home pages and bypass
peer review, but that is not the kind of open access advocated by the
Public Library of Science [1], the Budapest Open Access Initiative [2] or
BioMed Central (the publishers of Journal of Biology) [3]. All the major
open-access initiatives agree that peer review is essential to scientific
journals, whether these journals are online or in print, free of charge or
'priced'. Open access removes the barrier of price, not the filter of
quality control.
Professional quality
The quality of a journal is a function of the quality of its editors,
referees, and authors. All three variables are independent of the journal's
cost (free of charge or priced) and delivery medium (electronic or print).
Scientists of the highest caliber can edit, review, and write for
open-access journals. Impact factor and other measures of quality are also
price- and medium-independent. Whether a given open-access journal realizes
the quality of which it is capable is not assured, of course, just as it is
not assured for traditional journals.
Prestige
Prestige is not the same thing as quality. If quality is real excellence,
then prestige is reputed excellence. Put this way, it may seem that quality
matters but prestige does not. But the incentive for authors to submit
their work to a given journal is much more a function of the journal's
prestige than its quality, at least when the two differ. By providing this
incentive to authors, prestige tends to boost quality, just as quality
tends to boost prestige. The trouble is that most open-access journals are
new. Although new journals can be excellent from birth, prestige takes time
to cultivate. Hence, most of the prestigious journals today are
traditional. But even today the number of prestigious open-access journals
is growing; and in any case, all the factors that create prestige are
price- and medium-independent. So, it is only a matter of time before the
open-access journals have earned prestige roughly in proportion to their
quality (or at least have the same disparity between these two that
characterizes their well-established traditional counterparts).
Preservation
So far, paper is the only commonly used medium that we know can preserve
texts for hundreds of years. There are many creative methods emerging for
storing digital texts electronically with at least the security of paper;
the PADI project (Preserving Access to Digital Information) has assembled a
good review of them [4]. The only problem is that it will take hundreds of
years to monitor the outcome of present-day experiments. But we don't have
to choose between insecure storage and retreat from the digital revolution:
the short cut to preservation is to print digital texts on paper.
Individual researchers can make printouts for their own use, and journal
publishers can print entire issues, either for routine sale or specifically
for deposit in long-term archives. Preservation in the digital era will be
as good as paper, just as it was before the digital era.
Intellectual property
Open access is compatible with copyright as long as the holder of the
copyright consents to open access. The fact that most copyright holders
want to restrict access to paying customers has created the illusion that
all copyright holders want this, or that copyright requires payment. This
is not the case. Copyright law gives the rights holder the authority to
decide - but most rights holders are profit seekers whose interest lies in
controlling access, distribution, and copying. But in their role as authors
of journal articles, scientists are not profit seekers and their interest
lies in dissemination to the widest possible audience. For this purpose, it
doesn't matter whether scientists retain copyright of their own articles or
transfer the copyright to an open-access journal or repository. Copyright
assures authors that authorized copies will not mangle or misattribute
their work. And the fact that the holder of the copyright consents to free
access sharply separates this kind of open access from what might be called
'Napster for science'.
Profit
Open-access publishing is compatible with revenue, and even profit, just as
it is compatible with a non-profit business model. For example, BioMed
Central is a for-profit publisher. Publishers adopt open access not to make
a charitable donation or political statement, but to provide free online
access to a body of literature, accelerate research in that field, create
opportunities for sophisticated indexing and searching, help readers by
making new work easier to find and retrieve, and help authors by enlarging
their audience and increasing their impact. If these benefits were
expensive to produce, they would nevertheless be worth paying for - but it
turns out that open access can cost much less than traditional forms of
dissemination. For journals that dispense with print, with subscription
management, and with software to block online access to non-subscribers,
open access can cost significantly less than traditional publication,
creating the compelling combination of increased distribution and reduced
cost. The revenue of an open-access publishing house cannot come from
subscriptions or licenses: that would violate the barrier-free nature of
open access. Instead of charging readers or their sponsors for access,
BioMed Central charges authors or their sponsors a fee for dissemination;
its revenue consists of these dissemination fees plus proceeds from the
sale of add-ons and auxiliary services.
Priced add-ons
An open-access journal gives readers access to the essential literature
without charge. But this is compatible with selling an enhanced edition, or
other products and services, to the same community of readers. A scientific
journal might sell 'add-ons' and auxiliary services such as current
awareness, reference linking, customization ('My Journal'), or a print
edition. Revenue from these add-ons may offset, or even exceed, the cost of
providing open access to the essential literature. One of BioMed Central's
most alluring auxiliary services is Faculty of 1000 [5], a recommendation
service harnessing a network of disciplinary experts to recommend the best
new work in a large number of biomedical specializations.
Print
Open access is free online access, and is perfectly compatible with other
kinds of access to the same content. A publisher of an open-access journal
might lose money by producing a print edition of the same content, and this
is one reason why some publishers might elect not to create a print
edition. But a publisher might decide to sell a print edition for cost to
those who need it, or prefer it, while serving most constituents through an
online open-access edition. Since the open-access edition can generate at
least as much revenue as is needed to cover its costs, and priced add-ons
can generate even more, publishers need no longer see the print edition of
a journal as the economic centerpiece of the enterprise. And of course,
open access is compatible with printing copies for the purpose of long-term
preservation, and compatible with users printing individual articles
through their browsers.
I don't know why these eight desiderata of traditional journals all begin
with the letter P (if we turn 'quality' into 'professional quality' and
fudge with 'intellectual property'). But it does tend to make the virtues
of open access easier to remember: if we adopt open access, we needn't
sacrifice any of the eight Ps, and we get open access to boot.
References
1. Public Library of Science [
http://www.publiclibraryofscience.org]
2. Budapest Open Access Initiative [
http://www.soros.org/openaccess/]
3. BioMed Central [
http://www.biomedcentral.com]
4. PADI - Preserving Access to Digital Information
[
http://www.nla.gov.au/padi/topics/18.html]
5. Faculty of 1000 [
http://www.facultyof1000.com/]
Editors' Note
Peter Suber is Editor of The Free Online Scholarship Newsletter
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/ and has no commercial or other
relationship with BioMed Central or Journal of Biology.
Received on Tue Jul 02 2002 - 14:14:19 BST