[Reader-list] Scientific publishing

[Rana Dasgupta]

Follow-up to another article i posted earlier about the move towards 
open availability of scientific information.

R


Scientific publishing
The paperless library

Sep 22nd 2005
 From The Economist print edition
Free access to scientific results is changing research practices

IT USED to be so straightforward. A team of researchers working together 
in the laboratory would submit the results of their research to a 
journal. A journal editor would then remove the authors' names and 
affiliations from the paper and send it to their peers for review. 
Depending on the comments received, the editor would accept the paper 
for publication or decline it. Copyright rested with the journal 
publisher, and researchers seeking knowledge of the results would have 
to subscribe to the journal.

No longer. The internet—and pressure from funding agencies, who are 
questioning why commercial publishers are making money from 
government-funded research by restricting access to it—is making free 
access to scientific results a reality. This week, the Organisation for 
Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) issued a report describing 
the far-reaching consequences of this. The report, by John Houghton of 
Victoria University in Australia and Graham Vickery of the OECD, makes 
heavy reading for publishers who have, so far, made handsome profits. 
But it goes further than that. It signals a change in what has, until 
now, been a key element of scientific endeavour.

The value of knowledge and the return on the public investment in 
research depends, in part, upon wide distribution and ready access. It 
is big business. In America, the core scientific publishing market is 
estimated at between $7 billion and $11 billion. The International 
Association of Scientific, Technical and Medical Publishers says that 
there are more than 2,000 publishers worldwide specialising in these 
subjects. They publish more than 1.2m articles each year in some 16,000 
journals.

This is now changing. According to the OECD report, some 75% of 
scholarly journals are now online. Entirely new business models are 
emerging; three main ones were identified by the report's authors. There 
is the so-called big deal, where institutional subscribers pay for 
access to a collection of online journal titles through site-licensing 
agreements. There is open-access publishing, typically supported by 
asking the author (or his employer) to pay for the paper to be 
published. Finally, there are open-access archives, where organisations 
such as universities or international laboratories support institutional 
repositories. Other models exist that are hybrids of these three, such 
as delayed open-access, where journals allow only subscribers to read a 
paper for the first six months, before making it freely available to 
everyone who wishes to see it.

All this could change the traditional form of the peer-review process, 
at least for the publication of papers. The process is organised by the 
publisher but conducted, for free, by scholars. The advantages afforded 
by the internet mean that primary data is becoming available freely 
online. Indeed, quite often the online paper has a direct link to it. 
This means that reported findings are more readily replicable and 
checkable by other teams of researchers. Moreover, online publication 
offers the opportunity for others to comment on the research. Research 
is also becoming more collaborative so that, before they have been 
finalised, papers have been reviewed by several authors. This central 
tenet of scholarly publishing is changing, too.