The Hindu : Opinion / Editorials : FOR ACCESS TO SCIENCE PUBLICATIONS

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Tuesday, Aug 03, 2004

Opinion

Opinion - Editorials

FOR ACCESS TO SCIENCE PUBLICATIONS

IN JULY, THE movement for `open access' got an important boost when the Appropriations Committee of the United States' House of Representatives and the Science & Technology Committee of the United Kingdom's House of Commons recommended measures that would help make scientific journal publications available more freely online. Scientists are judged by their research output. Each year they publish more than a million papers in approximately 16,000 science, technology and medical journals put out by more than 2,000 publishers worldwide. Commercial publishers have a dominant presence, with Reed Elsevier having a 28 per cent market share. There has been a growing feeling that neither the public, which pays for much of the science that is published, nor the scientists, who receive no payment either for their papers or for carrying out the `peer review' that ensures that quality is maintained in journals, benefit by limiting access to the papers through journal subscriptions. Not only are journals expensive; there is mounting criticism that journal costs have been rising exorbitantly. The Commons' S&T Committee noted that commercial scientific journal publishers enjoyed "substantially higher" profit margins than the academic, educational and professional publishing sector as a whole. And this was happening at a time libraries were obliged to cut down on journal subscriptions in order to keep within budgets. The problem is particularly acute for scientific institutions in developing countries such as India. Another issue that has been raised is that the larger public has little access to the scientific research that their tax money makes possible.

The limitations of the `subscriber pays' system has led some to attempt an `author pays' model for scientific journals. BioMed Central, which was established in 2001, has now over 100 journals in biology and medicine. [Public Library of Science] PLoS Biology, launched in October 2003, has the ambition of joining the front ranks of scientific journals; PLoS Medicine is to be launched soon. Prominent public and private research sponsors such as the Wellcome Trust in the U.K., the Max Planck Society in Germany, and the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS) in France, have announced their support for such a system of open access. But `author pays' publishing currently accounts for merely five per cent of the total journal market. The Commons' S & T Committee recommended that another alternative needs to be explored and supported — storing published work electronically in institutional archives. Just a month before the Committee published its report, Elsevier announced that scientists publishing in its journals would be allowed to post the final text of their articles on a personal or institutional website. Over 80 per cent of the journal publishers allow such archiving. The House Appropriations Committee suggested that copies of articles published from research supported by the National Institutes of Health be deposited within six months of publication in PubMed Central, a free digital archive of life science literature.

The Commons' Committee recommended that "all U.K. higher education institutions establish institutional repositories on which their published output can be stored and from which it can be read, free of charge, online"; and that "Research Councils and other Government funders mandate their funded researchers to deposit a copy of all of their articles in this way." It is an idea that India — where research is overwhelmingly supported by the Government — must adopt with conviction and enthusiasm. The software for such archiving is available free of cost and has been used to establish an e-print archive at the Indian Institute of Science. Not only must more such institutional repositories be established; scientists need to take the lead in ensuring that their papers are suitably archived.

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