Scientific publishing has problems. While libraries are unable to bear the ever increasing costs of journals, researchers at most universities struggle to access some of the articles they need. They are unwilling or unable to pay $50 for viewing an article, which often turns out to be useless. More reasonably prized pay-per-view variants seem not to materialize [1]. Pressure to publish in prestigious journals became so big that the authorships can be bought [2]. The Nobel prize winner Randy Schekman even called for a boycott of what he calls "luxury journals", which prompted Nature to issue a press release stating that "the research community tends towards an over-reliance in assessing research by the journal in which it appears, or the impact factor of that journal." The numerous and prominent supporters of the Declaration on Research Assessment now openly attack the use of impact factors to evaluate research.
Open access might resolve some of these problems. The idea is that researchers make the results of their research openly accessible on the web. By now, several funding agencies require that results originating from projects funded by them must be published in this way. This approach sounds simple, but simple things can be made terribly complicated. Posting an article on one own web page, like the one here, would not work. The principal argument raised against this "green route" is the missing quality assurance through peer review. A non-trivial aspect is how to find such articles, as proper indexing of such decentralized content by search engines is not straightforward, even though Google Scholar handles this job surprisingly well. This problem could be remedied by posting on centralized preprints serves, whereby arXiv being the most popular one, especially in the physics community. Still, peer review is missing. While physicists seem not to have major problems with that, they finally also rely on regular, peer-reviewed journals publish the posted preprints. Surprisingly, most physics publishers swallowed that pill by now. In other communities (e.g., chemistry, biology, geology) this approach is out of question, and scientific work becomes only worthwhile after a peer review and publication in journal run through a publishing house. Obviously, publishers do not work for free. The "gold" route has been proposed as the best solution, whereby the author pays a publication fee of the article, and the entire journal is then freely available on the web. Unfortunately, the "gold" option degenerated though a surge of predatory publishers, whose aim is not to publish science, but rather to collect the fees. The "platinum" route offers an open journal without publication fees. However, this model needs a (moderately) rich uncle to run the publishing house, but as arXiv shows, this model can be sustainable. Universities, societies, or funding agencies could also assume the uncle's role. Publishers prefer the "hybrid" model, where a journal offers certain articles as open access, while others not. In this case, the author pays for the publication of the open access article, while the library pays for the subscription of the journal. Some funding agencies are boycotting publishing houses practicing such "double dipping", in spite of the existence of cost-neutral models (e.g. gold-for-gold program). These questions and pitfalls are well discussed in a recent book [3].
The trouble starts here. Slowly but steadily, the university researchers drift into this mess. In principle, they are highly motivated to make our articles openly accessible, since they suffer by restrictive publisher distribution practices most. However, their main occupation is doing research and teaching, and they do not have time to dwell into the finesses of various types of open access licenses, or figure out for which journal one is allowed to post a preprint on their website, or rather a reprint after a given embargo period. The researchers also live in their specific scientific communities, so they would like to maintain, more or less, the publishing channels they have been using in the past.
Within my community, "green" is out of question, since it is not reviewed. My research group is currently experimenting with "green" open access "essays", which actually can have a substantial number of downloads. However, I would not even dare to include them in my regular publication list. I do not know of any "platinum" journal in our field either. All that means either to continue publishing in the traditional journals or to go open by spending money. My guess is that our laboratory will be spending $5000 each year to make some (not all) our articles open access. Where does this money come from? Well, from our current research budget. We will probably travel less and buy fewer test tubes. We are still lucky, as we can spend some funds on that. When we make our research papers openly accessible, that's surely worth the money.
But what do you do, if you cannot afford this luxury? Well, you stick to the traditional publishing system. But within the current situation, the richer labs will increasingly publish open access, hoping for more visibility, and eventually for more citations. More visibility finally means more research funding and the possibility to attract better coworkers. Finally, the richer will get richer, and the poor poorer. Already now, our scientific system preferentially rewards the larger and wealthier institutions, eventually unfairly so, and as a consequence they are growing at the expense of the smaller ones. Open access will further accelerate this process.
What happens with all articles, which are not open access or the ones published earlier? Subscriptions will be still needed to access those, and typically the publishers charge extra for access of the so-called back-files. One might also argue that this is only a transitory situation, until the copyright expires. However, this will be a long wait, currently almost a century. Moreover, some people work hard to prolong your wait even further. But even when the copyright expires, access may not be granted. Just try to access some of the scientific publications that were published about one century years ago. Most publishers do not make such content accessible. Some of this work is made openly available by various organizations (e.g., Internet Archive, Gutenberg, Royal Society), but the task seems nontrivial, and probably gives a taste how difficult the situation will remain in the future. Here the universities or the funding agencies could start to play a key role, as they are in a good position to run the necessary web servers at minimal costs and over long times. In any case, the transition process to the open literature will surely be an expensive and long process.
To have all scientific literature openly available would be fantastic. We should strive for it, even with all its problems. The current system should not be maintained. When we try hard, open access might become a reality for the next generation of scientists.
Michal Borkovec, February 23, 2015
References
[1] Martin Fenner, Why there is no iTunes for science papers, 2015, link
[2] Hvistendahl M., Science, 342, 1035-1039, 2013, 10.1126/science.342.6162.1035
[3] Weller M., The Battle for Open, Ubiquity Press, 2014, 10.5334/bam (open access).
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