Open and Shut?

Elsevier needs to get out more

2012-01-26T08:56:00.001Z

As many in the research community will now be aware, a controversial piece of legislation was introduced into the US House of Representatives at the end of last year.

Known as the Research Works Act (RWA), or HR 3699, the proposed new law would reverse the Public Access Policy introduced in 2005 by the US National Institutes of Health (NIH). The NIH Policy requires that taxpayer-funded research is made freely accessible in the National Library of Medicine’s PubMed Central database within 12 months of publication.

The RWA would also prevent other federal agencies from imposing similar requirements on their funded researchers. As such, it poses a serious threat to the Open Access (OA) movement.

The bill is backed by the Association of American Publishers (AAP) and its Professional and Scholarly Division (PSP), which last December published a press release describing the bill as, “significant legislation that will help reinforce America’s leadership in scholarly and scientific publishing in the public interest and in the critical peer-review system that safeguards the quality of such research.”

In the past week or so a number of AAP members have publicly disavowed the RWA, including MIT Press, ITHAKA, Pennsylvania State University Press, California University Press, Rockefeller University Press, Nature Publishing Group, and the non-profit American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), which publishes the journal Science.

One one member of the AAP that does clearly support the RWA is Amsterdam-based Elsevier, and a few days ago the company emailed me the following statement explaining why:

Our support for the Research Works Act comes down to a question of preferring voluntary partnership with government agencies and other funders to promote access to research works, rather than being subjected to inflexible government mandates like the NIH policy, which don't take into account the needs of different journals.

One of Elsevier's primary missions is to work towards providing universal access to high-quality scientific information in sustainable ways. We support the bipartisan bill, which seeks to prevent US government policies, like the one imposed by the NIH, that mandate the dissemination of journal articles published and funded by the private sector. Elsevier and other publishers have embraced and nurtured a whole range of access options to ensure broad dissemination — author pays journals, delayed access, manuscript posting, and patient access, to name a few. We've worked constructively with a number of government agencies to develop new ways to expand access to journal articles reporting on, analyzing and interpreting agency-funded research. But like other publishers and societies we have always opposed the adoption or extension of the NIH policy, which restricts the author's freedom to choose where to publish and undermines the sustainability of journals published by the private sector. The legislation is an effort to prevent such unsustainable policies.

And it is Elsevier that is bearing the brunt of the outcry against the RWA, being widely vilified as “evil” and/or wicked.

But while there can be little doubt that Elsevier played an important role in the introduction of the RWA, and that it has donated money to the two lawmakers who sponsored the bill, it would be naïve to think that it is the only publisher that supports the RWA. Most of the others have apparently chosen to keep their heads down and let Elsevier take the hits.

For that reason Elsevier has become the primary target for critics of the bill. But why is the criticism quite so vitriolic? Partly, no doubt, because Elsevier is the world’s largest and most dominant subscription publisher, and has long been held to overcharge for its journals, and partly because it resisted Open Access for so long, and with such obduracy.

But I think there an important additional reason. Since Derk Haank departed Elsevier for Springer in 2003, the company has had no human face. In many people’s eyes, therefore, the company is viewed not so much as a publisher, but as a faceless, anonymous, and unheeding, moneymaking machine intent only on sucking the lifeblood out of the research community in order to feed the insatiable appetite of its shareholders.

For current purposes, I am not interested in exploring whether this characterisation of Elsevier reflects reality in any way, and I am not interested in the rights and wrongs of the RWA. I do, however, think that the company could do itself a big favour if it began to communicate more directly, and more effectively, with the research community.

If Elsevier is indeed now committed to Open Access, and if its publishing services really do — as it maintains — provide good value for money, it really needs to demonstrate as much. And to do that it needs to step out from its Amsterdam publishing tower and talk to people. Rather than lobbying behind closed doors, and communicating by means of press releases and statements, it needs to engage in more public discussion, and in open forums rather than private meeting rooms.

As it happens, the company has shown signs of moving in this direction recently. Earlier this month, for instance, Elsevier’s vice president of global corporate relations Tom Reller entered the lion’s den of a social networking site, and posted comments on the blog of Michael Eisen, a co-founder of OA publisher Public Library of Science, and one of Elsevier’s fiercest critics.

And last week Elsevier’s director of universal access Alicia Wise braved the torrid waters of the Liblicense mailing list to explain “how it is possible for Elsevier to be both positive about PubMed Central and the Research Works Act.”

Image from Bernt Rostad

But this needs to be just the start of the process. And it was in order to make this point that I sat down earlier this month outside the Mad Bishop and Bear pub in London’s Paddington station to speak with Reller and Wise (I bought my own coffee, so I don’t expect to find myself listed on a journalist’s version of MapLight).

In doing so, I discovered that neither of them has horns, and they did not breathe fire at me. Of course, there was much that we could not agree on, but we did have a civilised discussion, and I think both sides learned from the exchange of views.

One thing I repeatedly stressed is that Elsevier needs to get out more, and talk to people — not just to its shareholders and larger customers, but to the wider research community. If it doesn't do that, I believe, then it risks later discovering that commenting on Eisen’s blog, and posting to Liblicense, was simply too little, too late.

The good news is that Reller gave me a personal commitment that he would arrange for me to do an interview with someone from Elsevier, likely Alicia Wise.

All that remains is for him to call me with a date and time.

I am waiting for Reller’s call!

The OA interviews: Francis Jayakanth of India’s National Centre for Science Information

2012-01-25T08:27:00.001Z

Like members of all movements, OA advocates come in all shapes and sizes, and they are driven by a variety of different motives. Some have embraced OA, for instance, because they see it as a good business opportunity, some because they want their research to be more accessible, and so have greater impact, some because they expect it will save their institution large sums of money, and some simply because they believe that OA holds out the promise of providing considerable common good.

What is distinctive about the Open Access (OA) movement, however, is that it is a leaderless revolution. There is no formal organisation or foundation to represent it, and there is no official leader. For all that, OA is generally associated with a small group of high-profile Western-based individuals and organisations that are extremely vocal in their support of OA, and who have shown themselves to be very successful at attracting attention.

Since all movements have to promote themselves effectively this is clearly a good thing. However, it does mean that the contribution of the many “foot soldiers” of the movement can too easily be overlooked. These are people who do not shout about their activities, but simply go about the business of facilitating OA quietly and modestly.

And it is the foot soldiers based in the developing world that tend to be least visible — people like Francis Jayakanth, a library-trained scientific assistant based at the National Centre for Science Information (NCSI), the information centre of the Indian Institute of Science (IISc) in Bangalore.

Ah-ha

Jayakanth’s ah-ha moment came in 2001, when he first saw arXiv, the physics preprint repository. “I was very impressed with the concept of electronic pre-print servers, and I wanted to do something similar for IISc publications,” he explains, adding, “[M]ost of the research publications produced by IISc are locked up in high-impact, commercial journals. For those who cannot afford a subscription to the journals, the visibility and the potential impact of research produced by IISc and published in these journals is lost.”

Francis Jayakanth

The appeal of OA for Jayakanth, therefore, is that it is “the best way of ensuring that research produced in the developing world gets wider visibility.”

Keen to help Indian researchers achieve this wider visibility, Jayakanth became a dedicated and highly effective advocate for OA. More importantly, he determined to do whatever he could in a practical way to advance the cause of Open Access in his native country.

In 2002, Jayakanth was instrumental in the creation of India’s first institutional repository ePrints@IISc. Today this repository contains over 32,000 publications — around 80% of all the publications produced by researchers at IISc. Strikingly, this has been achieved despite the absence of an open-access mandate at IISc requiring researchers to deposit their papers.

Jayakanth also threw himself headlong into the task of helping colleagues at other Indian institutions play their part in the OA revolution. He began organising and running workshops and conferences on OA, helping others to set up their own repositories, and assisting in the creation of new OA journals, and the conversion of print-only journals to OA.

Professor Subbiah Arunachalam, distinguished fellow at the Centre for Internet and Society in Bangalore, has known Jayakanth since 1994, when he was an Indian National Science Academy Visiting Fellow at NCSI for three months.

At the time, says Arunachalam, “NCSI was a beehive of activity with a number of trainee librarians learning to use computers and the emerging web technologies in their work. Francis was in charge of the servers and he was teaching a few classes.”

Arunachalam adds, “I have been visiting IISc and NCSI off and on since then and I have been following Francis’ work. Never one to seek wealth or fame, Francis believes in living simply (almost to the point of being self-effacing) and giving generously. He never says ‘no’ to anyone who requests help in setting up a repository, or speaking at, or conducting a workshop. Indeed when, for family reasons, he could not go to a workshop he had accepted he arranged with another expert to stand in for him.”

What is most notable about Jayakanth, says Arunachalam, is that where many librarians are happy to talk about OA, “Francis is one of the very few in India who have actually done something concrete.”

Foot soldier

Professor N V Joshi, the former chair of NCSI, and professor at the Centre for Ecological Sciences at IISc in Bangalore, agrees with Arunachalam’s assessment of Jayakanth. As an example of his commitment to OA, Joshi relates how, when the first anniversary of the death of the former associate chairman of NCSI Dr TB Rajashekar was approaching, Jayakanth pointed out that the number of deposits in the IISc repository was hovering around 5,000. What better tribute to the memory of Rajashekhar, he suggested, than to pull out all the stops in order to achieve 5,000 by the anniversary date.

“The students and assistants worked for many days, often very late into the night (2am and beyond), to ensure that the target was reached,” says Joshi.

When I characterised Jayakanth as a foot soldier of the OA movement, however, Joshi at first bridled. “[T]hat phrase seems to have an unfortunate connotation of having a lack of leadership and initiative — and nothing can be further from truth,” he responded. “I have had the pleasure of witnessing Dr. Francis Jayakanth's exceptional organisational ability, as well as his unobtrusive leadership role in many of the programs conducted by the NCSI.”

But a few days later, Joshi emailed to say that, on reflection, he felt perhaps the term soldier was apt, at least in regard to one aspect of Jayakanth's personality. Like a soldier, he said, Jayakanth is always happy to “carry out the responsibility entrusted to him with utmost dedication, without voicing the slightest judgement about the merits or otherwise of the goal.”

A good example of this, he explained, was Jayakanth’s decision to take it upon himself to do most if not all the daily tasks of maintaining ePrints@IISc. “At the lowest end, this involved checking the batteries of the backup power system and arranging for their replacement. It also covered deciding on the specifications of computers to be ordered, negotiating with the vendors to get the best possible deal and the subsequent follow-up action for delivery on time. Though there was good technical help available, there were instances when Dr Francis himself installed the operating system, tested it extensively, and then took up and completed the task of installing and testing the various software programs (DSpace, EPrints etc. etc.). He also took care of the installation of the new versions (updating the software) and of migrating to new and more powerful machines as was necessary from time to time.”

The point he wanted to stress in listing these details, said Joshi, “is that these are the ‘technician like’ things that he did on his own, to ensure that the repository was a success.”

On the other hand, he added, since Jayakanth has also demonstrated exceptional leadership qualities, it might be more accurate to compare him to a Lt. Colonel, a Major General or even Brigadier. “I had the pleasure and the honour of being the chairman of the National Center for Science Information for some time,” he explained, “and I am happy to admit that in almost all aspects Francis Jayakanth was the de facto chairman, as I would go more or less completely by his advice on matters of policy, initiatives, administration etc.”

Reward

In addition, said Joshi, it should be noted that Jayakanth is an extraordinary teacher and mentor. “He was the key person in the unique two-year program run by the NCSI to train library science graduates in the use of modern information science. In fact, after the sudden and sad demise of Dr TB Rajashekar, it was Francis Jayakanth who saw to it (along with a few colleagues) that the program continued to run very well. In addition to the two-year program, he has conducted many workshops for the students of library science, and the response has been excellent.”

Above all, Joshi concluded, Jayakanth has evinced an exceptional loyalty to NCSI, a loyalty all the more remarkable given that he has yet to be rewarded or promoted for his efforts.

“Dr Francis continues to be at the NCSI by choice, despite the lack of recognition and status commensurate with his abilities and performance,” he explained. “He has turned down several offers and invitations from good educational institutions who were keen to have him as the librarian. He is very well regarded in the library science community in India and was a vice president (and quite an active one) of the local chapter.”

At the beginning of this year, however, Jayakanth did finally receive recognition for his hard work and dedication, although ironically not from his native country, but from a London-based organisation called the Electronic Publishing Trust for Development (EPT). On January 1^st, EPT announced that Jayakanth had been chosen as the inaugural recipient of a new award for individuals working in developing countries “who have made a significant personal contribution to advancing the cause of open access and the free exchange of research findings.”

As the EPT press release put it, “Francis Jayakanth can indeed be considered an OA ‘renaissance man’, an advocate and technical expert in all aspects of Open Access development and an inspiration to all, both at the research and policy level.”

“EPT made the right choice when they chose Francis for their inaugural award,” notes Arunachalam.

Alma Swan, UK-based OA advocate and director of European advocacy at SPARC, concurs. “Francis has been responsible for a considerable amount of the progress on OA in India, but he is so unassuming that unless one were specifically involved in Indian Open Access developments, one wouldn’t know,” she told me. “Francis works quietly behind the scenes, nudging things along here, giving them a shove there. He is much admired and much consulted. His expertise and wise counsel inspire confidence, and he is a much sought-after OA advocate.”

In short, one of OA’s less visible advocates has at last been made more visible, and the leaderless revolution has rewarded one of its foot soldiers.

####

If  you wish to read the interview with Francis Jayakanth, please click on the link below. 

I    am publishing the interview under a Creative Commons licence, so you  are free to   copy and distribute it as you wish, so long as you credit  me as the   author, do not alter or transform the text, and do not use  it for any   commercial purpose. 

To read the interview (as a PDF file) click HERE.

The Research Works Act: Two more dissenters

2012-01-22T16:31:00.000Z

Open Access advocate PeterSuber is maintaining a page at the Berkman Center listing publishers and societies who oppose the Research Works Act (RWA), otherwise known as HR 3699.

Two new entries have recently been added to this page concerning societies that dissent from the RWA.

The first entry points to a January 11th post on the Code for Life blog reporting that a letter about the RWA has been sent to members of the International Society for Computational Biology (ISCB) by ISCB executive officer BJ Morrison McKay.

In the letter Morrison McKay says, “ISCB strongly opposes this bill [RWA]. Burkhard Rost, ISCB President, and Richard Lathrop, ISCB Public Affairs & Policies Committee Chair, are drafting a letter to the bill’s authors that expresses our opposition and emphasizes the importance of the ISCB Public Policy Statement on Open Access to Scientific and Technical Research Literature that was released in 2010.”

Morrison McKay's letter also invites members of ISCB who have yet to sign its OA statement to do so.

The second entry points to a comment on the Savage Minds blog reporting that on January 18th the Executive Board of the Society for Cultural Anthropology (SCA) voted UNANIMOUSLY to pass a resolution opposing the RWA.

The resolution begins, “On behalf of the SCA membership, the SCA Executive Board urges the American Anthropological Association to oppose the Research Works Act (HR 3699) introduced into Congress on December 19, 2011, and to distance itself from the endorsement of this legislation by the Association of American Publishers, of which AAA is a member.”

As the resolution indicates, the RWA is supported by the Association of American Publishers (AAP), which has described the bill as “significant legislation that will help reinforce America’s leadership in scholarly and scientific publishing in the public interest and in the critical peer-review system that safeguards the quality of such research.”

Neither the ISCB nor the SCA are themselves members of the AAP, although, as is evident from the resolution, the AAA is a member.

If passed, the RWA would be a major setback for the Open Access movement, since it would reverse the Public Access Policy introduced by the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) in 2005, a policy that requires all NIH-funded research to be made freely accessible online within 12 months. The bill would also prevent other federal agencies from imposing similar requirements on researchers.

A number of AAP members have already disavowed the RWA, including MIT Press, ITHAKA, Pennsylvania State University Press, California University Press, Rockefeller University Press, Nature Publishing Group, and the non-profit American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), which publishes the journal Science.

Other AAP members have indicated that they prefer to stay neutral (see here and here).

In addition, the OA publisher BioMed Central (BMC) has announced that it opposes the RWA. And BMC’s parent company, Springer has also published a statement on the RWA. Like the above two societies, neither BMC nor Springer is a member of the AAP.

Springer Statement on the US Research Works Act

2012-01-21T07:11:00.004Z

Springer, the world's second largest scholarly journal publisher, has sent me the following statement on the Research Works Act (RWA), otherwise known as HR 3699:

We do not think that the RWA will be successful, but we hope that it will generate measured, intelligent and constructive debate, which we greatly prefer to histrionics and exaggeration. That said, the RWA does not seem to be rooted in opposition to open access, but rather in opposition to unfunded government mandates.

Springer is the largest open access publisher worldwide and fully supports – and significantly invests in – open access as a business model. “Gold” open access publishing provides one model to properly address the question of funding the system of ordered, layered and certified scientific knowledge that is currently performed by scholarly peer-reviewed journals. Springer welcomes any opportunity to develop and grow this model in partnership with researchers, institution, societies and foundations.

“Green” open access archiving does not cover the costs associated with formal publication, and poses risks in terms of the sustainability of scholarly communications. Springer therefore believes that systematic green open access self-archiving enforced by an unfunded mandate and “one-size-fits-all” embargos should not be adopted as a policy. At the same time, we will always try to assist our authors in meeting publishing requirements they may face.

Should society deem it desirable to have scientific articles available for free to the public, it must come up with a system which not only pays for publishers’ investments, but which also ensures the sustainability of scientific communications. We believe that “gold” open access accomplishes this.

That said, we realize that scholarly communication is changing, and we continue to welcome discussions with all parties concerned with the future of scientific publishing.

If passed, the RWA would be a major setback for the Open Access (OA) movement, since it would reverse the Public Access Policy introduced by the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) in 2005, a policy that requires all NIH-funded research to be made freely accessible online within 12 months. The bill would also prevent other federal agencies from imposing similar requirements on researchers.

While traditional subscription publishers like Springer have now embraced Gold OA, in which they levy a one-off article processing charge for publishing papers, they have become increasingly unhappy about Green OA, where researchers continue to publish in subscription journals but make a copy of their papers freely available online, usually in an institutional repository, or a subject-based repository like PubMed Central. They particularly object to the use of mandates, where funders or universities require their researchers to make their papers openly available online, albeit after an embargo period. Mandates, they argue, might eventually destroy the subscription business model, and perhaps the entire scholarly publishing system with it.*

As Springer CEO Derk Haank put it to me a year ago, “I draw a distinction between author archiving and mandatory OA requirements such as the NIH Public Access Policy where they don't allow for a sufficient embargo … OA mandates institutionalise the process of author archiving, and if the delay between publication and archiving is only a couple of months, then there is a real danger of destroying the equilibrium that we have achieved over OA … There has to be a time lag. Otherwise, publishers will have no choice but to go fully OA. That could create a very messy situation and possibly destroy the current system.”

Yesterday the OA publisher BioMed Central (BMC), which Springer acquired in 2008, released a statement opposing the RWA.

The RWA is supported by the Association of American Publishers (AAP), which has described the bill as “significant legislation that will help reinforce America’s leadership in scholarly and scientific publishing in the public interest and in the critical peer-review system that safeguards the quality of such research.”

Neither Springer nor BMC is a member of the AAP. We should, however, note that a number of AAP members have disavowed the RWA, including MIT Press, ITHAKA, Pennsylvania State University Press, California University Press, Rockefeller University Press, Nature Publishing Group, and the non-profit American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), which publishes the journal Science.

Some other AAP members have opted to stay neutral (see here and here).

* A hypothesis, we should note, that is challenged by OA advocates.

BioMed Central opposes Research Works Act

2012-01-20T16:46:00.002Z

The Open Access publisher BioMed Central (BMC) has just emailed me this statement concerning the controversial Research Works Act (RWA).

BioMed Central strongly supports the NIH's role in enhancing open access through the operation of PubMed Central and through its Public Access Policy for employees and grantees. We are opposed to the RWA's proposal to roll back that policy, and feel that the success of open access publishers such as BioMed Central clearly demonstrates the invalidity of the arguments, made by supporters of the RWA, that public access undermines the ability of publishers to seek fair recompense for the service they provide.

BioMed Central has contributed to the latest OSTP RFIs on public access to peer-reviewed research, and to research data, and we will be posting those responses on the BioMed Central blog shortly.

OASPA [the Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association] will be issuing a statement relating to RWA shortly on behalf of its member open access publishers, including BioMed Central.

It is expected that BMC’s parent company, Springer, will make its position regarding the RWA known at the American Library Association (ALA) meeting in Dallas tomorrow. (Now available here).

Neither BMC nor Springer is a member of the Association of American Publishers (AAP), which supports the RWA. However, a number of AAP members have disavowed the RWA, including MIT Press, ITHAKA, Pennsylvania State University Press, California University Press, Rockefeller University Press, Nature Publishing Group, and the non-profit American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), which publishes the journal Science.

Some other AAP members have opted to stay neutral (see here and here).

Library of Congress neutral on the Research Works Act

2012-01-20T14:16:00.001Z

The Library of Congress has indicated that it is neutral on the controversial Research Works Act (RWA).

Commenting by email, a spokesperson told me, “The Library does not take a position on legislation we haven’t requested, unless asked a question directly by our oversight or appropriations committees. As a practical matter, we would not likely disseminate in any way that would violate copyright.”

The Library of Congress is a member of the Association of American Publishers (AAP), which backs the RWA, and which has described the bill as “significant legislation that will help reinforce America’s leadership in scholarly and scientific publishing in the public interest and in the critical peer-review system that safeguards the quality of such research.”

On the NIH Policy the Library of Congress spokesperson commented, “I can find no evidence of the Library having a pro- or con- stance on the NIH policy.”

Gary Price at INFOdocket recently drew my attention to a 12th January announcement by the Library of Congress indicating that Gayle Osterberg has been appointed director of communications at the Library, effective January 30th.

Osterberg was instrumental in founding the Copyright Alliance, an organisation whose membership includes the largest supporters of another controversial piece of legislation — the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA). Prior to that, Osterberg served for two years as vice president of corporate communications at the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA), a major player in trying to get SOPA passed.

The day after it was announced that Osterberg would be joining the Library of Congress, the Copyright Alliance published a press release praising US Representatives Darrell Issa (R-CA) and Carolyn Maloney (D-NY) for co-sponsoring the Research Works Act, otherwise known as HR 3699.

Meanwhile, another member of the AAP has also indicated that it wishes to remain neutral on the RWA. By email, director of media relations at the RAND Corporation Jeffrey Hiday told me, “RAND is not taking a position on the Research Works Act. We make all of our unclassified research available on our website and will continue to do so.”

By contrast, a number of AAP members have disavowed the RWA, including MIT Press, ITHAKA, Pennsylvania State University Press, California University Press, Rockefeller University Press, Nature Publishing Group, and the non-profit American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), which publishes the journal Science.

Further background on the RWA is available here.

Nature Publishing Group and Digital Science do not support the Research Works Act

2012-01-18T19:28:00.006Z

Nature Publishing Group (NGP) and Digital Science today released a joint statement about the controversial Research Works Act (RWA), otherwise known as H.R. 3699.

The statement reads:

Nature Publishing Group (NPG) and Digital Science note the concern amongst the scientific and library communities about the Research Works Act (H.R. 3699), currently under consideration by the U.S. federal government, and wish to clarify our position.

NPG and Digital Science do not support the Research Works Act.

NPG and Digital Science exist to support the creation and dissemination of human knowledge on a sustainable commercial basis. We seek to enable the open exchange of ideas, especially in scientific communities, in line with the requirements and objectives of relevant stakeholders.

Dr Annette Thomas [then Managing Director of NPG] was on the National Institutes of Health (NIH) working group that introduced the NIH Public Access Policy, and NPG has actively supported self-archiving since 2005. NPG encourages self-archiving of the author's accepted manuscript six months after publication. Since 2008, NPG's free deposition service has deposited over 3000 manuscripts in PubMed Central on behalf of authors. NPG works constructively with other 'open' repositories. Digital Science provides tools, such as ReadCube and figshare, for scientists and scholars to share content.

NPG's January 2011 position statement on open access remains representative of our views. NPG's business development efforts are very much focused on open access as one of a range of sustainable publishing models. Recently we have demonstrated this by launching the multidisciplinary titles Nature Communications and Scientific Reports, and several specialist open access journals and journals with open access options. Of the five journals NPG launched in 2011, four are open access, and 51 of the 54 academic and society journals that we publish now offer open access options.

—ends—

We should note that Nature Publishing Group is a member of the Association of American Publishers (AAP), which backs the RWA, and has described the bill as “significant legislation that will help reinforce America’s leadership in scholarly and scientific publishing in the public interest and in the critical peer-review system that safeguards the quality of such research.”

If passed, the RWA would be a major setback for the Open Access movement. It would reverse the Public Access Policy introduced by the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) in 2005 — which requires that all NIH-funded research is made freely accessible online within 12 months — and it would prevent other federal agencies from imposing similar requirements on researchers.

A number of other AAP members have disavowed the RWA, including MIT Press, ITHAKA, Pennsylvania State University Press, California University Press, and Rockefeller University Press. Others may be weakening — e.g. University of Chicago Press and Cambridge University Press.

NPG's statement is available here.

Further background on the RWA is available here.

*** UPDATE: AAAA DOES NOT ENDORSE THE RESEARCH WORKS ACT ***

The nonprofit American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), and publisher of the journal Science, has posted a statement on its web site stressing that it does not endorse the RWA. Below is an extract:

“We believe the current NIH public access policy provides an important mechanism for ensuring that the public has access to biomedical research findings,” said AAAS Chief Executive Officer Alan I. Leshner, executive publisher of Science. “At the same time, the NIH policy provides appropriate support for the intellectual property rights of publishers who have invested much in science communication.”

Leshner added, “AAAS, like many organizations, is a member of the Association of American Publishers, but we do not endorse all of their policies or statements, and we wish to make that very clear in this case. AAAS is not in favor of the proposed Research Works Act.”

The full statement is available here.

Research Works Act: Cambridge University Press expands on its position

2012-01-17T10:14:00.001Z

Last Friday I wrote about the Research Works Act (RWA) and included a quote from Cambridge University Press (CUP) about the bill, otherwise known as HR 3699.

The quote was in response to three questions I had asked CUP about, respectively, the National Institutes of Health Public Access Policy, the RWA, and the sponsorship of the RWA by the Association of American Publishers (AAP).

The RWA would have the effect of reversing the requirement (introduced by the NIH in 2005) that all research it funds is made freely accessible online. The bill would also prevent other US federal agencies from imposing similar requirements on researchers.

Last week CUP, which is a member of the AAP, provided the following statement in response to my questions, “We have submitted a formal response to the Office of Science and Technology (OSTP), but we want that response to have time to be processed by OSTP and it is too early for us to make any public statements.”

I also reported that Peter Murray-Rust, a Reader in molecular informatics at the University of Cambridge had written an open letter about the RWA to both CUP and Oxford University Press.

Murray-Rust wrote: “The AAP has proposed a bill which effectively legislates the restriction of access to scholarly publication with the sole intention of raising the income of publishers. I and many others feel this is unethical, immoral and unworthy of any organisation committed to the dissemination of knowledge. Some commentators have described it as an act of war by the publishing industry on the scholarly community … I hope that you can assure me CUP was not involved in creating the AAP’s position and ask you to consider the downsides of belonging to an organisation such as AAP.”

Peter Davison

Today I was copied into an email from CUP’s director of corporate affairs Peter Davison. The email expands on CUP’s position vis-à-vis the RWA, and reads:

“Cambridge University Press has submitted testimony to the United States Office of Science and Technology in response to the Request for Information (2011-28623) on subjects related to HR 3699. Our testimony is not identical to the position adopted by the Association of American Publishers. In particular, we write: ‘We support all sustainable access models that ensure the permanence and integrity of the scholarly record... The Bill as proposed could undermine the underlying freedoms expected by and of scholarly authors...’

“You ask that we consider the ‘downsides of belonging to an organisation such as AAP’. Few members of industry associations will find themselves in complete agreement with every action of those associations, but the support of AAP for our and our authors’ interests continues to be highly valued by Cambridge University Press, both within the United States and further afield.”

University of California Press differs from AAP on Research Works Act

2012-01-13T19:24:00.010Z

Alison Mudditt, the director of the University of California Press, has just emailed me the following statement outlining the Press’ position on the controversial Research Works Act (RWA).

We should note that the University of California Press is a member of the Association of American Publishers (AAP), which has backed the RWA.

“As part of the world’s leading public research university, University of California Press is committed to the wide dissemination of knowledge to researchers, educators, leaders, and public audiences worldwide. The issues raised by Research Works Act are complex and we welcome continued informed debate on this topic. Our perspective on these issues differs from that of AAP, and we are committed to engaging closely with scholars from all disciplines in exploring new models that retain critical features such as quality control, long-term preservation, and measures of impact and use. However, UC Press does not believe withdrawing our membership in AAP is beneficial to the resolution of this issue or to our long-term interests. Scholarly communication faces unprecedented and undeniable challenges, and we believe that rich and diverse debate is the best path to sustainable solutions.”

Statements on the RWA are also available from MIT Press, ITHAKA, and Pennsylvania State University Press here, here, and here.

Readers may also be interested in an article I wrote earlier today on the topic of the RWA, which provides some background on this controversial topic.

I invite other members of AAP to email me their views on the RWA, which I am happy to publish here.

*** UPDATE: THE ROCKEFELLER UNIVERSITY PRESS ***

Executive director of The Rockefeller University Press Mike Rossner has today sent a letter to Rep. Carolyn Maloney who, with Rep. Darrell Issa, introduced the RWA (AKA H.R. 3699) into the US House of Representatives at the end of last year.

The Rockefeller University Press is located in Maloney's constituency, and Rossner is a resident and voter in her constituency.

The letter can be viewed here. Below is an extract:

“I want to state emphatically that I support the NIH Public Access Policy and think it should be expanded to other federal funding agencies … Enacting a law that prohibits federal funding agencies from mandating public access to the results of the research they fund will deprive the public of important information that is rightly theirs. Although this Act has been supported by the Association of American Publishers (AAP), it is vital that members of Congress know that not all members of this Association agree with their position. The Rockefeller University Press is a member of the AAP, but we strongly oppose H.R. 3699.”

*** FURTHER UPDATE: AN ONLINE PETITION TO TRY AND STOP THE RESEARCH WORKS ACT HAS BEEN SET UP HERE ***

Can AAP Members stay neutral in the row over the Research Works Act?

2012-01-13T12:01:00.002Z

In the past couple of days I have reported on the decisions by MIT Press, ITHAKA and Pennsylvania State University Press to distance themselves from the Research Works Act (RWA), otherwise known as HR 3699.

All three organisations are members of the Association of American Publishers (AAP), which backs the RWA, and has described the bill as “significant legislation that will help reinforce America’s leadership in scholarly and scientific publishing in the public interest and in the critical peer-review system that safeguards the quality of such research.”

If passed, however, the RWA would be a major setback for the Open Access movement, since it would reverse the Public Access Policy introduced by the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) requiring that all NIH-funded research is made freely accessible online, and it would prevent other federal agencies from imposing similar requirements on researchers.

Unsurprisingly, therefore, the AAP has become the target for a lot of criticism, with the research community calling on members of the association to disavow both the bill and AAP’s support for it. There have also been calls for AAP members to resign in protest.

However, it is not currently clear how representative the views of MIT Press, ITHAKA and Pennsylvania State University Press are. In an attempt to find out I have over the past week or so contacted around 35 members of the AAP, primarily scholarly publishers. The majority of these organisations have yet to reply to my enquiry.

In contacting these organisations I asked the following three questions:

1. Do you support the National Institutes of Health Public Access Policy? If not, why not?

2. Do you support the Research Works Act (RWA)? If not, why not

3. If you do not support the RWA is it your intention to try to change AAP/PSP's public support of the Act (as outlined in its statement of 23rd December), or are you more likely to publicly disassociate yourself from AAP’s position, or even perhaps leave the AAP?

Of those who responded to me, the only organisation to answer all three questions directly (rather than issue a general statement) was the New England Journal of Medicine. The NEJM answered in this way:

1. Dr. Drazen [NEJM editor-in-chief] was on the NIH Public Access working group, and our policies actually surpass the guidelines of the NIH Public Access Policy: All of our research content, regardless of funding source, is freely available six months after publication.

2. We have no position on the RWA as drafted.

3. We will continue to support AAP/PSP.

But is NEJM’s neutrality more representative of what AAP members feel about the RWA than the position taken by, say, MIT Press? One cannot know for sure, but it does seem likely (for the moment at least). Below, for instance, is the response I received from CrossRef:

“As a not-for-profit trade association of publishers CrossRef does not take positions on political matters. We have 1,300 very diverse members who range from large commercial publishers to small not-for-profits and they also include society publishers, government organisations, and university publishers. Our members hold a variety of opinions about open access and mandatory deposits of government funded research. We are intentionally business-model neutral. It is not part of our mission to lobby.”

CrossRef is right to point out that it is more difficult for an organisation to arrive at a consensus when its membership is diverse. Nevertheless, at least two university presses seem equally keen to remain neutral about AAP’s backing of the RWA. In response to my three questions, for instance, Oxford University Press (OUP) simply replied, "We cannot comment as we aren't taking a public position on this issue.”

Cambridge University Press (CUP), meanwhile, responded, “We have submitted a formal response to the Office of Science and Technology (OSTP), but we want that response to have time to be processed by OSTP and it is too early for us to make any public statements.”

For its part, Getty Publications appeared to be unaware of the RWA. “Thanks for your inquiry,” I was told by the Getty media relations department. “We passed it by our colleagues at Getty Publications, but they are unaware of the issue you raise.”

But whatever their current position, what remains to be seen is whether AAP members will be able to stay neutral in light of the growing pressure they face from the research community to overturn the AAP's support for the RWA. Is it really possible, as the president of the ACM Alain Chesnais clearly believes, for AAP members to stay neutral on legislation like the RWA when its own members/customers/users begin to criticise it for doing so?

Time will tell, but some maintain that it is in any case disingenuous to pretend that neutrality is possible. As OA advocate Peter Suber points out, AAP members who choose to sit on their hands on this issue are not abstaining, as they may claim. Rather they are sending out a clear message. This message, he says, reads, “We're undecided about RWA, or our members disagree about RWA, or we don't take stands on political issues, but we agree to pay dues to an organisation using our money and our name to work energetically against the interests of researchers and research.”

Clearly, some AAP members do actively support the RWA, and are highly unlikely to change their minds. But exactly how many that is we do not know. What we can say with certainty is that Elsevier, the largest scholarly publisher in the world, does support the bill. Commenting on a blog post published by Public Library of Science co-founder Michael Eisen, Elsevier’s vice president and head of global corporate relations Tom Reller asserted, “Elsevier, along with other commercial and non-profit publishers do indeed support the Research Works Act and commend Congressman Issa and Congresswoman Maloney for co-sponsoring this important legislation.”

The problem is that many in the research community see things very differently. Some, like Peter Murray-Rust, a Reader in molecular informatics at the University of Cambridge, are not just critical of the AAP’s support for the RWA, but enraged by it. For that reason, Murray-Rust has written open letters to both OUP and CUP asking them to repudiate the bill.

He writes, “The AAP has proposed a bill which effectively legislates the restriction of access to scholarly publication with the sole intention of raising the income of publishers. I and many others feel this is unethical, immoral and unworthy of any organisation committed to the dissemination of knowledge. Some commentators have described it as an act of war by the publishing industry on the scholarly community.”

*** UPDATE: CUP EXPANDS ON ITS POSITION VIS-À-VIS THE RESEARCH WORKS ACT HERE ***

Pennsylvania State University Press says No to Research Works Act

2012-01-12T23:48:00.002Z

Following the recent repudiations of the Research Works Act (RWA) by MIT Press and ITHAKA, I have now received an email from the director of Pennsylvania State University Press Patrick Alexander.

Like MIT Press and ITHAKA, Pennsylvania State University Press is a member of the Association of American Publishers (AAP), which backs the RWA.

Alexander writes: “Echoing our colleagues at MIT Press who recently commented on the Association of American Publishers’ endorsement of H.R. 3699, AAP’s statement does not reflect the position of The Pennsylvania State University Press. Nonetheless, our relationship with the AAP remains a vital aspect of our responsibility to share a role in the academic publishing community worldwide. Accordingly, we have no plans to sever that relationship.”

Pennsylvania State University Press is the third member of the AAP to publicly repudiate the RWA, notwithstanding the fact that the AAP supports the bill. When it was introduced in December, the AAP described the RWA as “significant legislation that will help reinforce America’s leadership in scholarly and scientific publishing in the public interest and in the critical peer-review system that safeguards the quality of such research.”

If passed, the RWA would reverse the Public Access Policy introduced by the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) in 2005 requiring that all NIH-funded research is made freely accessible online. The bill would also prevent other federal agencies from imposing similar requirements on researchers. This would be a major blow to the Open Access movement.

What impact these public statements will have remains to be seen. All three of the above organisations have made it quite clear that they do not intend to resign from the AAP, which some researchers have been calling on members to do.

We should, however, note the comment posted earlier today on my blog by Gary Daught. Daught cites a statement that he says he received from the Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR) today in which CLIR says, “We are opposed to the Research Works Act, the goals of which are, indeed, fundamentally in conflict with CLIR’s values, vision, and mission. Today we will draft a letter of withdrawal from AAP.”

I emailed CLIR myself on Wednesday asking for a comment on the RWA, but have yet to receive a reply.

I invite any member of AAP to send me their views on the RWA.

ITHAKA becomes the second AAP member to disavow the Research Works Act

2012-01-12T21:24:00.003Z

Yesterday I reported that MIT Press has distanced itself from the Research Works Act (RWA). The RWA is a new bill introduced into the House of Representatives at the end of last year that would reverse the US National Institutes of Health Public Access Policy requiring taxpayer-funded research to be made freely accessible online. It would also prevent other federal agencies from imposing similar requirements on their funded researchers.

The RWA is backed by the Association of American Publishers (AAP) and its Professional and Scholarly Division (PSP), which last December published a press release describing the bill as, “significant legislation that will help reinforce America’s leadership in scholarly and scientific publishing in the public interest and in the critical peer-review system that safeguards the quality of such research.”

If passed, however, the bill would be a major setback for the Open Access movement. As I noted yesterday, AAP has therefore been widely criticised for its support of the RWA, and some in the research community have called on members of the association to disavow both the bill and AAP’s support for it. There have also been calls for AAP members to resign in protest.

Today I received an email from ITHAKA, the non-profit organisation dedicated to helping the academic community take full advantage of information and networking technologies, and which includes JSTOR, the online service providing access to archived academic journals, and Portico, the electronic-archiving Initiative.

The email was in response to an enquiry I made a few days ago asking ITHAKA to comment on the RWA, and AAP’s support for it. It contained the following statement:

“A core principle of our organisation is to provide the broadest possible access to scholarly works in ways that are sustainable and account for their long term preservation. We have no intention of endorsing RWA. We also have no intention of leaving the AAP. We do not agree with them on every issue, but we value our membership, as we do our participation in a number of library and scholarly associations.”

Commenting on the news, Open Access advocate Peter Suber said, “I applaud ITHAKA for distancing itself from the harmful Research Works Act. The AAP acts in the name of its members when it lobbies for the RWA, in effect recruiting all its members as allies in a cause that not all of them support. Through their public statements, MIT Press and ITHAKA have refused to lend their weight to a policy they do not endorse.”

MIT Press distances itself from Research Works Act

2012-01-11T23:10:00.007Z

There has been a great deal of discussion online recently about the Research Works Act (RWA), a new bill introduced into the US House of Representatives on December 16th by Representatives Carolyn Maloney (D-NY) and Darrell Issa (R-CA).

Effectively, the bill would reverse the NIH's Public Access Policy requiring taxpayer-funded research to be made freely accessible online, and prevent any other federal agency from introducing a similar requirement.

The RWA is backed by the Association of American Publishers (AAP) and its Professional and Scholarly Division (PSP). On 23^rd December the AAP published a press release welcoming the introduction of the bill, which it described as “significant legislation that will help reinforce America’s leadership in scholarly and scientific publishing in the public interest and in the critical peer-review system that safeguards the quality of such research.”

If passed, the bill would be a major setback for the Open Access movement.

AAP has been widely criticised for supporting the RWA, and some have called on members of the association to disavow both the bill and AAP’s support for it. There have also been calls for AAP members to resign in protest.

It appears that at least one publisher has been listening: MIT Press has just announced that it does not support the RWA, although it does not plan to leave the AAP.

A short while ago I received an email from Ellen Faran, the director of MIT Press. The email reads, “The AAP’s press release on the Research Works Act does not reflect the position of the MIT Press; nor, I imagine, the position of many other scholarly presses whose mission is centrally focused on broad dissemination. We will not, however, withdraw from the AAP on this issue as we value the Association’s work overall and the opportunity to participate as a member of the larger and diverse publishing community.”

After receiving the same email message, OA advocate Peter Suber commented on the Global Open Access List (GOAL), “I believe MIT Press is the first AAP-member press to disavow the AAP position on the Research Works Act. Kudos and profound thanks to Ellen Faran and MIT Press for their leadership on this issue.”

***More on the RWA here, here, here,and here***

The Open Access Interviews: OMICS Publishing Group’s Srinu Babu Gedela

2011-12-19T12:15:00.005Z

In an article published in The Charleston Advisor in July 2010, Jeffrey Beall, a librarian at the University of Colorado, Denver, described OMICS Publishing Group as a predatory Open Access publisher. “Having a large number of titles, as does the OMICS Publishing Group, is typical of predatory Open-Access publishers,” he wrote. “Also typical is each journal's broad coverage. By offering 68 titles each with a broad coverage, this publisher is tacitly saying it will publish anything.”

Srinu Babu Gedela

Is Beall’s characterisation of OMICS fair? Founder and managing director of OMICS Dr Srinu Babu Gedela insists it is not. “We believe the peer review process is very important … I am confident about the quality of the review process used in OMICS’ journals.”

Nevertheless, OMICS has published at least one article that even OMICS itself accepts should never have appeared in a peer-reviewed journal.

There have also been complaints that OMICS clones the names of other publishers’ journals, and on one occasion copied text verbatim from a competitor’s web site. This too Gedela denies. These incidents, he insists, were simply mistakes, and OMICS corrected the situation as soon as the problem was drawn to its attention.

A further complaint is that the publisher has been bombarding researchers with email invitations to join editorial boards, submit papers to its journals (of which there are now 200), and attend conferences. OMICS does not deny that it uses bulk email services. Nor does it plan to stop doing so. Indeed, Gedela implies, these activities are likely to increase in line with the growth of its business. “As we plan to organise 50 conferences in 2012, we will be mailing invitations to researchers frequently.”

OMICS is just one of a growing number of controversial OA publishers: Beall’s list of “predatory” publishers has now reached 28, and continues to grow. But while many researchers are quick to complain about the activities of these publishers, should not the research community accept some responsibility for the current excesses of the OA Gold Rush?

After all, OMICS says that it has now recruited 20,000 researchers to its editorial boards, and we can assume the other OA publishers are proving equally successful. This suggests that for every researcher decrying the activities of these publishers others are facilitating them. Are the latter not concerned that they are conspiring in the email bombardment of their colleagues? Do they not care that some of the journals on whose editorial boards they sit appear to be publishing papers that have had inadequate or no peer review? Are they not worried that some of these publishers may be engaging in dubious business practices?

So what is the background to the complaints levelled against OMICS Publishing Group, what are the details of those complaints, and how exactly does the company respond to them? Read the attached PDF file to find out ...

####

If you wish to read the rest of this introduction, and the interview with Srinu Babu Gedela, please click on the relevant link below. 

I   am publishing the interview under a Creative Commons licence, so you are free to   copy and distribute it as you wish, so long as you credit me as the   author, do not alter or transform the text, and do not use it for any   commercial purpose. 

To read the interview (as a PDF file) click HERE.

PLEASE NOTE: Normally when I publish an interview I place the introduction before the interview. On the grounds that my introduction for this interview is longer than the interview itself, Srinu Babu Gedela requested that I publish the introduction after the interview, rather than before it. As a compromise solution, I have produced two versions of the text, one with the introduction at the end, and one with the introduction at the beginning. Readers can therefore choose which version they want to read. The link above goes to the version with the introduction before the interview. Those preferring the version with the introduction after the interview can access it here.

Interview with Nicola Rylett: InTech's response

2011-10-26T15:25:00.004Z

Yesterday I posted an interview with Nicola Rylett, the marketing director of Open Access publisher InTech. I prefaced the interview with an introduction in order to give readers some background to the publisher. I now publish a statement and response from InTech to that introduction.

Underneath that is my response to InTech’s statement.

InTech Statement:

In the piece, “The OA Interviews: InTech's Nicola Rylett”, there were a number of valid issues discussed in great detail. However, despite a series of lengthy conversations which sought to not only address these historical issues but also to highlight the significant changes that InTech have implemented in recent months to eradicate said concerns, the author remains almost entirely focused on cases dating back as far as 2006. This, in our view, is an unfair representation of where the company currently stands, and this failure to shed light on more recent events with a balanced perspective may invariably lead the reader to a misinformed conclusion about InTech. We ask that readers persist with reading this comprehensive article which concludes with the full interview that Nicola Rylett, marketing director participated in with Mr Poynder – here is where the balance of the article is redressed, although it is questionable whether the reader will continue reading by the time they reach Page 17 of the piece.

The interview between Ms Rylett and Mr Poynder raised a number of important, pertinent and extremely interesting points that were not only relevant to InTech but also to the wider publishing- and- open access communities. The subject of peer review remains a hot potato among industry commentators, with advocates and critics seemingly at loggerheads over the extent to which it is enforced combined with its ability (or inability) to remain be the “quasi-sacred process that helps to make science our most objective truth teller” (Richard Horton, editor, The Lancet) and impartial, rather than err on the side of bias.

Finally, quality is another issue that needs to be addressed. While InTech has initiated a process of quality review within the organization in recent months, we believe the issue of quality per se is one that should be debated across the whole sector in the same manner that we need to openly deliberate how we can help increase the pace of transferrable knowledge in research globally, introduce innovative ways to meet and exceed customer requirements and expectations, and how we can maintain sustainability throughout the publishing community.

Article response, comments addressed as follows:

The statement, “Meanwhile it appears that no researcher ever received any royalties from the publisher,” is an assumption made by the author and our non-response should not be taken as an indication of confirmation nor denial. This remains a confidential matter between author and publisher.

Value for money is mentioned throughout the piece and at this point, we would like to highlight the significant differences between the article processing charges (APC) among our contemporaries. PloS, for instance, levy a c.2,086EUR APC, Biomed charge a fee of c.1,610EUR, while InTech's APC is among the lowest in the industry, between 590EUR for Books and 870EUR for Journals. It is also important to stipulate, as readers of the full interview will note, that there are variations with regard to the overall service provided for authors under the APC.

The statement, “I asked Rylett to put me in touch with four or five authors who had been granted a waiver, which she agreed to do. At the time of writing this, however, I had still not been sent any names”, is accurate. However, due to data protection protocol we can only forward author contact details upon receipt of their confirmation that they are willing to allow us to do so. We have sought permission from authors and will duly forward their information to Mr Poynder, as requested.

The statement, “Would not one expect the paragraph breaks to either be indented or double-spaced?” We have introduced paragraph indenting along with a number of other changes to the overall layout of our books which have already taken immediate effect, which will be evident upon publication of titles published within the forthcoming twelve months.

The statement, “And here is a front page of a book published in 2006,” followed by the statement, “We might also want to ask why, given the undeniable difference in quality, an author would opt to pay to publish with InTech rather than publish without charge with a traditional publisher,” seeks to convey to the reader that the company has failed to address previous discrepancies since their airing of said example some five years ago. This argument, in our view, has little conviction and it would be remiss of anyone to judge a company as it is in 2011 based on a solitary example dating back to 2006.

The statement, “What I do know is that InTech's critics have long maintained that it has a tendency to promise more than it delivers...the publisher is prone to exaggerate its achievements [and] are now inclined to conclude that InTech has succumbed to the same temptation in publishing and citing the new TBI survey,” is the author's own opinion and not representative of the wider community. In our interview, both Rylett and TBI demonstrated the results of the survey in an open and transparent way and it should be noted that Mr Poynder has continued to refute its findings, which is his prerogative.

The statement, “In other words, researchers based in the developing world who know they will be rejected out of hand by the traditional scholarly communication system, either because of where they are based, the quality of their written English, or both”, is the authors own opinion and should not be taken or accepted as a statement of fact. China and others members of the so-called BRIC nations and other countries have been largely unrepresented in the scientific publishing community, and InTech has enabled prospective authors who would ordinarily be excluded from doing so to have their work published and freely accessible. Language should not and will never be a barrier to becoming published with InTech - providing the quality is of the standard that we deem as acceptable. Indeed, it should be noted that like most of our contemporaries within the wider publishing community, we reject a significant number of proposals that we are presented with due to their failure to meet the required standards.

The statement, “Clearly one error InTech could make is to assume that it is enough to unleash on the world a plethora of upbeat PR messages and self-serving surveys, but omit to undertake the hard work necessary to improve its products, and to make the way it markets its services to scientists more acceptable,” is 100 per cent true in so much that if this is the approach we were to take then yes, that will invariably be the consequences of the company's inaction. However, that is not the stance we are adopting. Moreover, as the interview below will testify, we have already made significant strides in recent months to review all areas of the way we do business (focus on quality, customer services, external communications, etc.) and reacted accordingly which will effectively dispel much of the criticism levied against InTech by critics once the seeds we have sown now come to fruition over the course of the next twelve months.

The statement, “...it is not clear that InTech plans to cease bombarding researchers with unwanted email invitations”, is a gross exaggeration. Anyone with a basic understanding of marketing could never accuse an organization which sends fewer than 5 emails over a given twelve month period of 'bombarding' the recipient.

The statement, “Today, [InTech] describes itself – unfairly – as “the world's largest open access book publisher”, is factual and not an attempt at self-aggrandizement. While there are a number of other open access players within our market, their focus is overwhelmingly focused on the publication of journals, with InTech operating predominately in books.

The concluding statement, “The problem may be that the particular niche InTech has created for itself, and the modus operandi it has built around that niche, may make it very hard to up its game without eroding its customer base”, is an unfair statement and we refute the implication from the author which suggests that the quality of both our authors and publications is sub-standard.

####

Comment from Richard Poynder:

I appreciate that InTech took the time to speak with me in the first place, and to subsequently respond to my introduction. Below I address those issues raised by InTech where I believe a response is called for.

WIDER ISSUES

I agree that some of the issues I raised in connection with InTech could usefully be viewed in the context of the wider problems associated with the quality of published research today, peer review, and author-pays open access publishing; and I agree that there ought to be an industry-wide debate about this. Perhaps that is something that OASPA could organise?

I disagree that my introduction was “almost entirely focused on cases dating back as far as 2006”. For instance, I drew attention to quality issues connected with recently published books, including at least two published this month (e.g. this one, and this one). Likewise, I drew attention to peer review issues associated with a book published last year (this book), and I also cited InTech’s own survey (published in April) in which respondents repeated the same complaints made to me in 2010, and which have been made historically about InTech. E.g. complaints that journal articles and book chapters published with InTech appear sometimes either be reviewed too lightly, or not reviewed at all. As one of those cited in the TBI survey put it, “If there would be a review process, the writing process would be more natural and the chapter could be improved.”

ROYALTIES

I can think of no publisher that would refuse to say whether they have ever, or do now, pay royalties to their authors. And why would they refuse? I invite InTech/Sciyo once again to answer the question I posed in the interview: Has it ever paid royalties to any of its authors and, if so, how much has it paid out since 2010 (without naming any authors, or breaching any client confidentiality)?

VALUE FOR MONEY

I agree that some Open Access publishers charge a higher APC than InTech. In light of the issues raised, however, some might argue that there is a danger here of trying to compare apples with oranges. It also assumes that the other OA publishers cited themselves provide value for money, which again some might question. As such, citing what other publishers charge may be to miss the point. The issue is this: what do authors get for their APC when they publish with InTech, and does that represent value for money; it is not a case of making price comparisons with other publishers.

THE TBI SURVEY

InTech says, “Rylett and TBI demonstrated the results of the survey in an open and transparent way and it should be noted that Mr Poynder has continued to refute its findings, which is his prerogative.”

I do not think it is accurate to say that I refuted the findings of the TBI survey. I aired the concerns of some OA advocates about the wider relevance of the survey, the way in which the results had been put into the public domain, and the selective way in which the data had been presented. Since I did not get answers to all my questions, I invite InTech again to address these ones:

· Why did not the TBI survey state that only 5,000 of the 8,000 respondents to a survey that had polled 25,000 researchers answered the section on InTech?

· Can the online survey that was used be made public?

RESEARCHERS FROM THE DEVELOPING WORLD

InTech says, “China and others members of the so-called BRIC nations and other countries have been largely unrepresented in the scientific publishing community, and InTech has enabled prospective authors who would ordinarily be excluded from doing so to have their work published and freely accessible.” That is exactly the point I made. As I put it, “[O]ne could argue that InTech is providing a valuable service for those who are currently excluded from mainstream science.”

REJECTION RATES

InTech says, “[W]e reject a significant number of proposals that we are presented with due to their failure to meet the required standards.” I invite InTech to publish the figures on its rejection rates — for book proposals, chapter proposals and journal articles.

SPAM

It seems to me that there are two important issues to consider with regard to email marketing. First, the number of messages sent out and the randomness or not of the targeting. Second, the purpose of the messages and whether or not the recipients have opted-in to receiving them. As I understand it from InTech’s FAQ, the publisher continues to trawl public databases for details of researchers, and then despatches multiple marketing emails inviting them to buy a service from InTech. It is not clear to me that all the recipients of InTech’s messages have opted-in to receiving them. It also seems that many of them will not be existing customers of InTech. If that is not correct, perhaps InTech could clarify?

If it is correct, then I think it would be fair to say that InTech is sending out unsolicited commercial email, and in many legal jurisdictions this is subject to regulation. I don’t know what the current law on spam is in Croatia, but I believe the country is expected to join the European Union in 2013. It is my understanding that Article 13 of the EU Directive on Privacy and Electronic Communications regulates the use of email addresses for marketing purposes, and it established an opt-in regime. As such, I am told, unsolicited emails can only be sent with the prior agreement of the recipient.

But I am not a lawyer, and I am sure that InTech has taken legal advice on this. It might, however, be helpful if the publisher could confirm that its email marketing activities are conformant with Croatian law, and that they will be conformant with European law?

WORLD’S LARGEST OPEN ACCESS BOOK PUBLISHER

My comment regarding InTech “unfairly” calling itself the world's largest open access book publisher was in fact a typo! It should have read “Today, [InTech] describes itself — not unfairly — as the world's largest open access book publisher”. I will correct that in the PDF.

I assume that InTech’s main competitor in this field is Bentham eBooks?

The introduction and interview can be accessed here (PDF file).

The OA Interviews: InTech’s Nicola Rylett

2011-10-25T17:56:00.001Z

The history of Open Access (OA) publisher InTech is a complicated and somewhat confusing one. According to a Scribd presentation, the company was founded in Vienna in 2004. Over the subsequent seven years it has undergone a series of name changes, moved country, and attracted considerable criticism, both for the quality of its peer review and the way in which it markets its services. The company appears to inhabit a strange binary world: while some accuse it of repeatedly spamming researchers, and preying on the vulnerabilities and egos of researchers in order to make money, the company itself maintains that it is a victim of misinformation and misperception, and that it has a growing and happy customer base. As evidence of the latter, it cites a survey that it commissioned earlier this year. 81% of those responding to the survey, says InTech’s new marketing director Nicola Rylett, rated their publishing experience with the company as either 'excellent' or 'good'.

What do we make of these conflicting pictures of InTech? The quality of peer review can be difficult to assess. Nevertheless, the publisher has acknowledged problems with its peer review in the past, and when I drew Rylett’s attention to a chapter in one of its recently published books she agreed that the quality was “unacceptable”. It also seems fair to conclude that the company’s marketing techniques leave a lot to be desired. However, Rylett insists that InTech is addressing these issues. To that end, she explains, it is currently recruiting a new middle and senior management team.

It seems clear that InTech has proved very successful in selling its pay-to-publish services to thousands of researchers around the world. But can it persuade the wider research community, the scholarly publishing industry, and the Open Access movement to endorse it?

Nicola Rylett

InTech first came to my attention in 2007, when researchers began to raise questions about a Vienna-based company called I-Tech Education and Publishing which, they complained, was sending out unsolicited emails inviting scientists to contribute chapters to books — for which a 380Euros publication charge was being demanded. Many appeared to be concluding that the company was engaged in either mass spamming, or scamming, or possibly both.

At the time, I contacted the CEO of the company Vedran Kordic, who posted a response to the American Scientist Open Access Forum. “[M]ore than 1,500 authors published to date in the open access mode by us,” he said. “There is no one of them thinking that this is a kind of online cheat or that we are working on pay-publish mode.”

Over the next couple of years the complaints appeared only to grow, and by now researchers were posting their grievances on blogs as well as mailing lists. At some point the company changed its name to In-Tech. It also began to launch scholarly journals.

In November 2009 the company changed its name again — to Sciyo. It also created a second web site that appeared to be running in parallel to In-Tech’s site (intechweb.org). And shortly afterwards it announced that anyone publishing a book chapter with the company would receive royalties. These would be based on the number of times an author’s work was downloaded.

An OA publisher paying royalties was a novel idea; an idea, however, greeted with some scepticism. Nevertheless, it stimulated me to contact the company again — an enquiry that led to my doing an email interview with Aleksandar Lazinica, who introduced himself to me as the CEO of Sciyo ...

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If you wish to read the rest of this introduction and the interview with Nicola Rylett please click on the link below. 

I  am publishing it under a Creative Commons licence, so you are free to  copy and distribute it as you wish, so long as you credit me as the  author, do not alter or transform the text, and do not use it for any  commercial purpose. 

To read the interview and introduction (as a PDF file) click here.

IN-TECH HAS ISSUED A STATEMENT AND A RESPONSE TO THE INTRODUCTION TO THIS INTERVIEW. IT CAN BE READ IN THE PDF FILE LINKED ABOVE, OR ALTERNATIVELY HERE.

Interview with BioOne’s Mark Kurtz

2011-09-27T18:33:00.005Z

Historically, peer-reviewed journals were published by scientific societies on a non-profit basis. Today scholarly publishing is dominated by a handful of large commercial publishers focused on maximising their profits. This has left small society publishers struggling to survive and libraries unable to afford all the journals they need. Unable to compete with commercial publishers, many societies have given up and sold or outsourced their publishing activities to them—a decision that inevitably leads to a rise in the price of their journals.

Some, however, have sought survival by banding together and creating online collections of their combined journal portfolios. This is the objective of the Learned Journals Collection; and it is the aim of BioOne, which currently provides online access to 167 titles from 126 different non-profit bioscience publishers. I spoke recently with BioOne’s director of business development Mark Kurtz. The conversation was a further reminder for me that while the Open Access (OA) movement now looks set to solve the access problem, it is far from clear that it will solve the more fundamental affordability problem confronting the research community.

Background

Writing in D-Lib magazine in 2000 Rick Johnson—then enterprise director for The Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC)—pointed out that until the end of World War II scholarly publishing had operated somewhat like a gift economy. As he put it, “For nearly 300 years—since 1665, when the Royal Society of London published the first modern journal, Philosophical Transactions—societies satisfied the need for scholars to communicate among themselves and so maintained their role as the principal scholarly publishers. Research articles were ‘gifted’ to societies by authors and returned to the community in low-cost journals.”

Following the explosion in research funding after the war, however, societies increasingly struggled to cope with the ensuing flood of papers. Spotting a market opportunity, commercial companies quickly filled the vacuum. In doing so, these profit-hungry corporations quickly realised that the demand for scholarly journals is remarkably inelastic. So they did the rational thing, said Johnson, “they raised institutional prices of journals dramatically and relentlessly to exploit the elasticity curve.”

Given this inelasticity, Johnson added, the traditional “circle of gifts” between scholars and their society was replaced not with a real market economy, but a “dysfunctional hybrid.”

Unsurprisingly, the new entrants were soon engaged in an orgy of acquisitions and consolidation—aided by the alacrity with which some societies rushed to outsource their publishing activities to them when they saw how easy it is to generate large sums of money from scholarly journals if your goal is to maximise revenues rather than simply communicate research. By collaborating with commercial companies, these societies realised, they could not only ensure their own survival, but also make a healthy surplus that would allow them to subsidise their other activities.

As a result, today a few large commercial companies own thousands of journals apiece, and are generally able to set their own price.

Serials crisis

Thus was born the serials crisis, which has had the research community in its grip now for several decades. Unable to keep up with the constant increase in subscription prices, libraries began to cancel journals. Publishers responded by increasing their prices further, hoping to make up the lost revenue. This simply triggered further cancellations, and each time the price of a journal was increased a few more libraries cancelled their subscription. It was a vicious cycle that seemed likely to destroy the scholarly communication system.

Determined to staunch the bleeding, publishers came up with a new strategy: they put all their journals online and invited libraries to buy their entire journal portfolio on an all-or-nothing, multi-year basis—a business model that came to be known as the Big Deal.

Why, given their straitened circumstances, would libraries agree to buy even more journals? Why, moreover, would they agree to lock themselves into multi-year contracts? Because if they did so publishers promised them access to a much greater number of electronic journals than they had had print subscriptions to—for the same price.

At first, everyone seemed happy with the Big Deal. When the contracts came up for renewal, however, libraries were confronted with a stark choice: Pay the publisher’s new asking price (inevitably higher) and renew the contract; or go back to buying on a title-by-title basis and face the painful task of telling faculty that they were about to lose access to many of the journals they needed to keep up with developments in their discipline. In the circumstances, most librarians opted to renew the Big Deals.
Soon the Big Deals were devouring most of a library’s budget, forcing it again to start cancelling journals. This time, however, it was the journals of those publishers who did not offer their own Big Deal that were targeted—these were invariably the journals of smaller publishers, and usually those of society publishers.

As a result, more and more societies decided that, if they wanted to survive, they had no option but to fall into the arms of a commercial publisher. This further distorted the market, putting those societies that remained independent under great pressure to partner up too.

Meanwhile, the on-going struggle to pay for journals meant that libraries faced a mounting affordability problem; and as libraries cancelled more and more titles, so researchers were confronted with a growing access problem.

SPARC

Unsurprisingly, libraries began to search around for solutions to these twin problems. In 1998, for instance, a group of libraries founded SPARC—to “correct imbalances in the scholarly publishing system”. And Rick Johnson was recruited as executive director of the new organisation.

Several new initiatives were launched as a result, including SPARC Leading Edge, SPARC Alternative and SPARC Scientific Communities. It was from the latter that BioOne emerged, conceived as an “aggregation of the full-texts of high-impact bioscience research journals.”

####

If you wish to read the interview with Mark Kurtz please click on the link below. 

I am publishing it under a Creative Commons licence, so you are free to copy and distribute it as you wish, so long as you credit me as the author, do not alter or transform the text, and do not use it for any commercial purpose. 

To read the interview (as a PDF file) click here.

The Big Deal: Not Price But Cost

2011-09-01T13:31:00.004Z

The September issue of Information Today has published an article I have written on the Big Deal.

The article is available in full here. Below are a few extracts from it:

What is the issue?

First introduced by Academic Press (AP) in 1996, the Big Deal—in which publishers sell online subscriptions to large bundles of electronic journals—is now the principal means by which academics access research literature.

When it was introduced, the Big Deal was widely seen as a solution to the so-called serials crisis, and both publishers and librarians embraced it enthusiastically.

However, the Big Deal today is the biggest bugbear for librarians and currently the focus of a face-off between U.K. librarians and publishers.

How did an initiative that was once viewed so positively become an object of dislike and derision? What is the solution?

What is the Big Deal?

A Big Deal “may consist of hundreds of titles—often the publisher’s entire journals’ list—sold in a bundled package to a consortium of libraries on a one-price, one-size-fits-all basis,” according to Ingenta’s Mark Rowse in 2002.

In other words, research libraries combine to buy a single all-you-can eat subscription for a set fee and for a set number of years (usually 3). This fee is invariably based on the cost of the member institutions’ historical print subscriptions.

As Rowse explained, “A publisher might supply a whole list for the price of the sum of the original print subscriptions of a library consortium, with an electronic premium added, generally in the range of between 5 and 15 percent.”

In addition, a built-in percentage increase of around 6% per annum became standard.

What was the Big Deal’s attraction?

For libraries, the perceived benefit of the Big Deal was “access to a greater number of journal titles and a stronger negotiating position through the purchase of a greater volume of content by large consortia,” says Fred Friend, honorary director scholarly communication at University College London.

Why has the Big Deal become librarians’ greatest bête noire 15 years after its introduction?

Ivy Anderson, director of collections at California Digital Library points to three issues, concerns that only actually became apparent over time. These she characterizes as budgetary concerns, policy concerns, and systemic concerns.

What is the nub of the problem?

[L]ibrarians have never denied that the Big Deal increases usage and lowers per-article costs. Says Anderson, “It has to be acknowledged that the large publisher journal licenses have expanded access and lowered the unit cost of much journal content relative to what the cost of those journals might have been without those deals, particularly when publishers have been willing to cap price increases in exchange for multi-year revenue guarantees.”

However, she points out that the problem is that lower per-unit costs do little to help librarians grapple with the more fundamental affordability problem confronting them.

To understand this problem, Anderson wrote on the liblicense mailing list earlier this year one has simply to juxtapose two well-known charts, “one from ARL documenting the long decline in the proportion of research university funding allocated towards libraries, and another reproduced by STM documenting the equally steady increase in journal publication over time. These trends have long been on a collision course.”

The relative decline of library budgets

What is the publisher’s perspective?

For their part, publishers rightly point out that if the scholarly publishing system is to continue functioning (in its current form at least), they have to be paid for the services they provide. Speaking to me last year, Derk Haank pointed out that journals are currently growing in volume by 6% to 7% per year. As a consequence, he said prices must inevitably go up.

“We have been doing all that is possible over the last couple of years, and will continue to do so to ensure that our price increases are lower than the volume increases. But not increasing our prices is not an option in the long term,” he said.

One can argue about the level of profits publishers ought to be making from the public purse, but Haank’s general point is hard to gainsay.

He added, “I agree that there was once a serial pricing problem. I have never denied there was a problem. But it was the Big Deal that solved it.” For that reason, he suggested, “The Big Deal is the best invention since sliced bread.”

[Haank also said]:“Librarians need to accept that if they want access to a continually growing database, then costs will need to go up a little bit … We try to accommodate our customers, but at a certain point, we will hit a wall.”

UK librarians confront publishers

But librarians can hit walls too and ... some already have. Many are simply no longer able to pay publishers’ asking prices. And nowhere is this discontent more evident right now than in the U.K., where the Big Deal first saw the light of day.

Frustrated by the insupportable cost of the Big Deals and angry at what they see as publisher recalcitrance, U.K. librarians have decided that enough is enough.

Two years ago, Research Libraries UK (RLUK), which represents the so-called Russell Group of universities, and whose membership consists of 30 major institutions, including Oxford, Cambridge, and Manchester universities, Imperial College, the London School of Economics, and The British Library, made a decision. With its Big Deal contracts with both Elsevier and Wiley-Blackwell due for renewal in January 2012, RLUK instructed JISC Collections (which acts on its behalf in content licensing matters) to take a firm line in renewal negotiations.

Specifically, RLUK is insisting that in future its member institutions are billed in sterling rather than euros, that the bills are staged rather demanded upfront and—most striking of all—that prices are rolled back to where they were in 2007 (with an allowance for RPI).

In practice, says Deborah Shorley, director of library services at London University’s Imperial College (who is chair of the RLUK group leading the revolt), this would effectively amount to a 15% reduction in current prices.

What can RLUK’s strategy achieve?

RLUK’s strategy would appear to be the biggest challenge to the status quo for 15 years. But is it a potential game-changer?

Let’s put the question another way: If it succeeds in its objective, what will RLUK have achieved? If the fundamental problem faced by the research community is long-term affordability then how can a temporary price reduction resolve the deeper problem? After all, prices will doubtless creep back up again. And librarians will still be handcuffed to an inflexible system.

It is striking that most discussion about the Big Deal too often fails to examine the underlying questions raised by the serials crisis. Questions such as: Can the research community still afford the scholarly communication system it has inherited, or has the cost become too great?

And even if the traditional system is still theoretically affordable, could it be that those who ultimately pay for it (universities, research funders, governments, and ultimately taxpayers) are no longer willing to foot the bill as the costs go higher and higher?

The signs are that the answer to both questions is no. If that is right, then RLUK’s strategy can surely only provide short-term relief. Is there no way out of the impasse?

A possible answer is mooted in the full 9,000-word article, which is freely available here.

The Open Access Interviews: Wellcome Trust’s Robert Kiley

2011-08-26T15:53:00.010Z

Over the past year Open Access (OA) publishing has gained considerable mindshare, not just amongst researchers and librarians, but publishers too. This has been helped greatly by the perceived success of the Public Library of Science (PLoS) — which in 2010 managed to cover its operating costs with revenue for the first time. But as it becomes increasingly likely that OA publishing will prove no less expensive than traditional subscription publishing, a couple of key questions arise: How much will Gold OA eventually cost? And how will the research community pay for it? I explored these questions recently with Robert Kiley, Head of Digital Services at the UK-based Wellcome Trust, one of the world's largest medical research charities.

The consensus is that viability for PLoS was eventually achieved thanks to PLoS ONE and the “light” peer review model that it has pioneered. Indeed PLoS ONE is widely described as a “cash cow”, since it is believed to be subsidising not just the publisher’s flagship journals but practically the entire PLoS enterprise. For this reason, no doubt, traditional publishers are currently rushing to create clones of what PLoS itself describes as the first of a new breed of megajournals.

Amongst those to announce PLoS ONE look-alikes in recent months are the American Institute of Physics (AIP Advances), Nature Publishing Group (Scientific Reports), the Company of Biologists (Biology Open) and Sage (Sage Open).

In addition, practically all subscription publishers now offer a Hybrid OA option. This allows researchers to have their papers made freely available on the Web even when they publish in a subscription journal — if they agree to pay an article processing charge (APC). Designed by publishers as a way to offer OA without loss of revenue, Hybrid OA is invariable charged at premium rates — which range from between $3,000 to $5,000 per paper.

In short, despite their initial rejection (not to say repugnance) of OA, publishers now view it as a lucrative new revenue stream to have opened up in the scholarly publishing space. Indeed, they appear to fear that unless they move quickly they may lose out in what some have characterised as a “gold rush”.

This new attitude was articulated on the Liblicense mailing list recently by publishing consultant Joe Esposito, who assured list members “OA can grow and commercial publishers can become even more profitable, in part by co-opting OA publishing.”

Dilemma

In the meantime, however, many in the research community have resigned themselves to the fact that OA publishing may never provide the cost savings that it was expected to deliver. As former director of Penn State University Press Sandy Thatcher put it recently on Liblicense, “[W]ith the gold OA model, you are entirely at the mercy of publishers, who will charge what they need to make their preferred profit margin and will not be any more transparent than they are now about their actual costs. End users will benefit, but will the costs to the system be any less?”

If costs do not fall the research community faces a dilemma, since it was widely assumed that OA would provide a solution to the long-standing serials crisis — the phenomenon whereby library budgets have consistently failed to keep pace with the rise in the cost of journal subscriptions (effectively it is libraries that pay for scholarly publishing).

To add to the challenge, in the short term OA can only increase costs, because during the transition research institutions are having to continue to pay subscriptions while also paying for OA membership schemes. The latter are subscription-like deals offered by OA publishers like PLoS, BioMed Central (BMC) and Hindawi to enable research institutions to block purchase free-at-the-point-of-use publication rights so that faculty members can make their papers Open Access without being billed personally. These too are usually funded from library budgets.

In addition, many universities have created Gold OA funds so that one-off grants can be awarded to researchers wanting to publish in OA journals for which the institution has no membership agreement.

To cap it all, these additional costs come at a time when the global financial crisis is squeezing university budgets to death. Rather than being able to provide additional funds, most universities are beginning to find that they need to take an axe to their journal subscriptions.

In its 2010 Study of Subscription Prices for Scholarly Society Journals, for instance, Allen Press published a list of universities that made “significant institutional subscription cancellations” last year. This included Georgia Tech, the University of California, San Francisco, Oregon State University, and the University of Nevada, Las Vegas.

And this July The Chronicle of Higher Education reported that the University of Oregon and Southern Illinois University even felt compelled to cancel a number of “big deals”, which can mean depriving researchers of access to thousands of journals in one fell swoop.

Meanwhile on the other side of the Atlantic, Research Libraries UK (RLUK) has informed both Elsevier and Wiley-Blackwell that unless they agree to a 15% reduction in prices it will not renew its Big Deal contracts with them next year. This is serious: RLUK represents the so-called Russell Group of universities, whose membership consists of thirty major institutions, including Oxford, Cambridge and Manchester universities, Imperial College, the London School of Economics, and the British Library.

Safety net

In this kind of environment how can universities avoid eventually having to cancel their institutional membership schemes too — as in fact Columbia University did in 2009? And how long can they avoid having to close their Gold OA funds — as the University of Amsterdam did the same year.

In fact, Gold OA funds today tend to be more nominal than real. Having realised that demand could quickly outstrip available resources if OA took off, universities have in recent years started to impose rigorous eligibility rules on authors asking for assistance. When the Compact for Open-Access Publishing Equity (COPE) was founded in 2009, its stated policy made this explicit.

As the Director of the Office for Scholarly Communication at Harvard University Stuart Shieber explained at the time, “By design, the overall cost to a university of implementing the compact, in the short term, would be quite small. Hybrid open-access fees are explicitly eschewed, and true open-access fees tend to be found at present in just those areas of scholarship where grant support is most prevalent, reducing the underwriting load on the university substantially. Rough estimates based on the experience of the Berkeley Research Impact Initiative fall in the range of tens of dollars per faculty member per year.”

A year later Shieber was pleased to be able to report that, in practice, Gold OA funds are providing even less support than he had envisaged. Harvard’s own HOPE Fund, for instance, has to this day paid for only three OA papers.

In other words, the policy of many Gold OA funds is that if there is any alternative source of funding, and/or if the proposed journal does not meet a very strict set of criteria, no money will be made available. As Shieber points out, these funds should be viewed as “safety nets” alone. “Safety nets are useful even when they are not used.”

If institutions now start to cancel their OA membership schemes (which some believe provide pretty poor value anyway), the question inevitably arises: in light of the continuing financial squeeze, who on earth is going to pay for the “dramatic growth of Open Access” — as some characterise it?

An answer to this question is all the more pressing given that the fee waivers currently offered by many OA publishers could be under threat. With commercial publishers like Nature Publishing Group (NPG) entering the no-frills market created by PLoS ONE, it is anticipated that the waiver schemes could become rare, or even disappear altogether — a point made by Phil Davis on The Scholarly Kitchen blog earlier this year.

Dissemination costs are research costs

So who will pay for Gold OA? Shieber hinted at one alternative funding source in 2009: research funders. In his mind, no doubt, was the example of the Wellcome Trust, which in 2005 — when it announced its OA policy — stated that it believed “dissemination costs are research costs”. As a consequence, it said, in future it would foot the bill for any grantee who wanted to publish in an OA journal.

This decision cost Wellcome £622,000 ($1m) in 2005/6, and the bill has grown steadily over time. Last year the Trust forked out just over £3 million ($4.9m). And if and when OA publishing becomes the norm the cost could rise to £7.3 million ($12m) per annum, which represents around 1.25% of Wellcome’s current research spend.

Wellcome’s decision is good news for any of its funded researchers who want to embrace OA. Some, however, believe that it put the nail in the coffin of hopes that OA would reduce the cost of scholarly publishing. Unlike the funds created by COPE members, for instance, Wellcome is happy to pay for papers to be published in Hybrid OA journals — which, as noted earlier, charge premium rates.

With one of the world's largest medical research charities prepared to pay their asking price, critics complain, publishers have naturally come to assume that they can charge whatever they want for OA products — much as they have always done for journal subscriptions. As a result, critics add, the serials crisis will simply morph into a different kind of pricing impasse.

Others, however, argue that overpricing may not actually be possible in the current economic environment — as the stand taken by RLUK might seem to imply. Most research, they point out, is funded not by private charities like Wellcome, but by governments — and the current sovereign debt crisis afflicting the Western world has made money so tight that it just won’t be feasible to pay publishers the rates they want.

In fact, private funders are no less susceptible than governments to the financial turbulence we have witnessed in recent years. In 2008, for instance, the London Times reported that the Wellcome Trust had lost £1.5 billion ($2.4 billion) after some of its investments had turned sour the preceding year. This saw the Trust’s investments after debt shrink from £15.1billion to £13.1billion.

As a result, the amount of money Wellcome has available to fund research has fallen by £95m since 2007. And the continuing panics still sweeping through markets suggest that the situation is likely to get worse before it improves.

All in all, it is not at all clear today how Gold OA will be paid for going forward, or how OA publishing will develop.

Intriguingly, two months ago the Wellcome Trust announced that — together with the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) and the Max Planck Society — it plans to launch a new OA journal. Even more intriguingly, the three partners stated that no APCs will be levied “for a number of years”.

This will inevitably further reduce the amount of money that the Trust has available for funding research projects. But what does it portend?

Confident

With these thoughts in mind I recently emailed some questions over to Wellcome’s Robert Kiley.

As will be evident from the Q&A below, Kiley remains confident that Wellcome’s decision to pay for Gold OA was the right thing to do, and he does not believe it will have a significant impact on the amount of money Wellcome is able to make available to fund research.

He rightly points out that — compared to the shifts in value that the ups and downs of the market can inflict on the Trust's resources — the $12m that it may have to spend on Gold OA is small beer. Moreover, Kiley adds, that figure “assumes we pick up 100% of the OA costs.” Since most research is funded by more than one organisation, he explains, it is safe to assume that the other organisations funding the research will share any publication costs.

And while declining to say how much money Wellcome is investing in the new OA journal, Kiley insists that the percentage of its funds devoted to research dissemination (rather than research itself) will rise only “slightly” as a result.

Finally, Kiley expresses himself confident that OA publishing will prove cheaper than subscription publishing, particularly in light of the current wave of PLoS ONE-clones being launched. These, he points out, levy lower APCs than both Hybrid and pure OA journals (i.e. between $1,350 and $1,980).

This assumes, of course, that a sufficient number of Wellcome-funded researchers will be content to publish in less prestigious no-frills journals like PLoS ONE.

But given the straitened circumstances that the research community finds itself in today, perhaps the more important point is that if PLoS ONE’s prices are such that they can subsidise the larger PLoS enterprise (and spark a me-to “gold rush” as a result), then we must assume that publishers still believe they can ask the research community to pay premium prices, even when selling entry-level products that provide only a minimal service (PLoS ONE articles are not copyedited for instance).

The research community might justifiably wonder why publishers appear to be the only stakeholders that do not believe they have to tighten their belts.

Wellcome’s plans to introduce a new OA journal do, however, suggest an intriguing possibility: Although the three partners have certainly not said as much (in fact they have given a number of not entirely convincing reasons), it is tempting to speculate that the unspoken motivation for launching the journal could be a realisation that, in the age of the Internet, professional publishers have become an unnecessary and expensive luxury.

We could note, for instance, that the project’s FAQ states, “Online open access journals such as the PLoS titles and 'Nature Scientific Reports' are a step in the right direction. Our open access journal will also incorporate online technology to allow for an engaging, interactive experience, but will be staffed by experienced, active scientists and will use a faster, more transparent peer review system.”

Below I publish the email Q&A I had with Robert Kiley.

Robert Kiley

RP: I believe the research funded by The Wellcome Trust generates around 5,000 papers a year. Is that right?

RK: Yes it is.

RP: In 2005 the Trust introduced an OA mandate that requires all its funded researchers to either self-archive their final peer-reviewed manuscript in the UKPMC repository within six months of publication, or to publish them in Gold or Hybrid journals. To help them do the latter the Trust agreed to pay any OA charges incurred.

RK: Correct.

RP: I am told that Wellcome’s contribution to Gold OA costs consists primarily of block grants that it makes to around 30 large institutions. Other Wellcome-funded researchers have to apply to the Trust to have their grants supplemented on a case-by-case basis. Are the block grants based on an estimate of the number of papers that Wellcome grantees at those individual institutions are likely to generate, or is there a one-for-one relationship?

RK: The block grants are based on an estimate of the number of papers that will arise from Wellcome-funded researchers at a particular institution.

RP: Do the beneficiaries of the block grants supply Wellcome with statistics showing exactly how that block grant has been used?

RK: At the end of each year, each institution supplies the Trust with a spread sheet showing what they actually spent on OA publication costs.

As with any grant, the institution can only claim against the grant commitment for money it has actually spent. I.e. this explains why the commitment funding levels are often higher than the actual funding spend.

Regrettable?

RP: As I understand it, the costs arising from the Trust’s OA policy have grown over the past five years from £622,000 ($1 million) to just over £3 million ($4.9m). Is that correct?

RK: This increase reflects the fact that more and more authors are complying with the Wellcome mandate, and for this many more are selecting the "author pays" option.

I guess it also reflects the growing availability of "pure" OA journals, from the stables of PLoS and BMC, and more recently from Wiley, BMJ, NPG etc.

RP: If OA becomes the norm, then I understand that Wellcome expects these costs to grow to around $12 million (£7.3 million) per annum, which would represent around 1.25% of its total research spend?

RK: Yes, but that 1.25% assumes that Wellcome is picking up 100% of the research publication costs. In reality, much of the research Wellcome funds is also funded by other funders. Thus, if a paper is attributed to more than one research funder then we would expect the publication costs to be apportioned as well.

We recognise that this splitting of OA costs is probably not fully in place yet, but with the development of "middleware" solutions — such as Open Access Key — the splitting of publication costs across funders should become easier.

RP: What I take away from this is that in a fully OA world Wellcome could have around $12 million a year less available for funding research (as opposed to communicating it). I assume that previously these costs would have been met by research institutions (through journal subscriptions). Is that regrettable in any way?

RK: To repeat the point, the $12m assumes we pick up 100% of the OA costs. The scale of support available for research is driven by our investment portfolio.

RP: What does that mean in practice?

RK: For example the total amount spent on grants in 2009/10 was £450m, compared to £490m in 2008/09 and £545m in 2007/08. The introduction of our OA policy has not impacted the funding available for research grants. See here for the details.

Costs

RP: In a presentation you gave earlier this year at the annual conference of the Association of Subscription Agents and Intermediaries you reported that during a three month period at the end of last year Wellcome funded the publication of 440 articles. This cost the organisation just over $1million (£611,000), which averages out at $2,367 per paper (£1,447)?

RK: Correct. Those figures were based on the 440 papers that we paid for during the last quarter of 2010. These articles were published in journals with a wide range of APCs, up to and including $5,000 for Cell Press. The median cost was $2,250 and the mode $3,000.

The recent RIN/CEPA/Ware study on transition models, by the way, argued that if the average Article Processing Charges were set at about £1,457 (or $2,185 — the estimate by Outsell of the 2009 average charge) then "UK universities would benefit from substantial annual net savings that we estimate at £2.8m (or £3.0m including non-cash savings), .....whilst at the national level the UK makes annual savings in funding costs of £9.7m"

As you say, in the piece of work I undertook I calculated that the average APC levied on Wellcome Trust authors was $2,367 — thus validating the estimates provided by Outsell, and confirming that the "low APC" modelled in this report is highly realistic.

We believe that the benefits of maximising the dissemination of Trust-funded research findings, via our open access policy, outweigh the costs.

RP: As you imply, the RIN figures you cite assume that APC rates settle at a lower level. However, the report also says, “if average APCs were set at a level equal to the estimated current global average cost per article (£2,634), UK universities’ annual cash costs would rise significantly, leading to a high net cost to the UK relative to the other scenarios (other than licensing).” Your assumption presumably is that the average APC cost will fall by at least £1,177 from today’s price?

RK: If you look at the raft of new, "pure OA" journals that have been announced over the past six months you will see that the APC is akin to the PLoS ONE APC. So, the APC for NPG's Scientific reports is $1,350; BMJ Open is £1,200 [$1,980], Open Biology (Royal Society £1,200); Biology Open (Company of Biologists) $1,350 etc. — all of which suggests that an average APC of around £1,457/$2,185 is realistic.

The RIN report also looked at the benefits (not just cash savings) that would arise if greater access were provided to each of the core user groups. Again, with an APC of around $2,200 the benefits cost ratio (BCR) is "very substantially positive, in the range 10.8-15.7".

New journal

RP: As well as committing to pay all the Gold OA fees incurred by its grantees Wellcome recently announced — with HHMI and Max Planck — that it plans to launch its own OA journal. In doing so it does not intend to levy any publishing charges on authors "for a number of years". Presumably the Trust’s financial commitment to dissemination can be expected to grow even more going forward, removing further money from actually doing research. Would you agree? Do you have any figures on what these additional costs might be?

RK: Yes, our support for this new journal will mean that we are spending (slightly) more on dissemination costs.

We have not disclosed how much we are investing in this new journal, but remember that this initiative is being jointly funded by the HHMI and MPS (as well as the Trust). Details about the new journal can be found here.

RP: Wellcome is a private funder, and it was one of the first funders to embrace OA, so it has been very much in the vanguard of OA. Most research is funded by governments. Do you believe that they will follow Wellcome's lead and assume, as Wellcome does, that "dissemination costs are research costs", and so agree to pay all OA publication costs?

RK: I think you will need to talk to RCUK etc. to get their view on this. That said, the RCs do already provide mechanisms for their grant holders to meet open access publications cost — either as direct costs through the grant, or indirect costs.

Anecdotally we hear that RCUK-funded researchers find it more difficult than Wellcome-funded researchers to meet OA costs. And, though I would agree that our mechanisms for meeting OA costs greatly simplify the process, a quick search on PubMed shows (for example) that in the past year there have been some 196 Medical Research Council-funded papers published in either PLoS ONE, PLoS Medicine, PLoS Biology or PLoS genetics.

The point I am trying to make is that, in this simple example, MRC researchers were able to meet the APCs levied by PLoS.

RP: Or perhaps they were beneficiaries of the APC waivers currently provided by PLoS. As its FAQ puts it, “PLoS is committed to ensuring that our fee is never a barrier to publication and so we offer a waiver to any authors who do not have access to funds to cover our publication fees.” The problem with waivers, of course, is that they can be discontinued at any point. I am wondering, however, whether some of these costs are unnecessary in any case. It is widely believed, for instance, that far too many papers are published today (partly because researchers are evaluated by their institutions on the number of papers they publish).

RK: Umm.. I think I might take issue with the assertion that "it is widely believed that far too many papers are being published" — I'm not sure this is a problem as such and there are actually some drivers for more papers to be published, such as those reporting negative results etc. And anyway, we — and I'm sure most other funders — would never evaluate purely on quantitative terms of course.

RP: Thank you for your time.

I discuss the affordability problem confronting scholarly publishing in an article on the “Big Deal” published in the September issue of Information Today. (More here)

The Open Access Interviews: WebmedCentral’s Kamal Mahawar

2011-08-17T16:56:00.017Z

In any discussion about scholarly communication today two thorny issues quickly emerge: the so-called access problem, and the problem of declining peer review standards. Kamal Mahawar, co-founder and CEO of a new web platform for publishing biomedical research called WebmedCentral, believes he has a solution to both problems. WebmedCentral, however, is not without its critics.

The access problem afflicting the research community is essentially an issue of affordability. Researchers submit a paper to a publisher, who then invites other researchers to assess it for quality and value. Assuming it is deemed to be adequate the paper is then published in a journal. To fund this process publishers sell subscriptions to their journals. Research institutions buy these subscriptions to ensure that their researchers have access to all relevant research being done around the world.

As library budgets have declined, however, research institutions have struggled to find the necessary money to pay for all the subscriptions their faculty require, depriving researchers of access to more and more research — a phenomenon known as the serials crisis.

Advocates of open-access publishing (as distinct from self-archiving) believe that the answer to this access/affordability problem is for researchers to abandon publishing in subscription journals and publish in OA journals instead. Rather than imposing charges for access (subscriptions), OA journals levy a publication fee, or “article-processing charge” on authors, or more usually their institutions. This enables publishers to make the papers they publish freely available on the Web, and so provide unfettered access to them.

The problem with OA publishing, however, is that the publication fees are far from cheap — around $1,350 to $3,000 per paper. Consequently, not all researchers have access to the necessary funds. While some OA publishers offer waivers for those without the wherewithal, this is generally done on a case-by-case basis, and the practice could very well be discontinued at some point in the future. If it was, indigent authors could find themselves unable to get their research published, particularly authors based in the developing world.

Raghavendra Gadagkar, a researcher at the Centre for Ecological Sciences at the Indian Institute of Science in Bangalore, made this point eloquently in a letter to Nature in 2008. He concluded that author-pays OA, “does more harm than good in the developing world”.

Decline in quality

Meanwhile, there is a growing conviction that the quality of peer review is declining. This concern was addressed recently by the House of Commons Science & Technology Committee. In its report, the Select Committee stated: “the integrity of the peer-review process can only ever be as robust as the integrity of the people involved”; and it concluded that “oversight of research integrity in the UK is unsatisfactory.”

Kamal Mahawar — whose day job is Consultant General and Bariatric Surgeon at City Hospitals Sunderland NHS Trust in the North East of England — believes the answer to the present crisis in scholarly communication lies in making research papers open access, but without imposing a publication fee on authors. More radically, he believes that any attempt to undertake pre-publication review should be abandoned.

Mahawar’s reasoning is that since the bulk of the costs associated with publishing research papers arises from the process of managing peer review, and the quality of the reviewing is in any case open to question, pre-publication review has become an unnecessary tax on the research community.

All that is needed, he adds, is to provide a low-cost publishing platform, let researchers post their papers on it, and then have independent researchers from other institutions review the papers — a process known as post-publication peer review.

As Mahawar put it in a written submission to the Science & Technology Committee inquiry, “There is widespread belief that pre-publication peer review, ineffective and harmful as it may be, is a necessary evil. I believe time has now come for scientific community to discard pre-publication peer review and concentrate on reinforcing post publication peer review.”

Of course there is no shortage of people happy to share with you their views on peer review. What is different about Mahawar is that he has put his money where his mouth: a year ago, with a group of colleagues, he launched WebmedCentral as an open-access post-publication peer review platform for biomedical science.

WebmedCentral promises to publish all papers submitted to it within 48 hours without reviewing them, and then help authors solicit reviews for the papers post factum.

Suspicion and criticism

To Mahawar’s disappointment, however, the research community has reacted to WebmedCentral with a degree of suspicion and criticism. It did not help that there were initially no details available on the site indicating who owns and manages the service.

Amongst other things, this led to speculation that WebmedCentral was some kind of marketing channel to enable the pharmaceutical industry promote its products. There were also complaints that its publication model would “flood the market” with unreviewed papers and “threaten the current models (including PLoS ONE)”.

In January, PLoS ONE associate editor Matt Hodgkinson posted a detailed and critical review of WebmedCentral on his blog Journalology. Many of the articles on the site, he concluded, “are unpublishable in any biomedical journal”; and he suggested that, given its copyright policy, it would be misleading to call WebmedCentral “open access”.

In a separate post, Hodgkinson criticised WebmedCentral for not publishing its ownership details. Having discovered these for himself in the Companies House database, Hodgkinson posted them on his blog, and ended by saying: “Drs Mahawar, Malviya, Kejariwal, Mr Jain, you should be proud of launching a site that aims to reform biomedical publishing. Why hide away?”

It was not a promising start for a new venture. But Mahawar and his colleagues believe that their cause is a worthy one so they have persisted. And to their credit they have responded to the criticism and made a number of changes, including publishing ownership details on the site and updating their copyright policy. They are also currently looking at how they can introduce an additional quality control layer on the site so that readers can, as Mahawar puts it, more easily judge "which sections have been found by reviewers and faculty to be of a better quality”.

Mahawar has also responded to Hodgkinson’s review. In his response he denies that it is misleading to call WebmedCentral open access, and he suggests that Hodgkinson’s review may have been too judgemental.

He is also unrepentant about publishing what Hodgkinson called “fringe science”. As he put it to me, “That some of these articles would be considered unpublishable in the current system is the whole point of WebmedCentral”.

He added, “It is inevitable that early on we will attract submissions which have not found a place elsewhere but gradually we hope to move the emphasis away from the act of publication to science, and then the quality of submissions should improve.”

Another obstacle the service faces is that researchers have shown themselves generally reluctant to commit time to post-publication reviewing, a point that post-publication review advocate and former BMJ editor Richard Smith has had to concede.

Put this point to Mahawar, however, and he responds: “We feel that other journals have been distracted by pre-publication peer review and were thus not able to give post-publication peer review much attention. Since this is our sole review model, we take it very seriously and are likely to be more successful as a consequence.”

But the greatest obstacle WebmedCentral faces is that it still lacks a business model. As one researcher commented on FriendFeed, “I don't see a viable business model and no evidence of an active reviewing community. Lot of things like this have been tried and none succeeded yet. People are not willing to submit good work to such unrecognised systems. Would love to see something like this succeed but I don't think this will be it.”

Comments like this also do not faze Mahawar. “We believe that if we provide a service which the community values, money will not be too difficult to find,” he told me. “We are exploring all options including philanthropic donation, advertisements, and angel investment for continued funding of this venture.”

The good news is that post-publication peer review is gaining favour — helped no doubt by the perceived success of Faculty 1000 (although it should be noted that F1000 only reviews papers that have already been traditionally reviewed and published in a regular journal).

On the topic of post-publication review the Science & Technology Committee Report remarks, “While pre-publication peer review continues to play an important role, the growth of post-publication peer review and commentary represents an enormous opportunity for experimentation … We encourage the prudent use of online tools for post-publication review and commentary as a means of supplementing pre-publication review.”

In other words, for the moment post-publication review is seen as an adjunct to pre-publication review. Whether it will eventually replace traditional pre-publication peer review, and if so how it will be facilitated and funded, remains for the moment unclear. In the meantime, however, experiments like WebmedCentral are surely to be welcomed.

Below Mahawar answers some specific questions about WebmedCentral.

Kamal Mahawar

Q: Can you clarify when WebmedCentral was launched, what your position is at WebmedCentral, and who else is involved?

A: The portal www.webmedcentral.com (commonly known as WebmedCentral) was officially launched in August 2010. It is owned by a company called Webmed Limited, which is registered in England.

I am a shareholder, director and CEO of the company. The others involved are my friends Deepak Kejariwal (shareholder, director and chairman), Mr Ajay Malviya (shareholder and director) and Mr Manish Jain (shareholder, director, and CFO).

In addition we have a technical team based in the US, UK, and India running our day-to-day affairs. We also have a number of scientists helping us as advisory board members, faculty, and scholarly reviewers.

Q: You say on the site that “Biomedical publishing needs radical changes to empower authors, reviewers and readers.” Can you say more about why you launched WebmedCentral and how you hope it will address the changes you feel are necessary?

A: Biomedical publishing is a multibillion dollar industry that thrives on two basic types of publishing model: reader-pays (funded by libraries or readers) and author-pays (funded by research agencies or authors). The money involved is significant and effectively excludes a large section of the scientific community from participating in academic debates, as they simply cannot afford it. The developing world is especially disadvantaged.

On probing further, it becomes clear that the costs arise mainly from pre-publication peer review. Journals organise this reviewing on behalf of the community and they charge the community for doing so. It does seem rather ironic that the same scientists who write articles for free and review them for free have to pay to actually read them (or publish them with open access journals).

Furthermore pre-publication peer review as the gate keeper of science has come under increasing criticism and scrutiny. Post-publication peer review, on the other hand, aims to generate a debate around every published work and each manuscript as if it were a work in progress, with constant monitoring by the community and updating by authors.

WebmedCentral is trying to build a dynamic platform where publication is not considered the end point of scientific communication, but the beginning. This is backed by raw data, free commentary and reviews and author interaction. We will enable these facilities on our portal and it will then be up to the scientific community to use it.

Our model uses the latest internet technologies to facilitate publication. It will allow every scientist, from any part of the world, who has anything to say to express it freely without any fear of rejection by peers. Peers can make their comments post publication if they so wish.

This approach allows us to keep our publication costs very low and delays are practically non-existent (articles are mostly published within 48 hours). We are trying to build a fair, low cost, efficient platform for scientific communication.

Misleading?

Q: Earlier this year PLoS ONE associate editor Matt Hodgkinson wrote a critical review of WebmedCentral. Do you feel that review was unfair, inaccurate or unbalanced in any way? (One could argue that PLoS ONE is a competitor to WebmedCentral: perhaps Hodgkinson should have added a statement to his review indicating his affiliations?)

A: Please find attached here our response to Matt Hodgkinson’s blog posting. I have sent it to Matt as well for him to post it on his blog.

Q: In his review, Hodgkinson referred to a number of contradictory messages on the WebmedCentral site about copyright and concluded, “Calling WebmedCentral ‘open access’ would be misleading.” Does he have a point?

A: We have clarified this point in the attached document. WebmedCentral is open access and the terminology is not at all misleading.

Q: Hodgkinson also said that the site includes fringe science and that many of the articles on the site are “unpublishable in any biomedical journal”. Would you agree?

A: That some of these articles would be considered unpublishable in the current system is the whole point of WebmedCentral. We do not wish to judge articles before publication. It is inevitable that early on we will attract submissions which have not found a place elsewhere but gradually we hope to move the emphasis away from the act of publication to science, and then the quality of submissions should improve.

If you agree that making a commodity scarce increases its value, by making publication a non-issue, we seek to take the emphasis away from the act of publication to the science itself. In such an environment, an author has nothing to gain by publishing substandard research under their name, and everything to lose. It is our belief that serious authors looking to enhance their reputation will find this freedom of expression empowering, whereas casual authors will soon bring disrepute upon themselves.

Q: As I understand it, to address the above point you intend to add an extra quality control layer on the site. Presumably that would mean that the fringe science would remain, but there would be a second layer on top of that which would include some more traditional peer review services?

A: The additional layer being planned would make it easier for a reader to judge which sections have been found by reviewers and faculty to be of a better quality. It would still not prevent anybody from publishing what they want as that is our core principle and we do not wish to compromise it.

Intermittent intervention

Q: How do you normally seek reviews of uploaded papers, or are authors expected to organise their own reviews?

A: Reviews are primarily organised by authors, but WebmedCentral intervenes intermittently and invites additional reviewers. We also have our own scholarly reviewers and a team of faculty helping in this task.

Q: I have had complaints that WebmedCentral “spams” researchers asking them to review papers. Would you accept that charge, or are researchers simply overly sensitive to such issues?

A: As I say, WebmedCentral intermittently invites reviewers to generate debate around published work. We all (including myself) receive such requests from journals all the time and that is mainly due to the fact that number of articles published is increasing geometrically whereas the number of reviewers is not.

WebmedCentral’s answer to this problem is, as I mentioned, to move the emphasis away from the act of publication per se, which we believe is responsible for the massive rise in the number of publications.

Q: There have been a number of attempts to shift scholarly publishing from a pre-publication review model to post-publication reviewing — including, of course, the attempts by PLoS ONE. To date, however, it has proved very difficult to attract much in the way of post-publication commentary. Where it does occur it tends to take place not on the site where the paper was published, but elsewhere on the Web — on, for instance, researchers’ blogs, and via Twitter etc. Why do you think this is, and how do you think sites like WebmedCentral can encourage more commentary on the papers themselves.

A: We have already been more successful in generating post-publication debate than many others and we hope to be able to improve upon our performance in future by several planned interventions.

We feel that other journals have been distracted by pre-publication peer review and were thus not able to give post-publication peer review much attention. Since this is our sole review model, we take it very seriously and are likely to be more successful as a consequence.

Q: As I understand it, WebmedCentral has published 558 papers since it was launched. Are you pleased with this figure or disappointed? What are your expectations for submissions going forward?

A: We are very pleased with what WebmedCentral has achieved in less than a year. It is much beyond our expectations. We expect to grow by 100% every year for the next few years in terms of hits to our website, growing our user base, and growing the number of articles submitted and reviews posted.

Q: Unless I am mistaken, the only income you receive from WebmedCentral is from the premium upload service you offer (which costs $50), which I assume is minimal. You and your partners must however have invested (and continue to invest) considerable sums of money in the site. Is WebmedCentral a philanthropic project, or is it a commercial venture that has yet to develop a business model?

A: We believe that if we provide a service which the community values, money will not be too difficult to find. So far, the costs are being met by shareholder investments. We are exploring all options including philanthropic donation, advertisements, and angel investment for continued funding of this venture.

With hindsight

Q: I believe that Matt Hodgkinson’s review of WebmedCentral was sparked partly by the fact that there was no indication on the site of who owns the company behind it. There are a number of OA publishers whose ownership is obscure, and whose business practices many believe to be suspect. You have now added ownership details to WebmedCentral. Do you regret not having done so from the beginning?

A: We were hoping that the community would take our venture at face value and it would not matter who was behind it. We were also trying to avoid any undue publicity which would inevitably bring potential disruption to our routine professional lives.

However it soon became evident that some scientists were becoming suspicious that we had links with the pharmaceutical industry and other vested interests that we are trying to hide.

With hindsight, it would possibly have been better to reveal our names from the outset. However as Hodgkinson found out earlier this year, this information has been available in the public domain throughout for anyone who really wanted to find out.

Peter Suber: Leader of a Leaderless Revolution

2011-07-01T15:20:00.001Z

The July/August issue of Information Today has published an interview I did recently with Peter Suber, the de facto leader of the Open Access (OA) movement. The interview is available online here.

Below are a few quotes taken from the interview.

On why OA is necessary:

“Authors need OA to reach all the readers who could build on their work, apply it, extend it, cite it, or make use of it. Readers need OA to find and retrieve everything they need to read and to allow their software prosthetics to process everything they need to process.

“OA doesn’t merely share knowledge. It accelerates research by helping authors and readers find one another. It’s compatible with intermediaries but not with intermediaries who erect access barriers to keep authors and readers apart.

“Basically we need it to solve a serious access problem hindering researchers both as authors and as readers. But we also need it to seize beautiful opportunities offered by the internet, especially the opportunity to distribute perfect copies of arbitrary files to a worldwide audience at zero marginal cost.”

On the current situation with regard to Green OA:

“To me, there’s no single finish line for OA. But we’re rapidly approaching the point where green OA is the default for new research articles, even if it coexists with TA [toll access, or subscription access] from conventional journals. Green OA is already the default for physics worldwide, and for medicine in North America, for different reasons.

“The pace of progress varies from field to field and country to country, but the direction of progress is the same everywhere. The curve is up everywhere. And the reason is the same nearly everywhere, namely, the rise of strong green OA policies at funding agencies and universities. Some policies are weak and have little effect, but the spread of strong policies is definitely enlarging the worldwide volume of OA research.”

On the current situation with regard to Gold OA:

“We’re making progress here as well. The number of peer-reviewed OA journals is growing fast, both among new journals and established journals converting from TA to OA. There are more OA journals making profits or surpluses. There are more OA journals earning reputations for high quality, high impact, and high prestige.

“There are more experiments with different business models for OA journals in different niches and more recognition that there are many different business models to experiment with. There are more universities and funding agencies willing to pay publication fees at fee-based OA journals—and significantly, these numbers are growing even in a deep recession.

“There’s more recognition that supporting OA journals is an investment in a superior way to support research, researchers, research institutions, and peer review. More OA journals are documenting that their conversion to OA increased their submissions and citation impact.

“The growing number of conversions from TA to OA suggests to me that small and medium-sized publishers are starting to see OA less as a threat and more as a survival strategy. The big deals are soaking up library budgets, library budgets are flat or declining, and journals excluded from the big deals have little future under the subscription model.

“In fact, I see a growing recognition that the subscription model itself is unsustainable in a world in which the volume of published knowledge grows rapidly, and subscription prices grow faster than library budgets and inflation.

“I see more funding agencies and governments—not just libraries and universities coming to the conclusion that price barriers to this critically useful literature create harmful access gaps and undermine the public investment in research and peer review. These institutions have long been committed to green OA, but they’re increasing their commitment to gold OA as well.”

Suber’s message to publishers holding out against OA, especially those lobbying against self-archiving mandates:

“I’d argue that they should accept the legitimacy of mandating OA for publicly funded research and focus their objections on the length of the permissible embargo. If they don’t, they’re putting their private interest ahead of the public interest and demanding that public agencies do the same.

“If they don’t object to green OA mandates for publicly funded research and merely resist the idea of converting to gold OA themselves, then I have no objection. But I’d urge them to allow author-initiated green OA. I’d urge them to study the gold OA publishers who are paying their bills and making profits and study the real sustainability of the subscription business model in a world of rapidly growing research and flat or shrinking library budgets. But the choice is theirs, and I’ve never wanted government policy to go beyond regulating grantees to regulating publishers.

“For me, the pitch to subscription-based publishers is fourfold. First, permit green OA. Second, study gold OA. Third, don’t stand in the way as public agencies act in the public interest. Fourth, don’t stand in the way as researchers and research institutions act in the interests of research.”

On whether the PLoS ONE peer review model will become the dominant one for scholarly journals:

“PLoS ONE is a significant model for a peer-reviewed journal, even against the background of other peer-reviewed OA journals. The rapid growth of PLoS ONE imitators is a significant development in journal publishing overall, especially in light of the fact that some of the publishers with PLoS ONE clones were formerly harsh critics of the PLoS ONE model.

“In any science where there is some professional consensus on methodology, it makes sense to separate methodological soundness from significance and to focus prepublication review on soundness. To try to cover significance as well as soundness increases the time and cost of peer review and introduces a subjective element into editorial judgment.

“Significance is better judged by the entire community in open discussion after publication than by a few referees in private before publication. The stakes are higher than they might appear, since the longer prepublication review takes, the longer we must wait for the peer-reviewed article to become OA.

“The model will spread because it’s less expensive than traditional peer review. It may even have originated because it’s less expensive than traditional peer review. I appreciate the need to save money, especially at OA journals. But my own view is that the cost reduction is a weaker argument in its favor than its speed and focus on questions amenable to scientific judgment.

“As with any kind of peer review, it can be done badly. But I don’t worry that it means the end of rigor. We can judge methodological soundness with more rigor than we can judge significance, at least in those fields where there is professional consensus on method. The idea that postponing judgments of significance will reduce rigor is nuts. Where we find lapses of rigor, therefore, we can’t attribute them to the model itself but only to its implementation.

“I agree with Stuart Shieber that the PLoS ONE model is bringing some high-prestige publishers to the world of gold OA, which will increase the number of high-prestige OA titles. I also agree that the number of new PLoS ONE clones will increase competition for authors, which will tend to improve terms, for example, with lower publication fees and less restrictive licenses.

“I also agree with Phil Davis that if PLoS continues to grant fee waivers no-questions-asked, and if the new PLoS ONE clones don’t, then PLoS could see a steady rise in the number of indigent authors, subtracting any savings it might currently realize from the model. I don’t see a good solution to this problem, except to make the case that all fee-based OA journals, including the new clones, should offer fee waivers in cases of economic hardship. But I don’t expect that argument to carry much weight with publishers who want to maximize profits and minimize the financial stability of a rival.”

On whether OA will prove to be a cheaper way of publishing scholarly papers than the traditional subscription model:

“There are good reasons to think that OA publishing costs less, and will continue to cost less, than TA publishing at the same level of quality. There are several studies suggesting this.

“However, there are also those who dispute the conclusion, generally without evidence or with misleading evidence, such as the experience of behemoth publishers with legacy overhead from the age of print and subscriptions. I’m happy to leave it an empirical question and wait for more decisive data to emerge. But my hypothesis based on present evidence is that OA publishing will cost less.”

There is much more in the 9,000-word interview, which is available in full here.

Peer review: Still no practical alternative?

2011-06-22T15:02:00.003Z

The UK House of Commons Science & Technology Select Committee is currently conducting an inquiry into peer review. It held its fourth oral evidence session on June 8^th, taking evidence from both funders of scientific research and from Government.

UPDATE: THE COMMITTEE’S REPORT HAS NOW BEEN PUBLISHED. THE DETAILS ARE AVAILABLE HERE.

While the Committee gave no specific reason for launching the current inquiry it seems evident from the questions MPs have been asking that two particular incidents have been exercising their minds: the long-running saga over Andrew Wakefield and the MMR vaccine scare, and the so-called Climategate incident.

In the June 8^th session the Committee asked questions not just about the efficacy of peer review, but about scientific fraud, bias, the willingness of universities to investigate allegations of misconduct, and the need to make research data freely available so that others can access, examine and test them.

MPs seemed particularly concerned that universities may be unwilling to investigate claims of misconduct. As MP Graham Stringer put it in one of the questions he asked the witnesses, “There is a certain amount of evidence that very little fraud is detected in universities and major research institutions in this country. Do you think we should be doing more to try and detect that, because in one sense there is an interest within those bodies not to discover or expose the problems they have, to sweep it under the carpet, isn’t there? If you are running a university and you find you have a researcher who just writes down his figures without doing the work, which has happened in one or two cases, the university doesn’t want to say that it has been employing a fraudster for 10 years, does it?”

Politicians also probed the witnesses about the use of journal impact factors as a “proxy measure for research quality” when assessing the performance of academics, and whether “the growth of online repository journals” like PLoS ONE is a “technically sound” development.

Robust defence

For their part the witnesses put up a robust defence of current practices. They denied that universities would cover up fraud; they dismissed suggestions that the impact factor is used as a proxy measure of quality; and they insisted that, while it might not be perfect, there is no practical alternative to traditional peer review.

In support of the latter claim they repeated the oft-made analogy with Winston Churchill’s description of democracy. Churchill famously described democracy as “the worst form of government, except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.” Thus it is with peer review, averred the witnesses: no one has come up with anything better.

Those with any experience or knowledge of how peer review works in practice might have been tempted to conclude that analogising peer review with democracy is to obfuscate the issue. At the very least, it appears oxymoronic.

Such a conclusion was all the more likely in light of the opening question and answer. The Chair suggested that it might be helpful to conduct some research into the efficacy of the current system — on the grounds that “evaluation of peer review is poor”. To this Wellcome Trust director Sir Mark Walport replied: “Peer review is no more and no less than review by experts. I am not sure that we would want to do a comparison of a review by experts with a review by ignoramuses.”

Sir Mark’s statement can only have served to remind the audience that peer review is more oligarchic than democratic in effect. Rather than encouraging egalitarianism, it promotes elitism, and all the privileges one might associate with an old boy’s club (appositely perhaps, there was not a single female witness called to give evidence on June 8^th).

Of course the Churchillian analogy is not really meant to suggest that peer review is a democratic process. Nevertheless the witnesses’ repeated claims that the current peer review system is “good enough” would surely be challenged by many junior researchers, who frequently complain that scholarly journals tend to be controlled by small elite groups of insiders, invariably senior researchers.

As one researcher pointed out to me recently, this is particularly problematic for those working outside North American and Europe. As he put it, “Peer-reviewed journals with a high impact factor are either dominated by certain gangs, or groups, or the editors rely on the opinion of reviewers too much.”

The upshot, he added, is that “a small guy from Russia, Brazil or Thailand will never get published, even with excellent results, unless he or she has a prominent Western colleague as a co-author.”

In fact, it is not just researchers in less privileged parts of the world who can struggle to get published in scientific journals today. Nor is it only junior researchers who complain about the peer review system. In 2009, for instance, 14 leading stem cell researchers wrote an open letter to journal editors highlighting their disquiet at the way in which the system operates.

Speaking to the BBC about the letter Professor Lovell-Badge commented: "It's turning things into a clique where only papers that satisfy this select group of a few reviewers who think of themselves as very important people in the field is published.”

Responding in a (separate) BBC interview, Sir Mark downplayed the criticism. Scientists, he said, “are always a bit paranoid” about peer review. And to make his point Sir Mark again used the analogy with democracy — peer review is not perfect, but it is the best system that the research community has been able to come up with.

Risks

As indicated, the June 8^th witnesses also denied that the journal impact factor is used to evaluate researchers’ performance. “[W]e are very clear that we do not use our journal impact factors as a proxy measure for assessing quality,” David Sweeney, the director for research, innovation and skills at the Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE) told MPs. “Our assessment panels are banned from so doing.”

Once again, however, we could expect researchers to refute claims that journal impact factors are not used for promotion and tenure purposes. Whatever funders do or do not do, they might say, universities (that is, their employers) make it quite clear that being published in high impact journals is one of the best ways to advance an academic career.

Indeed, some universities (perhaps not in the UK, but certainly in other countries) operate schemes in which researchers are given cash bonuses if they succeed in being published in a high-impact journal. Universities in China, The Netherlands and Egypt are said to provide such incentives. In the case of Cairo University the details are publicly available on the institution’s web site. The accompanying table shows that faculty members published in a prestigious journal can earn a lump sum payment of between 2,000 and 100,000 Egyptian pounds (£5,000 to £10,000), with the amount paid directly related to the impact factor of the journal.

But it would be wrong to imply that the June 8^th witnesses were averse to new developments. They talked positively about the ways in which the Internet could improve the system, and they spoke enthusiastically about new online journals like PLoS ONE. “PLoS ONE has very good peer review”, said Sir Mark. They also cited with approval the development of web-based post-publication services like Faculty of 1000.

They were far less enthusiastic, however, about social networking tools like blogs, Twitter and Facebook. In contrast to PLoS ONE and Faculty of 1000 — which have been developed by, and are managed by, traditional publishers — the former tools were viewed as dangerously anarchic, uncontrolled, and uncontrollable.

Describing the risks inherent in such services Sir Mark commented, “You have only got to look at the world of blogs, Twitter or anything else. Openness brings its own risks. If anyone can comment, then they can all say what they want, so of course there are risks like that.”

Professor Rick Rylance, chair-elect for Research Councils UK appeared to agree: “You could end up in the rather ludicrous receding world of having to peer-review the post-review and the rest of it to find out whether it has worth.”

It is essential, added Rylance, for journals to continue to act as a quality filter “Clearly, if those filters are removed, there is a danger that people will be relatively unbuttoned about things.”

Why this was problematic was not entirely clear, particularly as Sir Mark had earlier pointed out that in the humanities, “there is a long tradition of writing book reviews where one academic is scathingly rude about another academic.” Was the suggestion that, while it might be fine for humanities scholars, scientists should be preserved from scathing criticism?

“I hope they are a threat”

Not every witness evinced such a conservative view. Sweeney appeared to represent a more radical school. A little anarchy, he implied, might not be such a bad thing. “I think those risks exist but there are benefits,” he suggested. “We will have to adjust to the use of social networking in this area.”

And when the witnesses were asked if article-level metrics posed a threat to high impact journals, Sweeney commented: “I don’t care if they are a threat to the base journals because the journal ecology will develop based on competition and alternative ways of doing things. I am sure they will respond. In some ways, I hope they are a threat.”

Nonetheless, the overall impression created by the witnesses was that any change to the current system should be avoided, and that traditional peer review should be treated as sacrosanct — on the grounds that, whatever its drawbacks, it is the only practical way of ensuring the quality of published research. As indicated, there even appeared to be resistance to testing its efficacy.

Again, many would disagree that published research achieves the levels of quality implied by the witnesses. They would also challenge the proposition that traditional peer review remains the only acceptable way of doing things.

And they might add that, as a result of the intolerable pressure put on researchers to publish as many papers as possible, the quality of peer-reviewed research is actually falling. Finally, they might point out that since practically all papers are eventually published anyway (in one journal or another), quality is a relative concept in the world of scientific publishing today.

It is for these reasons that there are growing calls for change. Moreover, many believe that, far from being a threat to the quality of published research, social networking offers a viable alternative.

Richard Smith, the former editor of the prestigious journal BMJ, for instance, has reached the conclusion that the very notion of pre-publication peer review is flawed. The best way of assessing a paper, he suggests, is after publication, not before.

As Smith puts it, “The problem with filtering before publishing, peer review, is that it is an ineffective, slow, expensive, biased, inefficient, anti-innovatory, and easily abused lottery: the important is just as likely to be filtered out as the unimportant. The sooner we can let the ‘real’ peer review of post-publication peer review get to work the better.”

And today, he suggests, there is an effective way of doing this. “For journal peer review the alternative is to publish everything and then let the world decide what is important. This is possible because of the internet.”

In January Smith developed his views further on the BMJ blog. In a post entitled “Twitter to replace peer review?” he suggested that bloggers and tweeters may be more effective at assessing research than the traditional peer review system.

Smith related how the blogosphere had drawn attention to a major flaw in a paper published (and peer reviewed) by the high-impact journal Science. This claimed that scientists were now able to predict human longevity with 77% accuracy. “One week after the paper was published the authors acknowledged that they had made a technical error,” said Smith, “and shortly afterwards Science issued an “expression of concern,” meaning ignore this paper.”

Revolution underway

It is worth noting that the current inquiry into peer review is by no means the first such inquiry. It is further worth noting that all previous inquiries reached similar conclusions to those expressed by the June 8^th witnesses: traditional peer review is as good as it gets.

In 1989, for instance, the UK Boden Report concluded there are, "no practical alternatives to peer review for the assessment of basic research.” It added, however, that this was no cause for complacency. "Rather the reverse. Peer review does have problems both in principle and in practice."

The same sentiment was echoed in a 1995 Royal Society report on peer review.

The current inquiry, however, is taking place in a web-enabled world. Given this, and the increased pressure on researchers to publish, the Committee is confronted with two new questions: 1) Have peer review practices deteriorated to the point where the status quo can no longer be justifiably supported and, 2) does the Internet, and the new social networking tools developed for it, offer a viable alternative to traditional peer review? Might these new tools indeed prove a superior way of reviewing, filtering and adjudicating on the quality and value of new research?

The most likely outcome, of course, is that the Committee will once again conclude that traditional peer review remains the only practical solution. And in doing so, it may even cite Churchill’s views on democracy.

But whatever the Committee concludes, we should not doubt that a revolution in peer review is underway. Today the status quo is under attack from young Internet-savvy researchers keen to shake the establishment's tree.

Smith cited one example. There was a similar incident last year, when another Science paper became the target of criticism in the blogosphere. The authors of this paper, which claimed to have demonstrated that arsenic-based life forms are possible, were accused of publishing flawed and inadequate research.

The firestorm of criticism was sufficiently compelling, and vocal, that Science subsequently published eight papers criticising the original research, and the paper’s authors appear to be back-pedaling. They have also agreed to release the bacteria so that other groups can try and reproduce their results.

Incidents like this are becoming commonplace, and some now believe that we are witnessing the beginning of the end for traditional peer review. Interestingly, the new approaches emerging on the Web appear to hold out the promise of providing a more democratic way of reviewing papers, one moreover that could prove both more efficient, and more cost-effective.

In short, there may now by a practical alternative to traditional peer review.

These developments are inevitably viewed by the establishment as threatening, not least because it means giving up some of the control it has traditionally enjoyed. But to resist these new forces would be to sit like King Canute ordering the tide to retreat.

Some of the issues explored by the committee on June 8^th are highlighted in the edited questions and answers below the video. The asterisked headings are mine.

The Chair of the Science & Technology Committee is Andrew Miller, Labour MP for Ellesmere Port and Neston. Other politicians to pose the questions below were Graham Stringer, Labour MP for Blackley and Broughton, Roger Williams, Liberal Democrat MP for Brecon and Radnorshire, Gavin Barwell, Conservative MP for Croydon Central, Pamela Nash, Labour MP for Airdrie and Shotts, Stephen McPartland, Conservative MP for Stevenage, David Morris, Conservative MP for Morecambe and Lunesdale, Stephen Mosley, Conservative MP for the City of Chester, and Stephen Metcalfe, Conservative MP for South Basildon and East Thurrock. (A full list of Committee members is available here).

Details of the first three oral sessions can be found here, here, and here.

The June 8^th hearing was split into two sessions.

#####

== FIRST SESSION ==

Those giving evidence in the first session were Professor Rick Rylance, Chair-elect, Research Councils UK, David Sweeney, Director for Research, Innovation and Skills, HEFCE, and Sir Mark Walport, Director, Wellcome Trust.

===

* On whether research funders should fund research on the effectiveness of peer review…

Q250 Chair: … Evaluation of editorial peer review is poor. Should you, as funders of research, contribute towards a programme of research to, perhaps, justify the use of peer review in publication and find out how it could be optimised?…

Sir Mark Walport: It all depends what you mean by "research". It is quite important to have a very straightforward understanding of what peer review is. Peer review is no more and no less than review by experts. I am not sure that we would want to do a comparison of a review by experts with a review by ignoramuses.

Q251 Chair: That’s not very nice, is it?

Sir Mark Walport: Having said that, we do conduct studies of peer review. The Wellcome Trust published a paper in PLoS ONE a couple of years ago in which we took a cohort of papers that had been published. We post-publication peer-reviewed them and then we watched to see how they behaved against the peer review in bibliometrics. There was a pretty good correlation, although there were differences. Experiments of one sort or another are always going on, but the fundamental question of whether you should compare expert review with just randomly publishing stuff I don’t think is something that anyone would be very keen to do. It lacks equipoise.

David Sweeney: Through our funding of JISC and through our funding of the Research Information Network, much work has been carried out in this area and we remain interested in further work being carried out where the objectives are clear.

Professor Rylance: Yes. We, too, would be open to trying to think about how that might be researched. We have to bear in mind that peer review is not a single phenomenon. It is peer review in relation to publication, grant awards, REF and so on. Again, there are differences between the natural sciences, the social sciences and the humanities. You would have to define the task a bit more carefully. We do, from time to time, undertake research on, for example, the influence of bibliometrics and its relationship to peer review, so work is going on in that way.

* On whether peer review limits the emergence of new ideas…

Q252 Chair: The Wellcome Trust highlighted a common criticism of peer review by saying: "It can sometimes slow or limit the emergence of new ideas that challenge established norms in a field." Do the others agree and what can be done about this?

Professor Rylance: Churchill once said that democracy was the worst system in the world apart from all the others. I think the same about peer review. Peer review is absolutely crucial, but, of course, it carries limitations of one kind or another in that it can slow down things. The volume of work load and so on and so forth is increasing but, none the less, we need to remain committed to the principle of doing peer review because, in the end, it is always the first and last resort of quality.

David Sweeney: We think that there is a risk, but we also look at the many experiments that are going on with social networking and modern technological constructs. We hope that the broad view that is taken of those will mitigate the risks which the Trust identified.

Sir Mark Walport: To be clear, the Wellcome Trust, in our submission, said: "Other commonly raised criticisms of peer review are…" We didn’t say that we agreed with that criticism. The issue is that peer review or expert review is as good as the people who do it. That is the key challenge. It has to be used wisely. It is about how the judgment of experts is used. It is about balancing one expert opinion against another. The challenge is not whether peer review is an essential aspect of scholarship because there is no alternative to having experts look at things and make judgments.

* On whether the growth of “online repository journals” like PLoS ONE is “technically sound”…

Q253 Chair: If that common criticism has validity, is the growth of online repository journals like PLoS ONE technically sound?

Sir Mark Walport: It is entirely sound. PLoS ONE has very good peer review. Sometimes there is a confusion between open access publishing and peer review. Open access publishing uses peer review in exactly the same way as other journals. PLoS ONE is reviewed. They have a somewhat different set of criteria, so the PLoS ONE criteria are not, "Is this in the top 5% of research discoveries ever made?" but, "Is the work soundly done? Are the conclusions of the paper supported by the experimental evidence? Are the methods robust?" It is a well peer-reviewed journal but it does not limit its publication to those papers that are seen to be stunning advances in new knowledge. It is terribly important to put to bed the misconception that open access somehow does not use peer review. If it is done properly, it uses peer review very well.

Professor Rylance: It is important to distinguish between peer review that is looking at a threshold standard, i.e. "Is this worthy of publication?" and peer review that is trying to say, "What are the best?" when you are over-subscribed in terms of the things you can publish.

* On whether the impact factor of the journal a paper is published in should be used as a proxy measure of quality when evaluating researchers…

Q255 Stephen Mosley: We have heard that the quality of journals, often determined by the impact factor of those journals, is becoming a proxy measure for research quality. Would you tend to agree with that assessment?

David Sweeney: With regard to our assessment of research previously through the Research Assessment Exercise and the Research Excellence Framework, we are very clear that we do not use our journal impact factors as a proxy measure for assessing quality. Our assessment panels are banned from so doing. That is not a contentious issue at all.

Sir Mark Walport: I would agree with that. Impact factors are a rather lazy surrogate. We all know that papers are published in the "very best" journals that are never cited by anyone ever again. Equally, papers are published in journals that are viewed as less prestigious, which have a very large impact. We would always argue that there is no substitute for reading the publication and finding out what it says, rather than either reading the title of the paper or the title of the journal.

Professor Rylance: I would like to endorse both of those comments. I was the chair of an RAE panel in 2008. There is no absolute correlation between quality and place of publication in both directions. That is you cannot infer for a high-prestige journal that it is going to be good but, even worse, you cannot infer from a low-prestige one that it is going to be weak. Capturing that strength in hidden places is absolutely crucial.

* On whether the 2014 Research Excellence Framework will use impact factor as a measure of quality …

Q256 Stephen Mosley: We have had some very good feedback about the RAE process in 2008 and the fact that assessors did read the papers, did understand them and were able to make a subjective decision based on that. But we have had concerns. I know that Dr Robert Parker from the Royal Society of Chemistry has expressed a concern that the Research Excellence Framework panels in the next assessment in 2014 might not operate in the same way. Can you reassure us that they will be looking at and reading each individual paper and will not just be relying on the impact?

David Sweeney: I can assure you that they will not be relying on the impact. The panels are meeting now to develop their detailed criteria, but it is an underpinning element in the exercise that journal impact factors will not be used. I think we were very interested to see that in Australia, where they conceived an exercise that was heavily dependent on journal rankings, after carrying out the first exercise, they decided that alternative ways of assessing quality, other than journal rankings, were desirable in what is a very major change for them, which leaves them far more aligned with the way we do things in this country.

Q257 Stephen Mosley: That is a fairly conclusive response, is it not? Lastly, you were talking about PLoS ONE in answering the Chair’s questions. From what you were saying, there is a difference in standard between papers in PLoS ONE that might not be in that 5% most excellent bracket, but just so long as the work is technically sound and correct, they are in there without being excellent. With the impact factor of those repository journals gradually increasing, does it mean that the proxy use of peer-reviewed publications is even a less valid approach to assessing the quality of research in institutions in the future?

David Sweeney: I think we just don’t do that. We are not keen to do that. We want to assess-all the time we do work every few years-on how much we can use bibliometrics in a robust way, particularly as you aggregate the information over a large number of publications. At present we do not feel that the role that that should play is beyond informing the expert judgments that are made by panels. We are very conscious of the fact that our research assessment exercise has to go across all disciplines. There would be little argument that the use of metric information is really quite difficult in many disciplines. We are trying to have a consistent way of doing things. We are very keen to be abreast of the latest research but confident that peer review should remain the underpinning element.

Sir Mark Walport: If you are assessing an individual, there is simply no substitute for looking at their best output. If you are assessing a field, that is when you can start using statistical measures. You can start using things like the number of citations. If you look at most funders, they are very focused on asking people to tell them what their best publications are, sometimes limiting the numbers. For our Investigator Awards, we limit the number of publications to people’s best 20.

Professor Rylance: Following on from David’s point, in my field, in the humanities, the majority of publications are not in journals. They are in other forms like books or chapters in books and so on. There simply is not the bibliometric apparatus to derive sound conclusions for that reason.

* On whether formal training in conducting peer review should be compulsory…

Q258 Pamela Nash: Given the importance of peer review in both academic research and publishing, do you think that formal training in conducting peer review should become a compulsory part of gaining a PhD?

Sir Mark Walport: Part of the training of a scientist is peer review. For example, journal clubs, which are an almost ubiquitous part of the training of scientists, bring people together to criticise a piece of published work. That is a training in peer review. Can more be done to train peer reviewers? Yes, I think it probably can. PhD courses increasingly have a significant generic element to them. It is reasonable that peer review should be part of that. People sometimes talk about the opportunity cost of peer review. Peer review is a form of continuous professional development. It forces people to read the scientific literature and it gives a privileged insight into work that is not yet published. Most laboratories would involve, if not their PhD students, their early post-docs in peer review work.

Professor Rylance: I would echo and support that. It seems to me that research is a collective enterprise and that anyone who wishes to enter that field either as an academic or in some other capacity needs to understand that. So an engagement with the work of others of a judgmental or other kind is really quite important as part of that process.

Q259 Pamela Nash: I am aware that the "Roberts funding" provided training for PhD students until recently. Would any of you have any ideas on who could be responsible for continuing that funding for that training?

Sir Mark Walport: That funding is available. For example, the Wellcome Trust funds four-year PhD programmes, so we are providing funding for a longer period. The research councils can speak for themselves, but the four-year model of the PhD is becoming well established and that gives universities the opportunity to provide that transferable skills training.

Q260 Pamela Nash: But should specific peer review training be recommended when that funding is given?

Sir Mark Walport: We are not prescriptive in what universities teach. As I said, that would be a reasonable component of it.

* On reducing the burden on referees…

Q261 Pamela Nash: … Both Research Councils UK and the Wellcome Trust mentioned in their contributions to this inquiry that it would be favourable to reduce the burden — the bulk of the work — on referees of the peer review process. What would each of you propose to help streamline that process and reduce the burden on referees?

Professor Rylance: … One thing you can do is demand manage. If the burden is increasing, and we recognise that it is just in terms of volume and the complication of frequency, if you start to reduce the number of applications, that work load starts to reduce and the quality of peer review goes up, presumably, how do you demand manage in that situation? You could do it in a draconian way. You could, for example, say, "The quota for this university is whatever it is", based on historic performance. You could do it developmentally working with universities to filter their own application processes, such that ones which are not going to go anywhere in any reasonable scheme are filtered out at an early stage, or you could go for what, in the jargon, is called "triage" processes when you receive them. So you do a relatively light-touch first stage application and then you reduce others.

My personal view — there are differences of opinion about this — is that measures like quotas have quite significant downsides, of which probably the most significant is that they would discourage adventurous, speculative, blue skies applications because, naturally, if you have a quota, people tend to be conservative about what they are putting in in order to try and gain the best advantage…

David Sweeney: For us it is a volume problem. Obviously, more research is being done and more findings are being produced. We think that the amount that needs to go through the full weight of the peer review system need not continue to increase. Indeed, we are seeing initiatives in that. As part of our assessment exercise, we require four pieces of work over seven years from academics. In most disciplines, they will publish much more than that, but they do not submit it to the exercise because we are interested in selectively looking at only the best work. We would want to encourage academics to disseminate much of their work in as low burden a way as possible, but submit the very best work for peer review both through journals and then, subsequently, to our system. That is the only way to control the cost of the publication system. We must look for variegated ways of disseminating and quality-assuring the results.

Sir Mark Walport: The first thing is that the academic community is still highly supportive of the fact that peer review is an intrinsic part of the scholarly endeavour. To put some numbers on it, between 2006 and 2010 the Wellcome Trust made about 90,000 requests for peer review. We got about 50% usable responses. The response rate was a bit higher but not every referee’s report added value. That is a pretty good response rate, and much of that was international. We used the global scientific community to help review and they do that very willingly. People who are in environments where they know they cannot themselves get a Wellcome Trust grant are, nevertheless, willing to referee for us…

* On the withdrawal of funding for the UK Research Integrity Office (UKRIO)…

Q264 David Morris: Professor Rylance, have Research Councils UK and Universities UK withdrawn funding from UKRIO, and, if so, why?

Professor Rylance:… The original RIO was set up primarily with a remit for the biomedical sciences. It was set up on a fixed-term basis through a multi-agency system, which I am sure you are aware of, that included not just the funding councils, research councils and the Department of Health, but Wellcome were involved and other bodies. When that came to the end of its term, we had to make a decision about whether to continue. In other words, funding had stopped. It was not a question of withdrawing it. Do we continue that funding or do we not? There was a sense of two things. One is that it was really important to establish a body that had a remit and that that body should cover a broader range of disciplines than was the case with the original RIO. Secondly, we needed to disentangle various sorts of functions which were caught up within that original body. Could one be, for example, both a funder and an assurer of it, because you are clearly in quite a complicated relationship? Also, could you be both an assurer and an adviser, because, clearly, if you are giving advice which then turns out to be wrong, you would then be policing your own mistake at some level…

…The general conclusion was that, in its current format at that stage, RIO was not going to meet the sorts of needs that I have just described. We continued its funding for a little and we are now thinking about different ways in which we can put together a collective agreement on it, largely through, probably, a concordat style arrangement. The key player in this, just to complete the story, will be Universities UK. The reason why Universities UK are key to this is because they are not funders themselves of research.

Q265 David Morris: Are you saying that it is moving more towards the subscription funding model? Is this a necessary change?

Professor Rylance: It will be a subscription model in the sense that it will involve a series of agencies that will participate in the funding of it...

…There is a genuine sense among the bodies that I have just described that we need a cross-disciplinary organisation to provide assurance in tandem to link up the various sorts of assurance mechanisms that each funder has, to look at consistency and so on and so forth. That will be done, as I have described, through a concordat arrangement largely run through UUK, but that is as far as we have got at the moment.

Sir Mark Walport: … The Wellcome Trust was fully supportive of Research Councils UK on this matter. Research integrity is important. There is no argument and no debate about that. The question is where the responsibilities lie for ensuring that it happens. We believe very strongly that the responsibility for the integrity of researchers lies with the employers, so by and large that is the universities for university academics. It is clearly the research institutes for people employed by research institutes. That is why we support moving to a concordat between research funders and the employers whose researchers we fund that it is their responsibility, in the same way that health and safety is a responsibility that is delegated to employers. Frankly, we did not believe that UKRIO in the form that it was constituted was delivering what we needed.

* On whether universities are doing enough to address scientific fraud…

Q273 Graham Stringer: … At our last evidence session we had the Pro-Vice-Chancellor responsible for research at Oxford here — I could give you the exact quote but I will not read it — who, basically, said that in his experience there had not been an occasion when they had had to investigate somebody for fiddling their results for fraudulent practices in research. On the other hand, we had another witness who told us that, if research institutions had not sacked at least one person, then they were not trying. Taking Oxford as an example, if you take your assertion that it should be the employers, that indicates that the employers are not carrying out that job. Certainly, in the case of Wakefield with the MMR scandal, the employers of Wakefield did nothing. I will now come to my question. Doesn’t that mean to say that there has to be a huge change in employers’ practices if your view was to be maintained?

Sir Mark Walport: Employers are responsible for the integrity of their employees in all sorts of aspects of life. They are responsible in business for making sure that they do not commit fraud and that the accounting is done well. I can’t possibly comment on whether individual universities are immune from the malpractice of their employees. I do not think it alters the fact that, as in health and safety, and all sorts of other aspects, such as the good behaviour of employers in respect of how they deal with students, this is an employer’s responsibility. Increasingly, universities are taking this very seriously. Of course, you can pick examples of where things go wrong. You can pick examples of where peer review hasn’t worked well. The Wakefield sad story is a very good example of that. That paper should never have been published. But that is not an argument against organisations doing it well. In a sense, the importance of the concordat will be that it sets out in extremely clear terms what the relationship is and what the roles and responsibilities of universities as employers are for the integrity of their employees.

Q274 Chair: It is clear that the universities would have responsibilities, but, taking your two examples of health and safety or fraud in conducting their business, in both of those instances there is an external regulator with statutory powers.

…

Sir Mark Walport: The question is what those statutory powers should be. Ultimately, it is clear that a scientist who has committed some form of scientific fraud, if I can put it that way, should lose their job. Does that then fall under some other regulator? Is it something that the courts should deal with? Probably not very often. In the case of medical research, Andrew Wakefield eventually met his come-uppance at the General Medical Council. There are ways of doing this.

Q275 Graham Stringer: But he did not, did he? He was struck off for bad ethical practice. The General Medical Council did not deal with whether his research was fraudulent or not. In a sense that is a bad example. If I can repeat Andrew’s point, yes, it is the employers’ responsibility, but who is going to keep the employers good?

Sir Mark Walport: That is where the funders will play a very serious role. We take research integrity very seriously as well. It is a grant condition that the work is done properly. From our perspective, in relation to an institution that failed to manage the research integrity properly, we would have to question whether that was an institution at which we could fund research. It is not that we don’t take it seriously, but we believe that the mechanism for dealing with this has to be through the employer. Frankly, if the employer is unaware of things going wrong in the research, it is difficult to see how others would be aware and the employer would be completely unaware. They are doing it in whistleblowing procedures…

Q276 Pamela Nash: If I could take up that point, without an external regulator — you have just said that funders have a responsibility here on who they fund — surely, that is then an incentive for an academic institution to keep things quiet so that they don’t lose funding.

Sir Mark Walport: Not at all. It is the nature particularly of scientific research that errors are found out, and it can’t be in the interests of any good university not to have the research done to the highest possible standard….There is no incentive to cover up.

* On whether there is a need to provide greater openness and transparency in scientific data …

Q277 Graham Stringer: … Can I … quote from last week’s Scientific American, which makes the point really well? … It is by John P.A. Ioannidis: "The best way to ensure that test results are verified would be for scientists to register their detailed experimental protocols before starting their research and disclose full results and data when the research is done. At the moment, results are often selectively reported, emphasising the most exciting among them, and outsiders frequently do not have access to what they need to replicate studies. Journals and funding agencies should strongly encourage full public availability of all data and analytical methods for each published paper." Do you agree with that and do you follow those policies?

…

Sir Mark Walport: This is one of the arguments in favour of good peer review, because a good peer reviewer when reviewing a scientific paper actually probes and says, "Where are the controls? Where is the missing data?" That is the first thing. Secondly, we do explicitly ask investigators when they are generating datasets how they will handle the data. In general terms, we do encourage openness. In fact, at the moment there is a Royal Society inquiry on openness in science which is looking at the whole issue of openness of data. One has to recognise that there are both real costs and opportunity costs. Data is not an unalloyed good, as it were. It is something that has to be interpretable. It is quite easy to bamboozle by just putting out billions of numbers. It is actually a question of presenting the data in a way that is usable by others. But the principles of openness in science, of making data available and open, are something that the Wellcome Trust and other funders of biomedical research around the world are fully behind and completely supportive of.

Q278 Graham Stringer: Is what lies underneath that answer that you believe that codes, computer programs and all the data that would enable other researchers to replicate the work should be made available publicly?

Sir Mark Walport: Bearing in mind the feasibility and garbage in/garbage out, one has to be careful that the data is usable. Yes, increasingly very large datasets are generated. We want to maximise the value of the research that we fund. Therefore, openness is a very important principle. There are some other issues that need to be dealt with as well, so if you are dealing with clinical material then the confidentiality of participants is paramount. You have to manage data so that they are appropriately anonymised and people cannot be revealed. It has to be in the general interest of the advancement of science and knowledge. As you say, science is validated by its reproducibility. If you cannot see the data, that is a problem. Of course, the revolution of the power of the internet to make data available has meant that it is possible to put out data in ways that were never possible before.

…Broadly, it makes complete sense to make as much data available in as usable a form as possible. That is something that we strongly support. It is why the funding of institutions like the European Bioinformatics Institute, which is housed at Hinxton, is so important. The UK Government has a good track record in supporting the EBI and funding has recently been announced for an extension there as part of the European ELIXIR project. Making data available is something that is incredibly important.

David Sweeney: We believe in openness and efficiency in publicly funded research. Dr Malcolm Read took you through some of the issues at a previous hearing. We have funded and continue to fund projects that will push this area forward — UKRDS — and now some projects are looking at how cloud computing can help. Of course, we have learnt a lot from the research councils that the ESRC data archive has been a stunning success over many years…Technology is now allowing us to make advances, and through the work we fund we will learn a lot. Our objective is openness.

Q279 Graham Stringer: Where research is publicly funded, if I can paraphrase what you say, you are saying that the data should be publicly available. If there are good reasons for it being confidential, do you think it should be made available in a confidential depository to the reviewers and, potentially, for other researchers so that it is available in some form?

David Sweeney: That requires consideration of the particular circumstances and the sensitivity. Reviewers should have access to all the information. They need to assure themselves of the quality.

Professor Rylance: You start from that principle and then you think why it is that you shouldn’t reveal that rather than thinking you should close it and then why you should reveal it.

* On the costs of storing large amounts of data…

Q280 Graham Stringer: You have mentioned that you could have a huge dataset. Some of it may be good data and some of it may be rubbish. Are there real problems of costs and, if there are, who should pay for those costs of storage? Are there any other practical problems of storing huge datasets?

Sir Mark Walport: There are very major costs. For example, the Sanger Institute this year alone has generated 1,000 human genome sequences. That is a massive data burden. Indeed, the costs of storing the data may in the future exceed the costs of generating it. Who should be responsible for doing that? It is, ultimately, a research funder issue, because we fund the research and so we have to help with the storage. It is like all of these things. Our funding is a partnership between the charity sector and the Government and it is a shared expenditure.

Professor Rylance: There are issues as well about obsolescence. At what point does this data become simply not relevant anymore? The length of time for that will be discipline- specific and so on. There are a whole host of practical issues about how you do this. IP — intellectual property — is one, particularly, in my area, to do with creative works, for instance.

* On the degree to which article level metrics can measure the quality of research, and whether they pose a threat to high impact journals…

Q281 Stephen Metcalfe: I would like to turn now to the importance of articles versus journals, if I may. As I know you are aware, PLoS ONE instituted a programme of article level metrics. Do you believe that that is a good way to judge a piece of published science and, therefore, you are judging it on its intrinsic merit rather than the basis of the publication that it is in?

Professor Rylance: Yes, absolutely. To echo what we were saying earlier on, it is intrinsic merit that we are after. It is not reputational or associational value.

David Sweeney: I am not entirely sure that I would say that article level metrics necessarily captured the intrinsic metric merit. We should look at metrics of all kinds and try and judge where the collection and development of the metric does add value. As you drill down to individual articles, some metrics really are not entirely helpful. We have seen that with certain solid evidence in bibliometrics. Equally, we can see, with some of the networking metrics, that they may provide helpful information. I remain of the view that there will be no magic number or even a set of numbers that does capture intrinsic merit, but one’s judgment about the quality of the work, which may well be, in any way, in the eye of the beholder, may be informed by a range of metrics.

Sir Mark Walport: I complete agree with David Sweeney on that. You can alter the number of times that an article is downloaded by merely putting some words in the title. There is good evidence that the content of the title influences the number of times that something is downloaded, so measuring download metrics can be very misleading. Different fields have different types of usage. Methods papers, typically, are extraordinarily heavily cited. There can be a long time before the importance of a paper is picked up. It is like all of these things; at a mass scale the statistics are helpful. If you want to assess the value of an individual article, I am afraid that there is no substitute for holding it in front of your eyes and reading it.

Q282 Stephen Metcalfe: You don’t see the article level metrics as a potential threat to the more established high impact journals.

Sir Mark Walport: They are not a threat. Web-based publishing brings new opportunities, because it brings the opportunity for post-publication peer review and for bloggers to comment. There are things like the Faculty of 1000, which provides commentaries on papers. There are more and more ways for finding papers among a long tail of publications. This is a fast-evolving space. As the new generation of scientists comes through who are more familiar with social networking tools, it is likely that Twitter may find more valuable uses in terms of, "Gosh, isn’t this an interesting article?" All sorts of things are happening. It is quite difficult to predict the future. It can only be an enhancement to have the opportunity for post-publication peer review. It has turned out to be quite disappointing in that scientists have been surprisingly unwilling to put detailed comments. When the Public Library of Science started, it had plenty of space where you could comment. Academics are remarkably loath to write critical comments of each other alongside the articles.

Q283 Stephen Metcalfe: Does anyone else want to add to that? …

Professor Rylance: No. I, personally, do not think it is a threat. There are two issues here. One is the recognition of merit. I entirely agree with my colleagues that, in the end, you have got to read the bloomin’ thing to see whether that is true. Then there is the issue about how people gain access to the good and the strong. That is a slightly different question.

David Sweeney: I don’t care if they are a threat to the base journals because the journal ecology will develop based on competition and alternative ways of doing things. I am sure they will respond. In some ways, I hope they are a threat.

Q284 Stephen Metcalfe: You touched upon scientists being unwilling to get heavily involved in post-publication peer review. Philip Campbell from Nature told us that that may well be — I am summarising here — because there is no prestige or credit attached to that particular role and there is the risk of alienating colleagues by public criticism. Do you agree with that? Do you think that there should be a system of crediting people?

Sir Mark Walport: There are two separate issues. There are some very interesting community issues here. In the humanities, there is a long tradition of writing book reviews where one academic is scathingly rude about another academic.

… In the case of the scientific world, that tearing apart is done at conferences and at journal clubs. The scientific community does not have a culture of writing nasty things about each other. This is an evolving world.

Q285 Stephen Metcalfe: So introducing a system of credit-

Sir Mark Walport: On credit, I think one has to be realistic. Are you going to promote someone on the basis of the fact that they wrote a series of comments on other scientific articles? The hard reality is that the core activities of an academic in terms of their promotion and pay recognition are going to be around their own scholarship and their own educational activities. It can only be at the margins that you will get brownie points for having done post-publication peer review.

Q286 Stephen Metcalfe: Finally, if post-publication commentary were to grow, are you concerned about how you could ensure that there was no bias in that commentary, either positive or negative, either those wanting to build up someone’s reputation or those wanting to tear it down without anyone actually challenging them?

Sir Mark Walport: It is quite clearly a risk. We see that in every other walk of activity on the internet. You have only got to look at the world of blogs, Twitter or anything else. Openness brings its own risks. If anyone can comment, then they can all say what they want, so of course there are risks like that.

Professor Rylance: You could end up in the rather ludicrous receding world of having to peer-review the post-review and the rest of it to find out whether it has worth. Sir Mark was talking about the way humanities review each other’s things in print. Of course, one function for the journals that do that is to act as a quality filter to make sure that nothing defamatory, inaccurate or prejudiced is being said. Clearly, if those filters are removed, there is a danger that people will be relatively unbuttoned about things.

Sir Mark Walport: It is self-correcting in that the scientific community is constantly scrutinising each other. A scientist who wrote something that was particularly egregious would be subject to the peer review of their own community.

David Sweeney: I think those risks exist but there are benefits. We will have to adjust to the use of social networking in this area.

#####

== SECOND SESSION ==

Those giving evidence in the second session were Professor Sir John Beddington, Government Chief Scientific Adviser, and Sir Adrian Smith, Director General, Knowledge and Innovation, Department for Business, Innovation and Skills.

* On whether the peer-reviewed literature is fundamental to the formation of Government policy…

Q287 Chair: … You are familiar with the piece of work that we are undertaking. We have heard that researchers perceive peer review to be "fundamental to scholarly communications". Is peer-reviewed literature also fundamental to the formation of Government policy?

Professor Beddington: … The answer to that question is that science and evidence is clearly fundamental to Government policy and peer review is a fundamental part of science evidence. That is not meant to be a cute response, but it is absolutely clear that the process of science involves peer review, and properly so, and that scientific evidence is essential for being the evidence-based policy of the Government.

* On whether there is a need for research into the efficacy of peer review…

Q290 Chair: Evaluation of editorial peer review is poor. Do you think that there is a need for a programme of research in this area to test the evidence for justifying the use and optimisation of peer review in evaluating science?

Sir Adrian Smith: The short answer is no. It is an essential part of the scientific process, the scientific sociology and scientific organisation that scientists judge each other’s work. It is the way that science works. You produce ideas and you get them challenged by those who are capable of challenging them. You modify them and you go round in those kinds of circles. I don’t see how you could step outside of the community itself and its expertise to do anything other. You have probably had it quoted to you already, but there was a paper in Nature in October 2010 when six Nobel Prize winners were asked to comment on how they saw the peer review process. Basically, it was the old Churchillian thing that there are all sorts of problems with it but it is absolutely the best thing we have.

Professor Beddington: Peter Agre makes that point in that same article, saying: "I think that scientific peer review, like democracy, is a very poor system but better than all others."

Q291 Chair: That is twice that that has come up today.

* On the benefits of codifying the use of peer review, and whether UK scientific advisory groups are mandated to use peer review…

Q292 Stephen McPartland: I would like to ask you about Government use of peer review research. The US Congress has codified the use of peer review in Government regulations using the "Daubert Standard". In the US, the Supreme Court codified their use in the courtroom. Have you had any discussions with your American counterparts regarding how this works and what any of the benefits are?

Professor Beddington: … We would not see particular merit in excluding non-peer-reviewed information, because we have to recognise that there is a whole set of information that comes in as Government makes policy, some of it via the media, for example, evidence that is coming in to deal with emergencies. A basic decision on that I don’t think would be helpful. The issue is obviously going to be that, when we provide scientific advice to Government, there will be a weighing of that advice and the fact that certain advice is peer-reviewed and appropriately so, or indeed has been highly cited in a praiseworthy way, will go into the balance of that advice. I think I would advise against a piece of legislation saying that only peer review would be done. One would also have to question the definition of peer review and so on. I don’t think it would be something that I would be recommending to Government to think about adopting…

Q294 Stephen McPartland: Do you believe that a test should be developed to identify whether or not peer review is reliable? This Committee recommended in 2005, in a report entitled Forensic Science On Trial, that a test for expert evidence should be developed, building on the US Daubert test, and the Law Commission has now built on that and published a draft Criminal Evidence (Experts) Bill.

Professor Beddington: I would think that this has to be thought about on a case-by- case basis. Peer review is not a homogeneous activity. If one is starting to see that there are, for example, problems of peer review in a particular journal or in a particular area of science, that needs to be addressed by that journal and by the people who work in that particular area of science. If you posed the question, "Is the peer review process fundamentally flawed?" I would say absolutely not. If you asked, "Are there flaws in the peer review process which can be appropriately drawn to the attention of the community?" the answer is yes. From time to time that will happen and that’s the way to do it.

Sir Adrian Smith: And there will, from time to time, be misjudgments in that system. You can distinguish the system from particular cases within the system.

Q295 Stephen McPartland: Are UK scientific advisory groups mandated to use peer review?

Professor Beddington: No, for the very reasons I gave in my answer to the Chair’s earlier questions. We would certainly always take into account peer-reviewed information in providing advice to Government. I don’t think we would ever exclude it, but that would not be the sole evidence. In fact, some of the evidence that would come in would depend on the area of science. For example, in a large part of social science the scholarship is developed by the production of books, quite often well after the event. Yet social research is extremely important to Government policy. We would have this but it would not necessarily have been published in a social research journal. By contrast, for example, if we are thinking in the context of some work on genomics, then one would be expecting that to have been peer-reviewed and that would be going into the evidence. Again, I just don’t think that one would seek to make regulation. I emphasise again that the evidence we use in scientific, including social research, evidence, will sometimes be peer reviewed. Obviously, we would not seek to exclude peer-reviewed material but we would not wish to exclude material that had not been peer reviewed for these sorts of reasons.

* On the effectiveness of peer review in validating assertions made in articles submitted for publication…

Q296 Roger Williams: … In your opinion how well does the peer review process validate the assertions made in articles put forward for publication?

Professor Beddington: In a sense, both Adrian and I have answered that question earlier. Peer review does not guarantee that the results are correct. Science moves on by its use of scepticism and under challenge. We see all the time in the journals that are published this week that there will be people who have challenged peer-reviewed papers that were published some years ago and pointed out fundamental flaws in them or new evidence that undermines the conclusions of those papers. That is the progress of science. We can’t say that it is a guarantee, and manifestly not.

We can say that it is an awful lot better than bare assertion without evidence. Particularly when you are looking at scientific issues that are fundamental to policy — I have talked about this to this Committee before — the emergence of scientific consensus is very important. That is not to say you do not have sceptics or appropriate challenges, but peer review does not guarantee that and it never could…

* On whether peer reviewers should assess the underlying data supporting a research article as well as the article itself, and whether the raw data should be made freely available…

Q297 Roger Williams: Today, and increasingly, I guess, in the future, submissions in science will be accompanied by very large and complex sets of data. Do you think that the reviewers should be assessing that underlying data as well as the article that is being produced?

Sir Adrian Smith: In an ideal world, but that is rather difficult, is it not, because data will come out of laboratories and field studies. As a reviewer, you can’t go off and replicate that. If you are trying to study somebody’s derivation of a mathematical formula, you can replicate. The difference between the scientific argument and the data is rather different, but the protocols that are in place for collecting data, for example, in medicine, in conducting proper clinical trials and all the rest of it, are in an environment where all the pressures and checks and balances are to get that right.

…

Q299 Roger Williams: Sir John, the Government is, obviously, a very substantial funder of science. Should it, as a matter of principle, require that all this raw data should be made available?

Professor Beddington: Adrian has made a parallel point. With Government-funded science, the push is to have data out into the open. There are some areas, for example, shared data, which means you have a mix of data where some of the ownership of that data is outside the UK. You cannot make a hard and fast rule. In principle, though, the answer is that the more people who will look at the scientific problems from which we are wanting to get evidence the better. Therefore, transparency is, obviously, extremely attractive. From time to time, there will be timing issues, IP issues and so on, which will mean that transparency can be problematic. In the area we were looking at-the community of chief scientific advisers deals with this a lot of the time-we would be looking at material, and if it was not out in the open they would ask why not. If there is no good reason, they would urge that it would be put out into the open. Indeed, research councils push exactly along these lines.

Sir Adrian Smith: There will always be issues of personal data protection, commercial interests and intellectual property and national security, so the situation is quite complex. I understand that the Royal Society will be doing a study sometime over the next 12 months that the Committee may well be interested in.

Q300 Roger Williams: I think there is agreement that this data should be made available, subject to all the concerns that you have expressed about IP and commercial interests. Another matter is the cost of all this. Who should bear that cost if it is going to happen on a greater scale than it has in the past?

Sir Adrian Smith: That is one of the issues that the Royal Society may well look at. Different communities, different cultures and different forms of data pose different issues, but there is a real problem…

* On whether there should be a legal requirement on institutions to conduct a timely inquiry in cases of publication fraud or misconduct, and then publish details of the incident and the disciplinary action that has been taken…

Q310 Gavin Barwell: In the past there has been a perception that publication fraud or misconduct has not always been investigated by the institutions in a timely fashion. Wakefield and MMR is an example. Should there be a legal requirement on institutions to conduct a timely inquiry and to publish the full findings of that inquiry and any disciplinary action that is taken?

Sir Adrian Smith: I don’t know whether you need to go to what "legal" means, but, if you think of the funding that goes into universities, some of it will come through the Funding Council, for instance, through the QR stream and some through research grants. Both with the research councils and the Higher Education Funding Council conditions of grant are attached which make it clear what the expectations of behaviour are. I don’t think those are sufficient sanctions in themselves. An institution that would not follow up properly would be putting at risk its funding from HEFCE and the research councils.

Q311 Gavin Barwell: Are there specific conditions relating to what institutions should do if there is a suggestion that misconduct was taking place?

Sir Adrian Smith: Probably not.

Q312 Gavin Barwell: Do you think there ought to be?

Sir Adrian Smith: …My own view, having run a university for 10 years, is that the constraints you are under in terms of conditions from the many funders that one has are quite sufficient to frighten one into doing appropriate things.

Professor Beddington: The RCUK’s code of conduct, too, is a good look guideline in terms of conflicts of interest and appropriate behaviour. In the sense that universities depend on a significant income from the research councils, then they would be extremely unwise not to take forward any issues very quickly where they had detected fraud. The media would be commenting on it and other people in the same scientific area would be commenting on it. There would be a very substantial incentive for the universities to take this forward rather quickly.

Q313 Graham Stringer: … There is a certain amount of evidence that very little fraud is detected in universities and major research institutions in this country. Do you think we should be doing more to try and detect that, because in one sense there is an interest within those bodies not to discover or expose the problems they have, to sweep it under the carpet, isn’t there? If you are running a university and you find you have a researcher who just writes down his figures without doing the work, which has happened in one or two cases, the university doesn’t want to say that it has been employing a fraudster for 10 years, does it?

Sir Adrian Smith: I would disagree. When I ran a university, I would put it exactly the other way round. The institutional reputation will suffer much more long-term harm if you allowed fraudsters to exist and you don’t do anything about it. In fact, I think you would get a lot of brownie points in many communities if you publicly identified such people and threw them out. I think the incentives are all in the opposite direction.

Q314 Graham Stringer: It is surprising, therefore, is it not, … that there are no cases in Oxford, as the Pro Vice Chancellor told us, and that there are very few cases in other universities and research institutes where people have found fraudulent behaviour? In the case of Wakefield, even when fraudulent behaviour was found out, the institution investigated itself and found nothing wrong. The evidence we have is in the other direction, isn’t it?

Professor Beddington: I would not seek to comment on the Wakefield case. The issues here are that there is so much in the checks and balances in the way that science operates that fraudulent behaviour is highly likely to be detected by, initially, I suspect, gossip and then increasing concern that there is something wrong. That will happen. It may happen in the community and the attention will then be drawn to the university, and it would be very unwise for the university to ignore that information. I have not experienced it in 25 years at Imperial College.

Q315 Graham Stringer: Can I ask why you won’t comment on Wakefield, because it is one of the great scandals of the last 10 or 12 years? It was not dealt with very well. Are there not things to be learnt from that?

Professor Beddington: Yes, there are. My reason for not commenting is that I haven’t read into it for a while, and I would like to re-familiarise myself before I commented, Mr Stringer, rather than any shyness on my part. I am not on top of the detail.

* On whether researchers are biased towards the products of the pharmaceutical companies that sponsor their research…

Q316 Graham Stringer: … Are there problems with peer review in other areas? For instance, there is a huge amount of research sponsored by pharmaceutical companies and companies that produce biomedical products. Do you believe that a lot of researchers in those areas are biased towards the products that those companies are selling?

Sir Adrian Smith: ... I don’t think a lot of the research itself is biased. There are biased reporting effects, because if you are doing clinical trials and you get negative results, there isn’t a journal on clinical trials that didn’t work. It is the ones that work that get published. There is a selection bias in that sense. Do not forget that at the end of the day these things have to get through the FDA or drug regulatory authorities if they are to come on to the market. Then you have incredibly close scrutiny of the protocols, the trials that were done, the conditions under which they were done and so on and so forth. I think there are tremendous checks and balances in the system against that.

* On whether there is a problem with colleagues reviewing each other’s papers in those areas where only a small number of researchers are working…

Q317 Graham Stringer: Are there structural problems where there are only three experts in a particular field, so that they are, effectively, all peer reviewing each other and they either agree or disagree? In one sense, that was the major criticism of those people who criticised the researchers at the university of East Anglia for their research, was it not? There is a very small pool of researchers in that area.

Professor Beddington: Yes, you have that, but people are always moving out of their own fields. There is academic interchange. If things are of sufficient importance, they are likely to get challenged, not necessarily by the top two experts in the field but by others who are around the fringes, particularly if they are of significant interest…

Q318 Graham Stringer: To finish on a fairly obvious question, nearly all of our witnesses have used the Churchillian quote, but when you get fraudulent papers that have been through the best process we have of peer review, do you think that peer review has damaged that process? Getting back to Wakefield, his paper was peer reviewed. Do you think the peer review process has been damaged?

Sir Adrian Smith: How far do you want to take the Churchillian democracy analogy? There are bad things that happen within the peer review system. Not every MP who has been elected has behaved totally honourably.

Graham Stringer: What a shocking thing to say.

Sir Adrian Smith: You would not abandon the democratic process, presumably.

Graham Stringer: No. That would be terrible. Thank you.

Q319 Chair: Finally, are you aware that RCUK has ever cut funding because of fraud or allegations of fraud? If so, could you give us any examples?

Sir Adrian Smith: I would have to go back and look through the archives, as it were, and directly ask that of chief executives. I am not directly aware of a case.

Professor Beddington: I have no experience of it.

The (uncorrected) transcript of the full session is available here.

The video of the event can be accessed here, if it does not open up automatically in this post.

Open Access by Numbers

2011-06-19T19:16:00.004Z

Few can now doubt that open access (OA) to scholarly research is set to become an important feature of the scholarly communication landscape. What is less certain is how much of the world’s research literature is currently available on an OA basis, how fast OA is growing, and what percentage of the world’s academic and scientific literature will be OA in the long-term.

Trying to crunch the numbers is complicated by the fact that research papers can be made OA in two ways: Researchers can continue to publish in subscription journals and then make them freely available by self-archiving them in an institutional repository (Green OA), or they can pay to publish their work in an OA journal (either a pure Gold journal or a Hybrid OA journal) so that the publisher will make it freely available for them.

OA enthusiasts like librarian Heather Morrison — who publishes a series called “Dramatic Growth of Open Access” — tend to estimate OA occurrence and growth primarily by the simple counting of things.

In March, for instance, Morrison reported that there are now over 6,000 OA journals listed in the directory of open access journals (DOAJ), and implied that the number of OA articles is now growing more quickly than the number of papers being published in subscription journals. As she put it: “Data is presented that strongly suggests that the success rate for open access journals is already higher than that of subscription journals.”

In the same post, Morrison argued that by counting the number of papers flagged as OA on the Mendeley research sharing service we could conclude that self-archiving had grown by 171% in the first quarter of 2011.

Counting in this way presents an upbeat picture, suggests that the world is in the process of being flooded with OA, and that universal OA is just around the corner.

Refining the counts

Critics, however, point out that simple counting is too crude when trying to measure OA. Counting Gold OA journals, for instance, is not helpful since many of them publish just a handful of papers a year, if that.

Likewise, counting items that have been self-archived can be deceptive: Many records in institutional repositories will consist of metadata alone, or non-target items like presentations and other non-reviewed material.

Certainly publishers describe the incidence and growth of OA in a less upbeat manner. When I spoke to Springer’s Derk Haank at the end of last year, for instance, he estimated that only around 2% to 2.5% of the world’s papers are being published in Gold or Hybrid journals today.

And since the total number of research papers is growing at around 6% to 7% a year, he said, OA remains “just a drop in the ocean”.

In fact, predicted Haank, OA publishing will never be more than a niche activity. “I expect it to remain between 5% and 10% at a maximum,” he said.

Haank did not provide an estimate of Green OA, but implied that it was relatively low. Pointing out that he would be anxious if it did become commonplace he added, “But we are such a long way from that situation today that we are very easy going about author archiving.”

A few researchers, meanwhile, have been busy trying to arrive at more precise figures. When I last wrote on this topic in 2010 I spoke to a number of researchers, including Bo-Christer Björk.

Based at the Hanken School of Economics in Helsinki, Björk has undertaken several studies aimed at sizing the growth of OA, primarily Gold OA.

For a variety of reasons, Björk explained, this is not an easy thing to do. Nevertheless, when I spoke to him in January 2010 Björk estimated that Gold OA was probably increasing its share of the market by 0.5% per annum.

He added, however: “I have no evidence to show any acceleration in growth. On the contrary it seems that growth has been relatively stable, after a short expansive period when BioMed Central and PLoS were founded”.

“Tremendous growth of Gold OA”

Since then, Björk has taken a closer look at the many new OA journals that have been launched from 1993 - 2009, as well as the many subscription journals that have been converted into Gold journals.

There has also been the rise of “mega journals” like PLoS ONE, now the largest peer-reviewed journal in the world, and which expects to publish 12,000 papers in 2011 alone. In the wake of PLoS ONE’s success a number of PLoS ONE clones have recently been launched.

On June 13^th 2011 Björk and colleagues published a new paper reporting an average annual growth rate since 2000 of 18% for the number of OA journals and 30% for the number of articles.

This, the paper suggests, “can be contrasted to the reported 3.5% yearly volume increase in journal publishing in general. In 2009 the share of articles in OA journals, of all peer reviewed journal articles, reached 7.7%. Overall, the results document a rapid growth in OA journal publishing over the last fifteen years.”

And in a note he posted on the American Scientist Open Access Forum (AmSci) Björk said that the results, “show the tremendous growth of gold OA over the past decade”.

As we said, Björk’s primary focus is on Gold OA. What about Green OA?

This is an area that Yassine Gargouri, a postdoctoral researcher who works with OA advocate Stevan Harnad at the Université du Québec à Montréal (UQAM), has been working on for the past four years.

Gargouri’s numbers suggest that between 2005 and 2010 the percentage of Green OA rose from about 15% per year to about 21%, which amounts to an increase of about 1% per year.

His numbers also suggest that introducing a Green mandate (requiring all an institution’s researchers to self-archive their papers) triples the yearly percentage of OA papers from the mandating institution.

Taken together with Björk’s work, this would seem to suggest that around 30% of the academic and scientific literature published in 2011 worldwide may now be freely available on the Web, two thirds of it as Green OA and one third of it as Gold OA.

Can Gold alone buy OA?

Nevertheless, it remains difficult to be precise about OA numbers, and especially difficult to make accurate predictions about future growth.

Like all attempts to understand and predict the world by means of numbers and statistics, much depends on how one derives them in the first place, how one crunches them, and how one subsequently interprets the results. In the case of OA, a key question that emerges is whether Gold OA is able on its own to accelerate the growth of OA to the degree that the OA movement would wish.

Why is it necessary to fret over such things? It is necessary for a number of reasons, but above all because if OA advocates knew exactly what was happening, and why, they would be able to put their main effort into those activities most likely to achieve their goal.

Vitally, they would be better able to answer a question that has plagued the movement for many years: Should the priority be given to Green or to Gold OA?

In the PDF file attached below I am publishing a Q&A interview with Gargouri. With a PhD in cognitive informatics, Gargouri has also participated in projects dealing with knowledge management, semantic web applications and ontologies. He has also taught in the computer science department at UQAM.

The interview includes contributions from Harnad — a leading OA advocate and self-styled archivangelist.

####

If you wish to read the interview please click on the link below.

I am publishing it under a Creative Commons licence, so you are free to copy and distribute it as you wish, so long as you credit me as the author, do not alter or transform the text, and do not use it for any commercial purpose.

To read the interview (as a PDF file) click here.

See also: John Whitfield Open access comes of age Nature, 21st June 2011

Bernard Rentier Interview in Portuguese

2011-06-14T15:17:00.001Z

Brazilian Open Access advocate Dr Hélio Kuramoto is currently translating the recent interview I did with Bernard Rentier, Rector of the University of Liège, into Portuguese.

Dr Kuramoto plans to undertake the translation in stages. The first part was posted today, and can be accessed here.

Thank you Hélio!