Open Access: Doing the numbers

One question that has been repeatedly (and heatedly) debated since 1994 — when Open Access (OA) advocate Stevan Harnad first posted his "Subversive Proposal" — is the questions of costs. That is, what are the essential costs of publishing a scholarly paper? To date no one appears to have come up with an adequate answer.

For OA advocates this is all rather unsatisfactory, since many believe that one of the primary reasons for embracing OA is that it will resolve the journal price inflation problem that has now plagued the research community for several decades. The hope has been that OA will somehow squeeze out all unnecessary costs, and resolve the so-called "affordability problem".

As OA has grown in popularity, however, so it has become increasingly evident that Gold OA publishing could prove just as expensive (and inflationary) as the traditional subscription model. When OA publisher Biomed Central (BMC) started operating in 2001, for instance, it set its article-processing charge (APC) at $525; today BMC charges from $1,700 to $1,900 to publish a paper. Similarly, when Public Library of Science (PLoS) launched its first journal it charged an APC of $1,500; today it charges from $2,100 to $2,750.

The same inflationary effect has been evident with the institutional membership schemes that many OA publishers now offer as an alternative to charging an APC — leading to some controversy, and a very public withdrawal from the BMC scheme by Yale University.

But does this mean that OA publishing will turn out to be just as expensive as traditional subscription publishing? We don't know, not least because it is still not possible to say with any authority what it costs to publish a scholarly paper, let alone how much it costs to undertake each of the individual components of that process. Without this information we can't know whether OA publishing is likely to be more or less expensive, or whether current costs are reasonable and fair.

What we do know is that there is growing concern that the research community may end up simply moving from a situation in which it cannot afford to access all the scholarly papers it needs to, to one in which it cannot afford to publish all the scholarly papers it produces.

People have, of course, tried to crunch the numbers. In 1997, for instance, mathematics professor Andrew Odlyzko estimated that it was costing the research community around $4,000 to publish a paper. In reality, he concluded, the task could be done for as little as $300 to $1,000.

More recently (last month) the UK-based Research Information Network (RIN) estimated the "average total publishing and distribution costs per article" to be around £4,000 ($7,800) today. The report added that moving from a subscription-based publishing model to an OA publishing model would see a fall of £2.91 billion in the subscription prices paid by libraries, but that these savings "would be offset by an increase of £2.92 billion in the charges that the academic and research institutions of which they are part (or their funders) would have to meet in author-side publication fees". The end result, RIN concluded, would be that "academic institutions at a global level would need to fund an additional £10 million from the move to author-side payment."

But the problem with much of this number crunching is that it is generally the product of little more than back-of-the-envelope guestimates, not informed analysis, since it is invariably done by people who are able only to look through the window of the scholarly publishing business, not by those actually working in the industry. And it is only the latter that have access to the necessary data to make accurate assessments of costs. Unfortunately, most publishers are extremely reluctant to share any of their data with the outside world.

Recently, for instance, I posted a question on the Liblicence mailing list asking if anyone had done any research to establish the costs of a) implementing peer review and b) distributing a paper electronically — which some would argue are the only two essential costs in an OA environment. One of those who replied to my post was publishing consultant Joe Esposito, who responded, "All the figures Richard Poynder is looking for have been developed and redeveloped by commercial (and some not-for-profit) publishers over the years. Doing this analysis is simply part of what it means to run a business. Of course, this information is proprietary."

However, since it is primarily public money that is used to fund scholarly publishing, and historically publishers have been criticised for squeezing as much as a 35% profit margin out of the process, one might question whether that is a good enough answer.

Fortunately, at least one publisher is prepared to be more transparent: When I asked the American Physical Society (APS) how much it costs APS to publish a paper, the organisation's treasurer/publisher Joe Serene not only produced a figure, but agreed to break it down for me as well.

In total, Serene said, in 2007 it cost APS approximately $1,500 to publish the electronic version of a paper (with all print-related costs excluded), roughly 20% ($300) of which can be apportioned to each of the following functions:

• Editorial costs (including peer review)

• Electronic composition and production

• Journal information systems, "which support everything from manuscript receipt through electronic posting, mirroring, and archiving of the published papers"

• Central publication management

• Essential overhead expenses

Serene cautioned, however, that these financial categories are not functionally independent. For example, he said, APS receives approximately 35,000 manuscripts per year, and an effective central publication management system is essential for efficient (or simply non-chaotic) operations.

Do these costs help us assess whether OA publishing will be cheaper than the traditional subscription model? Since the answer will partly depend on whether you believe that all the above functions are necessary in an OA environment, and whether some or all could be reduced or streamlined, it should certainly help to have the figures broken down in this way. This in turn might lead people to want to explore in more detail what the various functions consist of, and how they are currently carried out, but at least we now have some real-life figures in the public domain to match against the various tasks associated with publishing a paper.

On the downside, having the figures from just one publisher is not enough in itself. What would help would be for other publishers to be as transparent as the APS. OA advocates would then be much better equipped to debate the issue in an informed and constructive manner.

One thing to note in the above figures, by the way, is that authors wishing to opt for the APS' "Free to Read" OA option are charged a $975 APC for articles in Physical Review A-E, and a $1,300 APC for Letters in Physical Review Letters. Serene points out, however, that these charges were purposely set below cost in order to encourage initial use of Free to Read, with the understanding that they would have to be raised if a significant number of authors were to chose this option; so far the use of Free to Read has been very low.

Perhaps the take-home point here is that either everyone has consistently underestimated the true costs of publishing a scholarly paper, or publishers (both traditional subscription publishers offering an OA option and pure OA publishers) still have some way to go in reducing their costs if OA is to prove more affordable than the subscription system.

Consider that at a workshop held at CERN in 2001 participants concluded that the cost of editing and processing an article could fall as low as €500 ($775 at today's rate) in an OA environment. (Although admittedly that estimate did not take into account any of the overheads associated with running a publishing organisation).

More significantly perhaps, as we noted above, within their short lifetimes both BMC and PLoS have increased their prices considerably — in the case of BMC rates have nearly quadrupled in some instances. This is all the more striking when you consider that when I spoke to BMC founder Vitek Tracz in 2006 he predicted that costs would fall. As he put it, "More and more of what we do for authors today they will be able to do for themselves in the future, and as we develop more tools to allow them to do it themselves, so what we charge them will be less and less."

So the question remains: Can OA reduce the costs associated with scholarly communication? If so, how, and when? If not, what are the implications of this for the "scholarly communication crisis?" These are important questions. But without accurate numbers to crunch we really cannot answer them adequately. Wouldn't it be great therefore if other publishers decided to be as "open" as APS in discussing their costs?

One thing is for sure: If OA ends up simply shifting the cost of scholarly communication from journal subscriptions to APCs without any reduction in overall expenditure, and inflation continues unabated, many OA advocates will be sorely disappointed. And if that were to happen, then we can surely expect to see calls for a more radical reengineering of the scholarly communication system.

I will close by pointing out that some OA advocates respond to any discussion about the costs of OA publishing by arguing that most OA journals don't actually charge an APC today. Others, meanwhile, insist that it is far too early to worry about Gold OA, since researchers can quite easily continue publishing in subscription journals and then self-archive their papers on the Web themselves — thereby achieving OA at no cost to them or their institutions (leaving aside the subscriptions that their institutions currently pay in order to buy access to research produced by other institutions). But there are reasons for arguing that these responses are not entirely satisfactory — as I hope explain in a future post.

In the meantime, I welcome comments from others, either via the comment button below, or by email to richard.poynder@btinternet.com.

The Open Access Interviews: Matthew Honan

Matthew Honan, Editorial Director, Bentham Science Publishers


No one, surely, would now dispute that the Internet is hugely disruptive, and poses a significant threat to many existing business models. For scholarly publishers the primary challenge comes from the so-called Open Access movement, which calls for research papers to be made freely available on the Web. As a result, publishers face an inevitable decline in their traditional journal subscription business.

How have publishers responded? Initially most ignored Open Access. Then they attacked it, arguing that it was unrealistic, anti-capitalist, or just plain dangerous. But eventually they began to embrace it, and today most scholarly publishers offer an Open Access option that allows researchers to pay publishers an "article processing charge" (APC) if they want their research to be made freely available on the Web. Alternatively, they can continue to publish without having to pay an APC, but then self-archive their papers on the Web, and around 91% of scholarly publishers now permit some form of self-archiving, although often only after an embargo period has passed.

Large publishers like Elsevier, Springer and Wiley were particularly reluctant to migrate to Open Access. As a result, a number of small publishers — e.g. Biomed Central (BMC) and Hindawi — saw in Open Access an opportunity to outmanoeuvre their larger competitors, and generally they have proved successful in this. Other smaller publishers, however, have adopted this strategy less successfully. Bentham Science Publishers would seem to be a case in point.

Last April Bentham announced its intention of launching 300 new Open Access journals by the end of the year. The audacity of this announcement should not be underestimated. After all, it has taken BMC eight years to build up a portfolio of 185 OA journals. And at the time of its announcement, Bentham itself was publishing less than 100 subscription journals. Unsurprisingly, therefore Bentham later reduced the number of new journals it planned to launch to 200.

Badly targeted

Even so, it was clear that an aggressive marketing campaign would be needed: For if Bentham was to achieve its goal it would need to recruit hundreds of researchers to act as chief editors, thousands to sit on the editorial boards of the new journals, and thousands more to submit papers to these journals. Consequently before long a constant stream of email invitations was flowing into the inboxes of researchers around the world.

At first the strategy appeared to be working. After all, being on the editorial board of a scholarly journal is a much-cherished ambition for researchers, and the kudos attached to being a chief editor an even more attractive goal; likewise, their constant hunger to be published means that researchers are always on the lookout for publishing opportunities. All in all, therefore, many of those receiving Bentham's invitations initially responded positively.

After the first flush of enthusiasm, however, researchers began to question Bentham's activities, not least because many of the invitations they were receiving seemed decidedly badly targeted. For instance, psychologists were being invited to contribute papers on ornithology, health policy researchers were being invited to submit papers on analytical chemistry and economists were being invited to submit papers on sleep research or, even more oddly, invited to join the editorial board of educational journals. This inevitably raised concerns about the likely quality of the new journals, particularly as researchers were being asked to pay from $600 to $900 a time for the privilege of being published in them.

To add insult to injury, some of the invitations researchers were receiving were addressed to a completely different person, or the name field was empty, and addressed simply to "Dear Dr.,". It was hard not to feel more insulted than flattered on receiving such letters.

Moreover, what was clearly an automated mass mailing exercise was proving a little profligate with its invitations, sending them out not just to researchers, but to any Tom, Dick or Harry. On at least one occasion, for instance, a journalist (who asked not to be named) was surprised to receive a letter from Bentham inviting him to submit a paper, "Based on your record of contributions in the field of information science." As he explains, "I was rather surprised by this, since — as a practicing science journalist — I wasn't aware that I had made any such contributions!"

At first the tide of increasingly inappropriate invitations was greeted with a mixture of good humour and head scratching. However, as the flood of email invitations continued unabated the recipients' response shifted from amusement to frustration, and then to anger — especially when they discovered that all requests to be removed from the mailing list were ignored.

Spam plague

By March of this year, senior health care research scientist at the University of Toronto Gunther Eysenbach had had enough. Publicly criticising Bentham's activities on his blog, Eysenbach complained, "In the past couple of months I have received no less than 11 emails from Bentham, all mostly identical in text and form, all signed by 'Matthew Honan, Editorial Director, Bentham Science Publishers' or 'Richard Scott, Editorial Director, Bentham Science Publishers', 'inviting' me to submit research articles, reviews and letters to various journals."

He added, "All pleas and begging from my side to stop the spamming, as well as clicking on any 'unsubcribe' links did not stop the spam plague from Bentham."

For others, the experience of being targeted by Bentham proved even more frustrating. When Professor John Furedy, Emeritus Professor of Psychology at the University of Toronto, received an invitation to be editor-in-chief of the Open Behavioral Science Journal he initially accepted. But after doing so he found himself being bombarded with further invitations. And when Bentham failed to reply to the questions he raised about the new role he had taken on he decided the best course of action was to withdraw his acceptance, reluctant to be associated with a company that behaved in this way. Even though he had resigned, however, Furedy was surprised to see that his name had been added to the list of editors on the journal's web site. And despite repeated requests to Bentham to remove it his name remains there to this day.

I too had by now begun receiving copies of Bentham's invitations — not because I was on its mailing list, but because frustrated researchers were forwarding them to me, and asking me to find out what the dickens was going on.

So I emailed various Bentham directors (including Richard Scott and Matthew Honan), all of whom — with the exception of publications director Mahmood Alam — completely ignored my messages. Moreover, while Alam replied, he proved decidedly unwilling to answer my questions, despite repeated promises that he would. He was equally unwilling to put me in contact with anyone else at the company.

I also tried calling the various telephone numbers on the Bentham web site, only to be greeted by voicemail messages. Personally I knew nothing whatsoever about Bentham, so for all I knew it might have been the front for some form of Internet scam.

In the hope of enlightening myself, therefore, I posted a message to a couple of mailing lists, and shortly afterwards Ted Bergstrom, a professor of economics at the University of California Santa Barbara posted a response — a response that confirmed everything I had been hearing from other researchers. I also began to receive private emails with information about Bentham, including the home phone number of Honan, which was sent to me by a publisher concerned that Bentham would bring the scholarly publishing industry into disrepute.

A few small errors

To his credit, when I called Honan he agreed to speak to me then and there and, with one notable exception, answered all my questions. He was, however, adamant that Bentham is not engaged in any kind of spamming. "The criticisms that you have levelled against the company for spamming are unjustified," he said, adding that by posting my message I had only served to "amplify" a few small errors that the company had made.

Honan also insisted that the company always honours requests to be removed from its mailing list, and added that it is doing no more than any other scholarly publisher. As he put it, "Like Bentham, for instance, other publishers periodically send unsolicited emails to mailing lists. The recipients are able to unsubscribe from these publishers' mailing lists if they want to, just as they can from our list." Those researchers who had continued to receive messages after opting had had multiple email addresses, he explained, saying, "We have had very few complaints, and we respond to the complaints that we receive — which are very few in comparison to the number of emails we send out." He did however apologise for any errors that had been made.

The recipients of Bentham's unwelcome invitations, however, remain critical of the company. One of those targeted was Professor Stevan Harnad, professor of cognitive science at Université du Québec à Montréal. He comments, "It is not possible to judge, from the data available, whether Bentham has been negligent or just naive in sending automatic mass form-letters soliciting editors and authors for their many new journal start-ups."

But what has most puzzled researchers is why Bentham would risk damaging its reputation in this way, and so the standing of its pre-existing subscription journals, some of which have over the years earned a respectable impact factor. "Bentham once enjoyed a reputation as a high-priced reputable scholarly publisher," comments Charles Oppenheim, professor of information science at UK-based Loughborough University, another researcher to be targeted by Bentham.

"In my view, it has damaged that reputation by the flood of emails it has sent inviting people to join the editorial board of, or contribute to, new OA journals it has launched. Not merely are the emails sometimes misaddressed, but when the publisher has been emailed by the recipient with queries, the publisher rarely replies." Oppenheim concludes, "Bentham has made a mistake by launching so many OA journals and by bombarding scholars with email invitations."

Illegal?

Eysenbach, meanwhile, is less forgiving. Indeed, he is so angry that he is considering suing Bentham under anti-spam laws. Arguing that it is illegal for businesses to send unsolicited emails to people that have not agreed to receive them, or where no previous contractual relationship exists, he comments, "The law is clear: I didn't have any other previous business relationship with Bentham [when it emailed me]. Unsolicited bulk email is spam, and illegal, and even offering to remove names is not an appropriate remedy." He adds, "I am not a litigious person, but this seems to be worth the effort to take one step further."

Were Eysenbach to take that step, however, it is not clear how successful he would be. As is now evident, Bentham is not a communicative company. And while it has a presence in four countries — the United Arab Emirates, the Netherlands, Pakistan, and Illinois, USA — in all four jurisdictions the contact point is either a PO Box, or c/o address. Moreover, Eysenbach is based in Canada, so even were he to be successful in the courts, enforcing a ruling in another jurisdiction could prove both difficult and expensive. Moreover, his task might be complicated by the fact that the one thing that Honan refused to tell me is who owns Bentham Science Publishers.

Clearly Bentham's activities raise a number of questions about Open Access. Perhaps the most important is this: "Does the incident paint a picture of the future, or was it a one-off event?" After all, in his blog post Eysenbach pointed the figure not just at Bentham, but at other publishers too, including BMC.

For Harnad there is a clear lesson to be learned. "Let it be an example to Bentham and other publishers that this is not the way to go about starting up journals. It merely gives the publisher, as well as online- and OA-journal publishing, a bad name."

Those wishing to read Honan's response to critics in detail are invited to read the interview by clicking on the link below. OA advocates may also be interested to hear details of Bentham's soon-to-be-announced self-archiving policy, and its "limited Open Access option". These too may prove controversial.

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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.

If after reading it you feel it is well done you might like to consider making a small contribution to my PayPal account.

I have in mind a figure of $8, but whatever anyone felt inspired to contribute would be fine by me. Payment can be made quite simply by quoting the e-mail account: richard.poynder@btinternet.com. It is not necessary to have a PayPal account to make a payment.

What I would ask is that if you point anyone else to the article then you consider directing them to this post, rather than directly to the PDF file itself.

If you would like to republish the interview on a commercial basis, or have any comments on it, please email me at richard.poynder@btinternet.com.

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

The Open Access Interviews: Bill Mortimer

Bill Mortimer
Research Support Librarian, Open University

One of the primary tools of the Open Access (OA) movement is the institutional repository (IR) — a freely-available web-accessible database in which university faculty are able to deposit their research outputs, notably papers that they have published in scholarly journals, and also books and book chapters.

The genesis of the institutional repository can be traced back to a 1999 meeting held in Santa Fe New Mexico, where the so-called Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH) was formulated. The aim of the meeting was to create an infrastructure that could build on the success of the physics preprint repository arXiv.

Founded by Paul Ginsparg in 1991, arXiv had become an important resource for scholarly communication within the physics community, and there was a growing desire to replicate the model in other disciplines. During the Santa Fe meeting a strong case was also made for creating institutionally-based repositories that catered for all research areas in a single university, and over time the IR has become the dominant repository model. However, the primary aim of the Santa Fe meeting was to create a protocol to make repositories interoperable, regardless of whether they were central subject-based repositories or institutional repositories.

Why repositories?

Why the need for repositories? After all, scholarly communication was outsourced to publishers long ago. The appeal of the model arXiv pioneered, however, was that it exploited the ability of the Internet to allow research results to be communicated much more rapidly than was possible with traditional publishing — where publishing a paper in a scholarly journal or book can take many months, or longer, a researcher can deposit a paper in an online repository the moment it is completed.

More importantly, traditional scholarly publishing was in crisis. Since the end of WWII an explosion of new scholarly journals, constantly rising subscriptions, and falling library budgets, had created a situation in which universities and other research institutions could no longer afford to buy all the journals their researchers needed. Moreover, even though publishers had begun migrating their journals to an online environment, subscription prices were not falling (as would have been expected, since traditional costs like printing and physical distribution go away on the Internet), but inexplicably continuing to rise. The suspicion was that the fundamental problem was publisher greed.

It should be noted that arXiv was intended to supplement the traditional model (by sharing preprints prior to publication), not to replace it. Nevertheless, its model was sufficiently compelling that some also viewed it as a solution to serial price inflation, and had begun to call on colleagues to make copies of all the papers they published in scholarly journals freely available on the Internet, by self-archiving them. If every researcher did so, it was reasoned, the research community's access problem would be resolved.

Freely available

Again, the aim was still not to replace traditional publishing but to supplement it. In fact, the objective was quite simple: If researchers belonged to an institution that subscribed to the journal in which a particular paper they needed had been published they could access the publisher's version of the paper using their institution's subscription. If, on the other hand, their institution didn't have a subscription to the journal in question, they could use the author's self-archived version. In this way, it was assumed, all 2.5 million articles published in the world's 24,000 scholarly journal each year would be freely available to all — in one form or another.

It was apparent, however, that if researchers simply dumped their papers hither dither on the Internet it would be difficult for others to locate them. What was needed was a custom-built software platform to allow universities to create a dedicated repository in which faculty could archive them. And as the emphasis shifted from central subject-based repositories to smaller cross-disciplinary repositories, it was realised that a low-cost solution would be needed. In 2000, therefore, the UK's University of Southampton released EPrints. The first dedicated repository software, EPrints was made available as freely downloadable Open Source software.

Importantly, EPrints was OAI compliant — which meant that EPrints repositories could expose standardised metadata descriptions of their contents on the Internet. These could then be collected by specialist harvesters and aggregated into a virtual cross-searchable global archive offering a single search interface. When a search was conducted the hits would then link back to the source material in the host repository. To this end in 2002 the University of Michigan launched the first OAI harvester, OAIster.

But while the objective of the self-archiving movement may have been simple, implementation has proved enormously difficult, and nine years after the Santa Fe meeting only around 1,000 of the world's 22,000 research institutions have yet to create an institutional repository. Moreover, those who have done so generally discover that only about 15% of their researchers will spontaneously deposit their papers in them.

Unanticipated challenges

In short, the IR movement has been confronted by a number of unanticipated challenges. First, as indicated above, it has proved immensely challenging to persuade researchers to take on what most quickly conclude is a thankless and burdensome additional chore. Second, getting senior management to support self-archiving, or provide the necessary funds to create and manage an IR, has proved nearly as difficult. Third, many publishers have sought to obstruct self-archiving, fearful that if free copies of the papers they publish become widely available on the Web their subscription revenues will dry up.

Since scholarly publishers have historically made it a condition of publication that researchers assign copyright to them, they have had a strong hand to play. By insisting on copyright transfer they effectively acquire ownership of the papers, and many have either refused to permit self-archiving, or insist that authors only do so after an embargo period.

In recent years, however, effective lobbying by OA advocates has begun to make some headway. Increasingly conscious that they are generally ignorant about the research output of their own faculty, for instance, university managers have begun to warm to suggestions that institutional repositories are the natural tool to collect the kind of management data they need if they want to monitor the productivity of faculty.

OA advocates have also had some success in convincing research funders that in a digital environment publicly-funded research should be freely available to all, not locked behind financial firewalls whose only purpose is to protect incumbent business models. After all, point out OA advocates, most research is publicly-funded, and authors give their papers to publishers without charging them. Why then should the research community have to buy its papers back in the form of journal subscriptions? Would it not be better, they argue, if publishers found a business model more suited to the networked world?

Mandates

In response, funders have started to introduce self-archiving mandates, making it a condition of funding that research outputs are made freely available on the Web. In other words, if researchers won't self-archive willingly, let's make them do so.

To date 21 funders have mandated public access to research findings, including the UK-based Wellcome Trust, the US National Institutes of Health (NIH), and all bar one (the EPSRC) of the UK research councils. In addition 19 universities have introduced institutional mandates, and major universities like Harvard and the University of California are currently considering doing so.

But progress remains slow, and many hurdles remain. There have also been some unintended consequences: After convincing university managers to adopt IRs, for instance, OA advocates have discovered that in many cases it is only bibliographic data that is being deposited, not the full-text. Since metadata is all that is required for information management purposes, and limiting deposits in this way avoids any risk of getting into copyright disputes with publishers, it is not perhaps surprising. From the point of view of Open Access, however, it is a most unsatisfactory development.

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But how do things look on the ground? To find out I sat down recently with Bill Mortimer, Research Support Librarian at the UK's Open University. An advocate for Open Access, Mortimer has played a key role in the development of the OU's repository, Open Research Online (ORO).

What became evident during our conversation is that the OU's experience maps neatly onto the history of the self-archiving movement. As in many universities, the library created an institutional repository some years ago, but struggled to persuade researchers to deposit their papers in it. Without the necessary funds to continue supporting ORO, the library was then forced to put it on the back burner for a while. After Mortimer was appointed, however, the OU's Pro-Vice Chancellor for research was persuaded to adopt ORO as a central resource for the upcoming Research Assessment Exercise.

As a result ORO experienced a rapid growth in the number of deposits and today, says Mortimer, it is the fourth largest repository in the UK. But like so many repositories the bulk of the content in ORO today is metadata, and just 15% of its records consist of full-text.

As I talked to Mortimer it occurred to me that the OU's commitment to Open Access is interesting for a number of other reasons. Its philosophy, for instance, is well matched with the values of Open Access. Founded in 1969 by the then Prime Minister Harold Wilson, the OU's mission is to be "open to people, places, methods and ideas." As Mortimer puts it, OA "fits the aims and ethos of the OU like a glove."

The OU might also seem to have more to gain from Open Access than most universities — for while it is widely recognised (and globally respected) as a distance-learning institution, the OU is not well-known as a research institution. What better way of demonstrating its credentials, and showcasing its work, than by making its research freely available on the Web?

Much larger revolution

It also struck me that as a provider of remote education the OU is at the forefront of a much larger revolution, a revolution of which OA is but a component part — that is, the gradual "virtualisation" of education and research. From the outset, for instance, the bulk of the OU's teaching has been delivered virtually — initially via television and radio, later online. And today some of its courses are run entirely on the Web.

As research papers make the transition from physical objects to electronic files located in disparate online databases, scholarly communication is going through a similar process of virtualisation. And here too Open Access is just one piece of it. Today journals are not only accessed electronically, but the entire publication process is becoming virtual, with many parts of it now automated. Papers are submitted online, peer review is managed and undertaken online, and many journals no longer have any print equivalent.

Indeed, some argue that, as a result, the traditional gate keeping role played by publishers is fast becoming redundant, much in the way that the lecture hall is redundant at the OU. Within this larger revolution Open Access starts to seem like an alternative to traditional publishing, not a supplement.

It was no surprise to me, therefore, to learn that the OU has begun to develop its own Open Access ejournals. Nor was I surprised when I asked Mortimer if he thought that ORO might in the future be viewed as more of a publishing platform than a database of research outputs that he so readily agreed with me.

Publishers, however, are not the only gatekeepers in the scholarly communication process. So too are librarians. The question inevitably arises: Could the bricks and mortar library eventually go the way of the paper journal?

As one might expect, Mortimer has views on such issues, and it was interesting to discuss them with him. In the process, however, he revealed himself to be a serious-minded but modest interlocutor. And while he has undoubtedly given a great deal of thought to Open Access, and to the implications for librarians of the brave new electronic world, he was keen to stress that he is a practitioner, not a theoretician.

A pragmatic issue

In short, Open Access is for Mortimer primarily a pragmatic issue. As he pointed out, his job is to ensure that OU faculty have access to all the research they need, not to promote causes. It just so happens that Open Access currently offers him the best hope of achieving this. Indeed, I formed the impression that, while he is happy to discuss radical future scenarios, Mortimer is in many ways a traditionalist, and were journal subscription costs to suddenly plummet, to a level where the OU could provide faculty with all the research it needs, Mortimer would be more than happy to re-embrace the traditional subscription model.

Given this pragmatism it is interesting to note that, with his colleagues, Mortimer has recently suggested to OU management that the University introduce an "Immediate-Deposit/Optional Access" (ID/OA) mandate. The ID/OA mandate is a compromise strategy intended to force researchers to self-archive, but in a way that circumnavigates publisher opposition, and avoids any potential copyright disputes with them. And it is able to facilitate Open Access even where the full-text is not accessible on the Web. In short, it promises a very practical solution to the many hurdles currently besetting Open Access. It is no surprise, therefore, that it should appeal to a pragmatist like Mortimer.

It would be the next logical step for the OU to adopt such a mandate. But will it happen? When I spoke to Mortimer no decision had been made, but he stressed that senior management is "actively considering" the idea.

If you would like to learn more about the Open University and the development of Open Research Online, or are curious as to how an ID/OA mandate might work, please read the attached interview.

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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.

If after reading it you feel it is well done you might like to consider making a small contribution to my PayPal account.

I have in mind a figure of $8, but whatever anyone felt inspired to contribute would be fine by me. Payment can be made quite simply by quoting the e-mail account: richard.poynder@btinternet.com. It is not necessary to have a PayPal account to make a payment.

What I would ask is that if you point anyone else to the article then you consider directing them to this post, rather than directly to the PDF file itself.

If you would like to republish the interview on a commercial basis, or have any comments on it, please email me at richard.poynder@btinternet.com.

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

If, however, you would prefer a more digestible article try the Computer Weekly website.

The Open Access Interviews: John Wilbanks

John Wilbanks

The goal of the Open Access (OA) movement is to have the peer-reviewed literature made freely available on the Web. That is, to remove research from behind the financial firewalls imposed by the traditional publishing model — which charges users (or their institutions) a fee to access scholarly articles, usually by means of a subscription.

"Freeing the refereed literature," argues OA advocate Stevan Harnad, is both optimal and inevitable, since in the age of the Internet most of the distribution costs of scholarly communication go away, and so continuing to restrict the number of people who can access it (by imposing artificial barriers) is to hobble science without just cause. After all, science is essentially the cumulative process in which people develop ideas, and make new discoveries, by building on the work of others. Clearly, they need to be able to access other researchers' work in order to do this.

Rather than treating research as a scarce resource that needs to be rationed, therefore, Open Access advocates argue that we should aim to maximise the number of eyeballs that can read it.

As the Open Access debate has developed, however, it has become increasingly clear that maximising eyeballs is just the first step. Open Data advocates like Peter Murray-Rust, for instance, argue that research papers also need to be accessible to machines — an argument he put to me recently with some passion. The problem today, says Murray-Rust, is that even where papers are freely available on the Internet it is difficult, if not impossible, to automatically extract the data contained in them, for both technical and legal reasons.

John Wilbanks, VP of Science Commons, has an even broader view of the role the Internet has to play in science. Like Murray-Rust, Wilbanks believes it is essential for research papers to be machine-readable. Likewise, he believes we need to develop an appropriate legal infrastructure to facilitate this. He also believes it is essential that science databases are freely available, and that these databases are interoperable — not just with one another, but with research literature.

In addition, Wilbanks believes the Internet should be viewed as a platform for facilitating the free circulation and sharing of the physical tools of science — cell lines, antibodies, plasmids etc. In a sense, he wants to see these tools embedded into research papers — so if a reader of an Open Access paper wants more detailed information on, say, a cell line, they should be able to click on a link and pull up information from a remote database. Should the researcher then want to obtain that cell line from a biobank, they should be able to order it in the same way as they might order an item on Amazon or eBay, utilising a 1-click system available directly from the article.

To make this possible, points out Wilbanks, we need to build the necessary technical infrastructure. This, he says, will require creating new ways of automating the collection, aggregation and discovery of scientific information, as well as the construction of an effective ecommerce system for the physical materials of science. And the best hope for achieving that, he adds, is by helping to create the so-called Semantic Web.

The end game, explains Wilbanks, is to make the research process as seamless and frictionless as possible. This implies that the scholarly paper is no longer simply an article to be viewed by as many eyeballs as possible, but also the raw material for multiple machines and software agents to data mine, a front-end to hundreds of databases, and the launch pad for an ecommerce system designed to speed up the process of research.

In this light, Open Access is not an end in itself, but the necessary precondition for a complete revolution in the way that science is done.

Some Open Access advocates believe that it is too early to be thinking about such matters. If — fourteen years after Harnad's seminal Subversive Proposal — the Open Access movement has still only succeeded in freeing around 25% of the peer-reviewed literature, they argue, we should remain firmly focused on freeing the other 75%, not fretting about what we do with it once it is free.

But that, surely, is too short-sighted a view. Besides, points out Wilbanks, we do not have the luxury of time, and so cannot afford to wait until the peer-reviewed literature is all available before starting to build the tools to exploit it.

If science is to continue benefiting mankind, he suggests, radical change is needed, and it is needed quickly — because science has reached the point where traditional methods are no longer able to deliver the goods.

In short, we are approaching the point where we will not be able to develop new life-saving drugs, or devise solutions to complex problems like global warming, without the kind of dramatic change in the way we do science that Science Commons envisages; for science is now so complicated that we will soon be unable to crunch the data quickly enough, or effectively enough, unless we embrace the kind of machine-driven, network-centric approach envisaged by the Semantic Web. As Wilbanks bluntly puts it, "The fact is that the complexity involved in studying a living system is such that even Pfizer — with $4 billion a year in R&D — can't handle it."

Wilbanks shared his thoughts with me during a recent telephone conversation; a conversation I had been trying to arrange ever since attending a fascinating presentation he gave at the Oxford Internet Institute one snowy February morning last year — a presentation I only succeeded in attending after digging my car out of a snowy hill in the Cotswolds!

A smallish, fresh-faced man with glasses, Wilbanks is undeniably very bright. He is also extremely knowledgeable about the life sciences. However, what I found most striking was the contrast he presented to most other Open Access advocates that I have interviewed. Open Access supporters are usually passionate and opinionated, and invariably argumentative. Wilbanks appears to have none of these characteristics.

Indeed, my overwhelming impression was of a quiet, unemotional and dispassionate man. Certainly I found it hard to envisage him getting into a heated argument about Open Access or, in fact, about much else. He seemed far too rational for that. But then, as Wilbanks himself pointed out to me, he is an "entrepreneur manager", not a lawyer, not a scientist, and not an activist.

And this is precisely what an organisation like Science Commons requires. In times of revolutionary change there is always a need for tub-thumpers able to inflame the passions, and inspire people to act. What is often forgotten, however, is that it is equally important to have effective organisers who can oversee and manage the transition. That, surely, is the role we can expect to see Wilbanks play going forward.

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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.

If after reading it you feel it is well done you might like to consider making a small contribution to my PayPal account.

I have in mind a figure of $8, but whatever anyone felt inspired to contribute would be fine by me. Payment can be made quite simply by quoting the e-mail account: richard.poynder@btinternet.com. It is not necessary to have a PayPal account to make a payment.

What I would ask is that if you point anyone else to the article then you consider directing them to this post, rather than directly to the PDF file itself.

If you would like to republish the interview on a commercial basis, or have any comments on it, please email me at richard.poynder@btinternet.com.

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

The Open Access Interviews: Professor Carlos Brebbia

Professor Carlos Brebbia

Scholarly publishing finds itself at a difficult transitional stage today. In response, some publishers have decided to behave badly — as evidenced by the actions of publisher lobbying organisations like PRISM.

But as Alma Swan recently pointed out to me, most of this bad behaviour emanates from a small group of four or five large publishers, "not the hundreds and hundreds of publishers out there, most of whom are starting to understand that Open Access is the way of the future."

The problem for these other publishers, however, is that the behaviour of PRISM — along with the questionable activities of organisations like the Association of American Publishers (AAP), and the apparent greed of not-for-profit organisations like the American Chemical Society (ACS) — is tarring all publishers with the same brush, and making researchers understandably suspicious of anyone calling themselves a publisher.

This was demonstrated for me recently when I was passed an e-mail sent to a researcher by Carlos Brebbia, the director of a small academic publishing company called WIT Press, which produces two journals.

In line with WIT's new Open Access policy, the e-mail asked the researcher to pay a €50 per-page publication fee. Brebbia added, "I have checked our records and your institution has not yet subscribed. Will it be possible to request them to do so? It is cheaper to pay the subscription of €450/$550 rather than the €50 per page."

The e-mail was passed to me as evidence that WIT Press was behaving badly and, in the process, giving Open Access a bad name. So I contacted Brebbia and asked him about his journal publishing activities, and how he is adapting to a world in which, as he himself puts it, "Open Access is a reality."

The interview can be read by clicking the link below. I leave readers to reach their own conclusions.

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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.

If after reading it you feel it is well done you might like to consider making a small contribution to my PayPal account.

I have in mind a figure of $8, but whatever anyone felt inspired to contribute would be fine by me. Payment can be made quite simply by quoting the e-mail account: richard.poynder@btinternet.com. It is not necessary to have a PayPal account to make a payment.

What I would ask is that if you point anyone else to the article then you consider directing them to this post, rather than directly to the PDF file itself.

If you would like to republish the interview on a commercial basis, or have any comments on it, please email me at richard.poynder@btinternet.com.

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

The Open Access Interviews: Peter Murray-Rust

Peter Murray-Rust

Peter Murray-Rust is a committed advocate of Open Access (OA). He is, however, a disappointed one. He is disappointed not because so few researchers are willing to self-archive their scholarly papers on the Web, not because it is proving so hard to persuade funders and research institutions to introduce Open Access mandates, but because of a failing he sees within the movement itself. Out of his disappointment, however, has come a new movement: the Open Data movement.

As a Reader in molecular informatics at the University of Cambridge Murray-Rust is interested in scholarly papers less for their textual content, more for the raw data contained within them — the graphs and tables, the molecular structures, the spectral and crystallography data, the photographs of proteins, and all the other factual information that litters science papers.

As such, much of Murray-Rust's time is spent not on reading the scholarly literature, but mining it — using various software tools to automatically extract the "embedded data" contained in the tables, the charts, and the images in science papers, and capturing the "supplemental information" that invariably accompanies the papers. After aggregating all these data Murray-Rust will compare them, input them into programs, use them to create predictive models, and reuse them for a variety of different purposes.

In short, Murray-Rust is working at the frontline of what has been dubbed Science 2.0, an online interactive environment where a great deal of the information used is more likely to have been discovered, aggregated and distributed by software and machines than it is by humans; an environment where data are constantly used and reused — pumped through new tools like RSS feeds, and displayed in mashups, wikis, and the various other tools developing around Open Notebook Science.

Murray-Rust's ultimate goal is to create and exploit what he calls the chemical semantic web — a web that would assume most scientific information was unencumbered by proprietary interests, and able to be freely shared and exchanged.

In practice, however, mining the scholarly literature remains a difficult and risky activity, explains Murray-Rust — not so much because the technology is still in its infancy, but because scholarly publishers routinely appropriate the content of research papers, and then lock it up behind financial firewalls and prohibit its reuse.

Assuming that the Open Access movement was committed to removing these barriers, Murray-Rust became an OA advocate. After all, as leading OA advocate Peter Suber puts it, Open Access implies scholarly literature that is "digital, online, free of charge, and free of most copyright and licensing restrictions". That, says Murray-Rust, is what is needed to build the semantic web.

But while the definition of Open Access agreed at the launch of the 2001 Budapest Open Access Initiative (BOAI) states that any paper made Open Access must be free of copyright and licensing restrictions, Murray-Rust discovered that in most cases publishers and authors still fail to provide the necessary permissions when making papers Open Access. Where a paper is flagged as being Open Access, reuse is often prohibited. And even where there is no specific prohibition, usage conditions are frequently not specified, effectively placing the paper into licensing limbo.

In many cases, says Murray-Rust, Open Access publishers don't even articulate to themselves under what conditions they are making their papers available on the Web, let alone provide an appropriate licence. As a result, third parties cannot know what usage is permitted. And where publishers do think it through, and attach a licence, the usage conditions are in any case often non conformant with the BOAI definition.

The legal status of papers that researchers themselves self-archive on the Web, or in their institutional repositories, is equally uncertain, and sometimes reuse is expressly forbidden.

What frustrates him says Murray-Rust, is that this confusion could have been avoided — had the Open Access movement emulated the Open Source Initiative (OSI) and developed customised OA licences. And having done so, he adds, the movement (again like the OSI) could have policed the use of the term Open Access, and publicised and sanctioned publishers who fail to use the licences, or who make false claims about Open Access. It should also have better educated researchers about licensing.

Further limiting what he can do, adds Murray-Rust, traditional subscription publishers like the American Chemical Society and Wiley explicitly forbid text mining of papers they publish. At the same time these publishers insist that authors not only sign over the copyright in the paper, but also ownership of the supplemental data, despite the fact that factual data are not subject to copyright.

After failing to persuade Open Access advocates to hear his concerns, Murray-Rust began to direct his energies to what he calls the Open Data movement, for which he is now a leading advocate. While he remains an advocate for OA, he explains, he has come to believe that the issue of Open Data needs to be addressed separately. For where the Open Access movement is concerned only with ensuring that scholarly papers are human readable, the Open Data movement requires that they are also machine readable. And since Open Data implies reuse, it is vital that licences are provided that specifically permit this.

Fortunately, Science Commons stepped into the breach, and is proving a valuable ally, not least by developing the Open Data protocol and the recently-announced Public Domain Dedication & Licence (PDDL) — thereby providing the first component of the legal framework that Murray-Rust believes is needed to enable text mining, and helping in the creation of the chemical semantic web.

I had been keen to speak with Murray-Rust for some time, so I was pleased recently to be able to hook up with him on the telephone. I found his ebullient style, rapid delivery, and quick-fire mind both challenging and fascinating. Above all, the conversation offered me an interesting new perspective on Open Access, and confirmed suspicions I have long harboured that the Open Access movement would truly benefit from having an official body to represent its interests.

Murray-Rust is a vivid and rumbustious person who does not pull his punches. When I emailed the draft text of the interview to him, however, he asked that I stress the positive rather than the negative in this introduction. "Yes, I am angry, but not completely," he wrote. "I believe in the power of the bottom-up to change things and I am optimistic that we shall get change."

He also asked me to underline his appreciation for all that the Open Access movement has achieved, and requested I append this paragraph: "Although this interview highlights some of the shortcomings of Open Access movement I want to pay tribute to the many activists who have devoted and often courageously worked to make scholarly knowledge free for everyone. I'd particularly like to say something very appreciative about Peter Suber, and I'd like also to mention the Scholarly Publishing & Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC) and the Wellcome Trust — who in my opinion have probably been the largest force for change recently."

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If you wish to read this interview in its entirety 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.

If after reading it you feel it is well done you might like to consider making a small contribution to my PayPal account.

I have in mind a figure of $8, but whatever anyone felt inspired to contribute would be fine by me. Payment can be made quite simply by quoting the e-mail account: richard.poynder@btinternet.com. It is not necessary to have a PayPal account to make a payment.

What I would ask is that if you point anyone else to the article then you consider directing them to this post, rather than directly to the PDF file itself.

If you would like to republish the interview on a commercial basis, or have any comments on it, please email me at richard.poynder@btinternet.com.

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

The Open Access Interviews: Dr Alma Swan

Dr Alma Swan

Last month it was announced the President Bush had signed the long-awaited omnibus spending bill that, amongst other things, will require the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) to mandate Open Access to all the research it funds. While a few have expressed dissatisfaction with some of the details of the mandate, the news has been widely greeted as a major victory for the Open Access movement in the US — a victory, moreover, that came only after a long struggle.

In Europe, meanwhile the news was decidedly disappointing, when it finally became clear that over-cautious European politicians and bureaucrats had chosen not to act in the interests of science, and would not be pushing for Open Access.

The disappointment was all the greater given the enthusiastic way in which the research community had responded to a petition that Open Access advocates had organised earlier in the year urging the EC to act on the recommendations of its own report, and mandate all EU-funded researchers to make their papers freely available on the Internet. With the petition attracting 18,500 signatures in a matter of weeks, it was universally assumed that a mandate was inevitable. It turned out, however, that aggressive lobbying by self-serving publishers had persuaded EC officials to drop the mandate.

As project manager for the petition, Open Access advocate Dr Alma Swan was personally involved in events. When I learned that she was passing through Oxford, therefore, I tracked her down in Oxford's famous Randolph Hotel. Sitting in the (to me) somewhat incongruous surroundings of the Randolph's plush tea rooms, I asked Swan what had gone wrong, and where it leaves the Open Access movement in Europe.

Far from being fazed by developments, however, Swan was as confident as ever. "One thing that those who oppose Open Access must understand is that we are not going to give up," she assured me. "Moreover, we are going to be more tenacious than the people who oppose us."

Besides, she added, the battle isn't going to be won in the corridors of power, but in the meeting rooms and the labs of research institutions. Here, she assured me, the omens are good — as awareness continues to grow that Open Access isn't just a trendy buzz word, or even an end in itself, but the enabler for a much larger revolution; a revolution, moreover, that universities will find it increasingly difficult to resist.

Swan's quiet confidence is also hard to resist. What makes her arguments particularly compelling is that Swan is not an over-earnest ideologue, but a generous-spirited and witty woman with an infectious, and somewhat subversive, sense of fun.

Nor is she obsessed with demonising publishers. After all, she points out, in resisting Open Access they are only doing what businesses are expected to do in capitalist democracies — seeking to maximise their profits. But she adds that their hypocrisy is nevertheless depressing. While making public statements claiming to support the principle of Open Access, she says, publishers are constantly engaged in behind-the-scenes attempts to derail it.

In characteristic Swan style, when pushed to take a jibe at publishers, she ends our meeting with a humorous anecdote, remarking that one prominent member of the publisher lobby group STM has developed a sneaky habit of stealing the jokes from her presentations. With a mischievous twinkle in her eye she says, "I've told him that whenever he's in the audience when I'm presenting, it'll be a strait-laced show."

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If you wish to read the interview with Alma Swan 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.

If after reading it you feel it is well done you might like to consider making a small contribution to my PayPal account. I have in mind a figure of $8, but whatever anyone felt inspired to contribute would be fine by me.

Payment can be made quite simply by quoting the e-mail account: richard.poynder@btinternet.com. It is not necessary to have a PayPal account to make a payment.

What I would ask is that if you point anyone else to the article then you consider directing them to this post, rather than directly to the PDF file itself.

If you would like to republish the article on a commercial basis, or have any comments on it, please email me at richard.poynder@btinternet.com.

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