Why all science funded by the public should become open access. Speakers are Nick Shockey and Jonathan Eisen. Illustrated by Jorge Cham, PhDcomics.com.
Nick Shockey is the Director of the Right to Research Coalition.
Jonathan Eisen is an American evolutionary biologist at UC Davis.
Nick Shockey (NS): Open access if free, immediate, online, availability of research articles with full reuse rights. This is about, first of all, making all these content available for anyone wherever they are in the world to read and access and build upon so people can do interesting things and work in new ways with the material which really make the research literature much more valuable.
Jonathan Eisen (JE): The history of the model is really publishing scientific manuscripts especially ones with complex detailed color figures was expensive. If you wanted your article distributed broadly and widely you sent it to one of these journals and then they would manage the review process and communications with reviewers and revisions and eventually something would be accepted and they handled the typesetting and the printing and the distribution of your scientific work.
It worked, it worked great. Science progressed pretty well and it became a good way to distribute scientific papers. What’s changed is, really, two things in essence. First is digitization; you can now do everything electronically instead of printing it. The second is that the journal started ratcheting up the price of subscriptions to many of their journals.
Those two things came to ahead where it’s become almost the theater of the absurd with the amount that some journals want libraries to pay to subscribe to the journal.
NS: Research has shown that journal prices have actually outpaced inflation by over 250% over the past 30 years.
There are over 15 entire academic disciplines where the average price for one journal is over a thousand dollars for one subscription for one year. Chemistry at the average is $4,227, and physics $3,649 and it even goes down into agriculture, it’s still over a thousand and geology and botany all over a thousand. Those are just the averages; these aren’t like the way out there. There’s a journal called Tetrahedron that’s $40,000.
JE: The journals aren’t producing the material. The journals don’t employ the people who write the papers, they don’t even employ the people who review the papers. It doesn’t make a lot of sense in terms of what science is supposed to be about. It’s supposed to be about discovering new things and spreading that knowledge around. It’s so irrational to think that these scientists like me are paid by the government to do research and to discover things and distribute that. Two years of work by 20 people is going to be compressed into a paper and then not made available to people. It just doesn’t make any sense.
NS: I think these problem of access to research is one that people run into all the time but it’s not one that they realize. I know when I was a student, whenever I would be doing research and come across a great abstract and not have access to it, I just moved on and thought, “This is the way it is.” I didn’t really realize that there’s a system behind this that was causing me to not have access. I think students educations literally depend on access to the general literature. Professors can only teach what they have access to.
If you look at less wealthy countries like low and middle income countries they really, really struggle to get access. That’s a real impediment and prevents researchers in those countries from being able to contribute fully or do world class research.
JE: Even with this lack of access and even with my brother starting the public library science I wasn’t convinced. I didn’t understand why this was a big deal. Then we had a family medical emergency and I was up at 3 in the middle of the night in a hospital next to my wife in the hospital room surfing the web on a crappy hospital wireless internet. I was trying to find out information about a particular medical treatment and I couldn’t get access to the damn papers.
Our doctors didn’t know the answer to these particular questions and we needed to decide about what to do with these medical treatment. Here I was a trained scientist with the ability to read and interpret and understand many of these papers and I couldn’t get them. That was the moment for me, I was, “You’ve got to be kidding me.”
Here’s what the problem comes down to in most cases. Because in the hospital room [I paid] I bought dozens of articles. The problem is that you don’t know which article is relevant until after you pay for it. The abstracts don’t make it clear what is contained in the paper. There was no return policy, right? I couldn’t buy it and then say, “This is wrong, I’m giving it back.” Now you’re going to spend $1,200 to just find out if possibly they’re relevant. If you do that every day you’re in a big whole.
I’m not some communist saying everything should be free and I don’t believe in corporations. Nobody is saying that publishing is free. What people are saying is that we need to work on models where the government that is already paying for the research and is then paying for the subscriptions and is then paying for the indirect costs for the libraries, in the end tax payers in the government are paying for these. Why can’t we do it in a way where the knowledge is distributed broadly as supposed to the knowledge’s restricted?
NS: There are two components of open access, the first is that articles are available for free to read so that you don’t hit that paywall when you click to read the full text. The second part of the definition that’s every bit as important is that the articles come with full reuse rights so that scientist and researchers can build an entire new tier of tools on top of the research literature. Those new tools can interact with these articles, they can mine the articles, they can find relationships. They can find snippets genetic code that are mentioned in multiple papers or different phrases or concepts that are referenced in a biology paper and a chemistry paper that individual researchers would never be able to uncover because they can’t read these many articles.
If you actually wanted to do you couldn’t because you would have to negotiate individual rights with every single publisher in order to do that.
In an open access world all these information would be open on the internet for free and people would have unrestrictive rights to do that data mining.
JE: I think the main impediment is the incredibly slow movement of scientific cultural practices. I think scientists despite being great explorers in terms of knowledge are very conservative in terms of changing their practice. Lots of the community says, “Oh yeah, I suppose openness but I want a nature paper.” That reliance upon impact factor and the name of the journal does allow some journals to not respond to the community pressure towards openness.
The scientific publishing model that we have now, there’s no evidence that it is optimal. We need to experiment with all different scientific publishing system. Corporations may figure that out before governments do. I am very open to whoever is going to come up with creative solutions to these issues. I view it much more as scientists and scientific publishers are slow to change. Some of them are going to be left in the dirt because openness is clearly the future and the creative ones are going to survive.
NS: It’s really important that graduate students start these conversations with the research teams, their P.I.’s, just let them know that it’s something that they care about. There’s a real benefit to researches to graduates in spite doing this right because the more people that see your work, the more people can build up on it and they’ll cite you. It’s not just good for the person that can read your paper, it’s also good for you.
JE: I believe that scientific knowledge spreads and increases fast is there are no restrictions on access to the knowledge that is been generated in other places. I want the discovery of new scientific knowledge to happen faster and openness helps accelerate that.
Even if for your own reasons you need to publish in a subscription journal there is this other option that even if you don’t publish in an open access journal that you can still make the text of the article itself freely available so that people can at least read it and get access to it.
