Freedom of the Owner of the Press
One indication that you’ve stirred up a hornet’s nest is that your opponents start sending impassioned letters to Congress, hinting that you’re an insidious threat to the public welfare.
Over the last year or so, policymakers and legislators have been peppered with mailings instigated by the Assn. of American Publishers, warning of a development that “raises the specter of government censorship and encroachment upon scholarly discourse and academic freedom.”
The publishers were referring specifically to a proposal by the National Institutes of Health that would have required any NIH-funded research paper to be posted on a public archive within six months of its publication in a subscription-only scientific journal. But their attack was really one front in a war that is challenging the basic economic models of scholarly publishing -- and that was launched from (where else?) UC Berkeley.
“We started because we were outraged at the system,” Michael Eisen told me last week. A biologist at UC Berkeley and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Eisen is co-founder, with Patrick O. Brown of Stanford University and former NIH director Harold E. Varmus, of the Public Library of Science, which publishes five journals of peer-reviewed scientific papers and has plans for many more.
As its name implies, PLoS runs on the principle that the findings of scientific researchers should be openly accessible to all, not deposited in journals whose subscription fees can run to thousands of dollars a year.
Rather than charge subscription fees, PLoS charges researchers to publish their papers; the current fee is $1,500. The idea is not chiefly to save money for universities at the expense of faculty members -- indeed, for universities with large faculties, the new model may be more costly than the old. The real goal is to wrest research copyrights from journal publishers; when researchers are paying for publication, they, not the publishers, retain control of their papers.
Eisen argues that PLoS eliminates many absurdities of traditional scientific publishing, in which a foundation or institution that might spend millions of dollars on a research project must turn its results over to a publisher gratis (scientific journals normally don’t pay for articles) and then spend more money to read the findings. It also takes better advantage of the Internet, which has rendered obsolescent the paper publishing process that gave rise to the subscription model.
The PLoS founders didn’t set out to become publishers themselves. “This was initially a public advocacy campaign,” Eisen says. But they soon realized that they wouldn’t get much support for their argument that the old system was the wrong way to distribute research findings until they could point to a working example of the right way.
The established scientific press, which includes giant profit-making corporations such as Reed Elsevier as well as not-for-profit institutions such as the American Assn. for the Advancement of Science (publisher of the journal Science), was arguing that subscriptions were the only way to pay for the rigorous peer review and production values that gave their publications credibility.
“We knew we’d have to launch prestigious journals to prove that open access and high quality could be synonymous,” Eisen says. PLoS Biology, their first journal, began publishing in October 2003.
Once PLoS emerged as a potential competitor, Eisen says, publishers started to take open access seriously. Some agreed to make more material available publicly, generally after a delay of six months or longer.
But they also mounted a sharp attack on the very principle of open access. There have been studies with titles such as “The Erroneous Premise of Open-Access Advocates,” publicity campaigns aimed at science reporters, and lobbying about the dark side of government-maintained research repositories. (Hence the warning about “government censorship” in the attack on the NIH plan.)
They contend that researcher-paid publishing presents other dangers to science. They suggest it could turn research journals into vanity publications by encouraging editors to accept substandard papers merely to collect fees.
They also question whether the system can financially support the rigorous editing, peer review and historical archives of traditional publishers.
“Let’s be clear about the implications for quality and presentation,” says Nick Fowler, director of corporate strategy at Elsevier, the largest scientific and technical publisher in the world.
Eisen dismisses these arguments as “largely cynical efforts to confuse the matter.” Publishers’ desire to maintain their journals’ prestige will keep them from lowering standards, he says. PLoS is increasingly self-sustaining, he adds, and hopes to wean itself within a few years from the foundation grants that financed its start-up.
Meanwhile, the open-access movement has mushroomed. In some fields, scientists now commonly exchange research findings via online databases like
arXiv.org, a website based at Cornell University specializing in physics, mathematics and computer science. A few foundations now require their grantees to make their papers publicly available within a few months after formal publication and include money for publication fees in their grants. The NIH initiative was a step forward, although the publishers succeeded in getting it severely scaled back. (In the final version, open-access publication of NIH-funded research is voluntary, not required.)
“We’re starting to have an impact,” Eisen says. “But we’ve had to fight tooth and nail just to get this experiment off the ground.”
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Golden State appears every Monday and Thursday. You can reach Michael Hiltzik at golden.state@latimes.com and read his previous columns at latimes.com/hiltzik.
