Over the past few years, a model of scientific journal publishing called "Open access" has generated tremendous buzz. Relying heavily on digital technology, and preaching a gospel of free access to scientific information, open access journals allow anyone, anywhere, to read the latest research without having to pay a hefty subscription fee. It’s an attractive idea for a lot of scientists, who pride themselves on sharing their results as widely as possible. A version of Open access publishing has also now become the law of the land for many academic researchers in the US.
I’ve posted about this trend before (here and here), but a post on Spoonful of Medicine got me thinking about it again:
Most of the comments [on an earlier post] have centered on what I wrote about the fact that open-access publishing is not the only alternative to scientific publishing, but just one of several models. Some people take strong exception to this idea to the point of feeling violated by the fact that we “sell back” the science they produce. Others acknowledge that we provide a filtering service, but point to the fact that the peer-review process is free. And a third group of critics argue that the problem with scientific publishing can be summarized in three words: Nature, Science and Cell. Each of these criticisms deserve some comment, and I’ll start with the concept that peer-review is free.
It’s worth reading the rest of Juan’s post for an insightful interpretation of that “free” peer review. I’m going to take on a slightly different issue, though: who ultimately pays for “Open access” publishing?
First, let’s get some terms straight. “Open access” technically refers to the Open Source-like license under which this new crop of scientific articles is published. The idea is that by opening up the copyrights, the publications become more “Free” for readers to use, as well as being “free” of cost. It’s been an incredibly successful model for software development, so why not extend it to science?
To most scientists, and many other observers not directly involved in the science publishing business, Open access looks unambiguously double plus good. The standard reasoning is: the public pays for most basic research, so the public is entitled to use the results of that research without having to pay an additional subscription fee. It’s a simple, intuitive argument. Like many simple, intuitive arguments, it’s also wrong – or at least woefully incomplete.
The crux of the problem is that scientific publishing – when it’s done right – always costs money. It costs quite a lot of money, in fact. While peer reviewers don’t draw paychecks, they are only a tiny part of the pipeline. Someone has to decide which papers to send out for review, someone has to interpret those (often contradictory) reviews, someone has to make final decisions about what to publish and what to reject, someone has to lay out the pages, someone has to run the printing press, someone has to maintain the Web server, and so on. Paper, ink, postage, and electricity aren’t free, either.
Open Source software doesn’t face most of these costs; in the software world, distribution and basic error-checking are entirely automated, the rest of the quality testing can be done by any user, and nobody wants a printed copy. Open access scientific publications have freed up the copyright, but they’re still stuck with the same financial burdens as their commercial publishing colleagues. So who pays?
For a typical journal publisher, there are only three possible sources of revenue: readers, advertisers, and authors. Traditional scientific journals lean on their subscribers and advertisers, mostly letting their authors (the scientists who write the articles) off the hook. Journals published by nonprofit organizations, such as the American Association for the Advancement of Science‘s Science magazine, nominally rely on “members” for their income, but most of those members are in fact joining as part of a subscription package, so the result is the same.
Open access journals have vowed not to charge the readers anything, which leaves them with three options: they can charge the authors, look to advertisers for support, and/or backhandedly shift the publication and archiving costs to someone else without charging them directly. I’m not an economist, but having watched this trend develop, I strongly suspect that the bill ultimately comes back to the same people who would have paid a subscription fee in the old model.
In the author-pays model, which the biggest Open access publishers seem to like, authors pay a substantial amount of money to have their work published. That money comes out of their grants, or their institutions’ grants. In this case, the journal is essentially taking (usually taxpayer) money that otherwise would have paid for more science. The big Open access publishers also like advertisers, who pay to advertise things like laboratory equipment. Of course, that advertising cost is reflected in the cost of the equipment itself, which comes out of the researchers’ grants, and … you get the idea.
Incidentally, many traditional journals actually make more of their money from advertisers than from subscribers, and some (e.g. Nature Methods) are entirely advertiser-supported. This makes it difficult to draw a bright line between some of the fashionable new Open access journals and the much older “controlled circulation” strategy.
The “self-archiving” model is more devious. In this approach, Open access publishers handle the (mostly “free”) peer review process, and if a paper is accepted, they publish a link to it. The publication itself is served elsewhere, either from a public system such as the one at the US National Library of Medicine, or an archive at the researcher’s own institution. In other words, the author or the granting agency still pays, but it’s not as obvious. One major challenge in this model is ensuring that the paper will remain accessible in the future, especially if no print version is produced. Eliminating printing and postage and unloading even the digital publication to someone else’s server certainly cuts costs, but is that a wise thing to do with our scientific heritage?
None of this means that I dislike the Open access idea. In fact, I find it quite appealing. I just wish its advocates would be a little less moralistic in their campaign against subscriber-based publishing, and acknowledge that their system has some warts of its own.
