Someone just asked me what I thought of Michael Eisen’s op-ed piece that came out in the New York Times a couple of weeks ago. Eisen wrote about a new bill in Congress that would roll back a NIH policy requiring NIH-funded researchers to submit copies of their publications to the National Library of Medicine’s publicly accessible web site. As Eisen explains:
But a bill introduced in the House of Representatives last month threatens to cripple this site. The Research Works Act would forbid the N.I.H. to require, as it now does, that its grantees provide copies of the papers they publish in peer-reviewed journals to the library. If the bill passes, to read the results of federally funded research, most Americans would have to buy access to individual articles at a cost of $15 or $30 apiece. In other words, taxpayers who already paid for the research would have to pay again to read the results.
This is the latest salvo in a continuing battle between the publishers of biomedical research journals like Cell, Science and The New England Journal of Medicine, which are seeking to protect a valuable franchise, and researchers, librarians and patient advocacy groups seeking to provide open access to publicly funded research.
The bill is backed by the powerful Association of American Publishers and sponsored by Representatives Carolyn B. Maloney, Democrat of New York, and Darrell Issa, a Republican from California. The publishers argue that they add value to the finished product, and that requiring them to provide free access to journal articles within a year of publication denies them their fair compensation. After all, they claim, while the research may be publicly funded, the journals are not.
I work for some of those journals, and don’t agree with the policy their lobbyists are promoting here. That said, I’m not entirely persuaded by the open access argument Eisen promotes. I’ve described some of my concerns on this blog already. Briefly, I don’t think the open access movement is really about making research “free.” It’s mainly haggling over price and billing.
The public absolutely should have direct access to the results from taxpayer-financed research, without having to pay a second time. By charging exorbitant per-article access fees and subscription rates, subscriber-supported journals are putting profit over public interest. Of course most of them are private corporations, so they’re supposed to act selfishly. That’s why we need a regulation that requires them to release these papers to the public within a reasonable time frame.
That said, the business model Eisen supports isn’t truly free. Open access journals such as the PLoS family of publications invariably charge a hefty “page fee” for researchers to publish their work. They also make a considerable amount of money from advertising. This has led to a booming industry of “open access” journals, some of which are little more than rebranded vanity presses. Don’t let the charitable-sounding description fool you; open access journals, even the really good ones, are still very much about profit.
Not that there’s anything wrong with that. I make my living from those profits. Indeed, while Eisen and other open access proponents often point out that peer reviewers work for free, they seldom mention the rest of the hardworking staff required to publish a credible journal. At journals such as Science and Cell, for example, someone with the title “Research Editor” has to receive the deluge of submitted manuscripts, triage them, distribute them to appropriate peer reviewers, evaluate the reviewers’ comments, and ultimately decide what to accept. Good research editors are not easy to find, and they absolutely don’t (and shouldn’t be expected to) work for free. For journals that also have news sections, as all of the really big ones now do, there are also news editors and writers like me. If we want to continue to have that added value in research publications – and the evidence is that everyone does – then we have to figure out how to pay for it. There’s also the cost of page design, archiving, and for journals that still have a paper edition, printing and distribution.
The real distinction between subscriber-supported and open access journals, then, is not whether they are in business to make a profit, but who pays and how much. In open access, the researchers pay through their taxpayer-funded grants and the advertising costs of the equipment and services they buy. In the subscription model, readers pay. So the taxpayers ultimately pick up the tab in both cases, just by different mechanisms.
Back when journals were only available on paper, and anyone could get access to them through the library system, the public could read the research they’d paid for at no cost. It just took awhile through inter-library loan. Now we expect everything to be available online, so the NIH open access policy forces the papers to be released that way. As I said, I think that’s appropriate. Yes, someone could still go to the library and ultimately get access to all of the papers, but in the 21st century we shouldn’t require that.
I think the solution is for journals that are currently subscriber supported to move to a business model that’s more like open access. The NIH policy is a good nudge in that direction, as it mandates public release of the papers, but only after a six-month grace period. While the subscriber-supported journals can still charge for immediate access, the policy puts them on notice that they’d better come up with a new plan for the long term. As PLoS and others have demonstrated, that doesn’t have to mean working for free.
So why did Maloney and Issa push a bill that would derail this evolution in science publishing? Well, Maloney’s Congressional district includes the US corporate headquarters of mega-publisher Elsevier, and Issa’s district is adjacent to two other Elsevier offices. Just sayin’.
I think we pretty much agree on most things, so I’m not sure why you’re calling me out for something I never said – I have never once argued that publishing is without cost or that publishers should not be compensated for the service they provide to authors, readers and science in general. Indeed, having co-founded PLoS and spent the better part of a decade working to make it a viable business, I understand this very well.
The whole point about open access is not that somehow the whole enterprise shouldn’t cost us any money. Rather it is that, in addition to funding the vast majority of published research, taxpayer-funded entities like the NIH, NSF, and state universities also already foot the vast majority of the bill for publishing. And, under the current system, they’re getting a really bad deal – paying tons of money to provide access to a small slice of the population. As PLoS, BMC and others have more than amply demonstrated, we could shift the entire publishing industry to open access, maintain all the things publishers currently do for us (including paying your salary and those of the many other people who make valuable contributions to the process), and provide unlimited access to the entire world in the process.
I think what I’m calling out is not so much your actual advocacy as your emphasis. Open access advocates, including you, invariably point out that peer review is free. The common rejoinder from subscriber-funded publishers is “publishing a good journal costs money.” Both things are true, and I think it behooves open access advocates to be more vocal about their model’s profitability. Rather than focus on the cost of peer review, with the implication that publishing is therefore cheap, argue that page charges are a more equitable way of defraying the very real costs.
I have never said – and do not believe – that peer review is free. My point was that, even with the money journals spend on editors and managing peer review, the vast majority of the real cost is in the salaries paid to reviewers, and thus constitutes yet another massive subsidy of publishing by the public sector.
What galls me the most about the stance of publishers like Elsevier, and of Maloney in defense of the bill, is the idea that somehow the process of publishing is entirely funded by private investment from publishers – intentionally obscuring the fact that the industry is one of the most heavily subsidized on Earth, in as much of the vast majority of its content, labor and revenue comes from public sources. Elsevier should be thanking their lucky stars for the historical accidents that have left them in control of such a massive cash cow, instead of trying to undermine fairly conservative efforts to make the system work optimally for the people who actually pay for it.
Peer reviewers’ work is certainly free from the perspective of the journals, and of course that’s the argument you’re making: it’s a hidden subsidy. That’s largely irrelevant to what I see as the core of the debate, though, which is why I object to putting so much emphasis on it. Both types of scientific publishing are heavily subsidized by taxpayers. Pot, meet kettle.
What I’m suggesting is a change of tactics to emphasize the differences between the two business models, rather than their similarities. Subscriber supported journals are framing this as a case of government regulations raiding a private industry’s hard-earned profits. Rather than point out that they’re subsidized (just like you), point out that it’s entirely possible to make a profit without nickel-and-diming individual taxpayers for it. Reframe the debate in terms of two different government-supported business models, both of which are profitable but only one of which uses public funds equitably.
We’re talking across each other. I agree completely with your point about tactics – that has ALWAYS been my and PLoS’s point – that this is not about who pays, but how we choose to pay and what we get for it.
The only reason I brought up the point about peer-review being largely subsidized by taxpayers is that Elsevier, Maloney and many others trot it out as the main reason why the NIH Public Access Policy is bad, and the fallacy of their argument needed to be countered.
abolish copyright, make all info free, pay info-providers by an
international organization, according to the estimated
expected benefit. Fund the organization by national contributions,adapted regularly depending on their
estimated benefit from it.