Scientific Publishing - Investing in our Future

During the last years, I developed the distinct feeling that my opinion on the promises of open access differs from what the majorities of bloggers preach: That open access is an end to be met by all means, preferably over the dead bodies of established publishers who are ripping us off - us, the scientists as well as us, the public. Scientific publishers, so the story goes, are making huge profits by enforcing high subscription fees for access to research results that were primarily tax funded to begin with. They have no right to deny public access to their journals.

I have splattered my opinion on this around in the comments, here and elsewhere, but thought it would be good to collect them. I am hoping for a fruitful discussion.

I'm all for open access - in principle. I have no library access at home, and it sucks if a paper isn't on the arxiv. I am not however in favor of making open access mandatory as means to enforce change, not at this point. I am concerned that the drawbacks for research will be larger than the advantages.

I'm all for open access in principle - but in practice many efforts I have seen, for example the recent call for an Elsevier boycott, do not address important questions. Michael Nielsen, in his (very recommendable) book "Reinventing Discovery" also supports a top-down approach in which funding agencies require open access to research results published under their grants. I do not support this because I find it to be a well-meant, but short-sighted procedure.

In a recent essay, H. Frederick Dylla, Executive Director and CEO of the AIP, emphasized the importance of creative destruction for progress. To improve on knowledge discovery and dissemination, we have to allow new technologies to supersede old ones, even if that means bankruptcy for some. The example Dylla calls upon is electricity putting out of work people in the candle and oil-lamp industries.

I agree, but I would like to put an emphasis on the adjective "creative" before the destruction. Making open access mandatory in a top-down approach now is like outlawing candles and oil-lamps before households have electricity. Jah, we have open access journals already, but we're not anywhere close by them being able to deliver and replace all the services we presently enjoy, in all the fields that we enjoy them, in all the quality with which we enjoy them, if we enjoy them. And boycotting established publishers just punishes those who have seved our community for centuries, and have served us well.

There seem to be many who believe that mandatory open access will have only benefits for all, except publishers who will be taught a lesson. The evil publishers will be forced to reduce fees, and to shrink profits to a reasonable level. In the end, we will have a system that provides the same service equally good or better, just at lower cost. A no-brainer, so better get a brain.

It is difficult to tell what would happen in fact. A recent survey among libraries found that, if a universal open-access mandate were introduced with an embargo period of six months, this would lead 10 per cent of libraries to cancel all their subscriptions to scientific journals, and about half of them to at least cancel some. (PDF here, see also THE for a summary.) This report was commissioned by the Publishers Association, which should have us be cautious with the finding, but not reason to outright dismiss it. Note that the number extracted from the replies are probably underestimating what would be the actual effect because once the option exists, pressure will be mounting to cancel subscriptions.

Another study by the PEER Project found that openly accessible self-archiving by researchers or universities would not have such a drastic effect. I suspect the difference between the studies is one of expectation what the archiving would look like. The study by the Publishers Association asked specifically "If the (majority of) content of research journals was freely available within 6 months of publication, would you continue to subscribe?" which suggests that what is freely available is access to the published paper on the journal homepage itself. Self-archiving on the other hand seems to me to suggest alternative online deposits, which are of very limited use for reasons of archiving, searching, filtering, tagging, referencing and so on.

Thus, the findings of the Publishers Association, that libraries would dramatically cut back on their journal subscriptions should open access become mandatory, are plausibly correct. This in turn would lead some publishers to go bankrupt or at least dramatically drop their subscription fees. And that is, after all, what many in the open access movement are hoping for.

So, having seen that this is where we might be going, let us ask what the risks are. For that let us get back to the claim that publishers are making unduly profits, and have a look at how the system is presently organized.


Research and development, and knowledge discovery in general, is essential to innovation. It is however a process that runs on a very long time scale, too long for it to work well in a purely capitalistic system: There isn't enough tangible outcome in the short run. Thus, literally all developed nations fund academic research publicly. Private funding exists, but it is more the exception than the norm.

Now this, mostly publicly funded research, needs tools to structure, filter and archive the produced knowledge. For that we have historically used commercial publishers who are working in competition with each other, much like in a free market, but are serving almost exclusively to the research communities. (Many publishers have popular science offers too, but the bulk of money comes from journal subscriptions.)

Are these subscriptions are overpriced? Are publishers making too much profit? That is not an easy question to answer. Basically, this claim means there is something wrong with the competition, something is not working with the market. Maybe it is the case that publishers make too much profit, I don't know. But I think what also plays a role for this perception of too high profits is a misunderstanding of the function of scientific publishing. The publishers themselves are trying to optimize profit, all right, after all that's how capitalism works. But the receiving end, the scientists or, in practice, the libraries, are not optimizing profit. Or at least they shouldn't. Their purpose is to do the long-term thinking, they have to think about how people tomorrow will be able to access and understand the knowledge generated today and yesterday. What do we need for that? What serves this goal?

Now look: There is an obvious tension here as financial pressure rises. Libraries get under pressure to cut subscriptions. They will cut first where there is the least resistence. That means presently unpopular and small fields. How do we know we will not regret this in a decade or two? We don't. It's a risk for knowledge discovery. Is it worth the risk? We don't know. That's bad enough already, but now ask what the publishers do. They bundle the non-popular stuff with the popular stuff in unpopular packaging deals. Why? Because otherwise they'd have to cut the stuff that's become non-popular and then it's gone for good. Now the libraries complain because the publishers are carrying on with publishing and selling research they don't want to buy any more.

Wait - that sounds like publishers are the ones holding up the torch, being concerned about the future of knowledge discovery while the scientists are the ones trying to optimize their profit. Odd, no? You shouldn't believe this any more than you should believe that publishers are evil bloodsuckers.

And now, in this situation under tension already, the open access movement wants to increase pressure on the publishers, believing that we'll end up with the same service and quality at a lower cost. No way, I say. What's more likely going to happen is that some smaller publishers go bankrupt or are bought by larger ones. And the larger ones will start throwing out what's the least profitable, serving to what seems to be the demand of the day. It's not their responsibility to do the long-term thinking. You can't blame a for-profit organization for wanting to make profit. Except, come to think of it, that's what the people signing the Elsevier boycott seem to be doing.

I personally am particularly concerned about the archiving that can be provided by relatively inexpensive depositories, which is why I like my papers to be published in print. I simply don't trust the presently available digital archiving systems, neither software nor hardware. Look, I've grown up, basically, among Roman ruins. It wasn't all that uncommon for the farmers in our neighborhood to find relics of Roman dishware or jewelry (right next to the WWII bombs that is). I'm thinking in thousands of years when I say I want knowledge to be preserved. Empires come and go. Make sure the knowledge stays. Which open access journal do you trust?

Another relevant point is the aggregation and searchability: The more information we have the more important it becomes that content is suitably filtered, tagged, searchable, classified and maintained, even if the original editing is already done. All these services cost money and are unlikely to work well in a low-cost splattered self-archiving. Are you sure the services we presently have will continue or improve? Capitalistic considerations, as we have already noted, are not serving innovation well in the long run. So why do we apply this argument to scientific publishing now?

The problem, in my eyes, is how we think about scientific publishing. For many researchers it has become primarily a cost factor, one that presently is hard to circumvent. But for me, it's an investment. It's an investment into our future, like research itself. And that investment, long-term like that into research, isn't one that should be decided on monetary arguments.

This role of scientific publishing is however obscured by the present funding practice in which journals are a cost factor to libraries, rather than, well, an investment of our societies. But if published scientific research papers are widely considered to be a service to the public that should serve the public, then the publishing too should be funded like a public service. So let publishers elaborate on their contribution to knowledge preservation and have them write proposals for funding. Let library committees judge on the merit and promise of these proposals and distribute grants. This would move the emphasis from destruction to creation, and it would put into place criteria that benefit research rather than primarily reduce cost. And it would almost certainly move us towards open access.

We should come to see scientific publishers as our alleys rather than our enemies. After all that's what they've been for centuries.



Appendix:

Scientific publishing serves many purposes: There is peer review, editing in its various forms, filtering and classifying, sorting and referencing, archiving, maintaining and distributing. Each of these services takes time and effort. They all have a monetary value. Here are some numbers, quoted from this document:

"

• Peer review has real costs and there are no economies of scale. Average cost $250 per manuscript for salary and fees only, excludes overheads - infrastructure, systems etc. (heavily affected by rejection rates)
• Excluding peer review, average production cost ranges from $170 to over $400 per article (again excluding all overheads)
• Annual publisher platform maintenance costs ranges from $170k to $400k (excludes set up and development costs typically costing hundreds of thousands of dollars)"

The cost per paper is not negligible and somebody has to pay it. Even the arxiv, one of the best known, most widely used and accepted depository of papers, has been struggling to run sustainably, and they just about manage to. (For more on the arxiv budget, read this). And that's a depository only, if with some moderation. No peer review, no editing, no print, no press, no whistles and no bells.

Disclaimer:

My husband works for a large scientific publisher, Springer. He does not however work in journal publishing, but for a scientific database in print and software. He also hasn't read what I just wrote. Now time to hit the publish button.