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19 June 2012

Set science free from publishers’ paywalls

Set science free from publishers' paywalls

IF YOU would like to read the latest research from my lab, be my guest. Our report on a protein from a mouse version of the winter vomiting virus has just been published in the journal PLoS One and is available online for free – to anyone (vol 7, p e38723).

Contrast that with my first paper, published in 1990, which you could only have read if you had access to a university library with an expensive subscription to the journal Biochemistry.

Back in 1990 – before the world wide web – that was how scientific publishing was done. Today it is being transformed by open access publishers like the Public Library of Science. Rather than being funded by journal subscriptions, these publishers charge authors or their institutions the cost of publication and make their papers available for free online.

Many scientists are passionate supporters of open access and want to see the old model swept away. They have launched a protest movement dubbed the Academic Spring and organised a high-profile boycott of journals published by Elsevier. And the tide appears to be turning in their favour. This week the Finch Report, commissioned by the UK government, recommended that research papers – especially those funded by the taxpayer – should be made freely available to anyone who wants to read them.

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Advocates of open access claim it has major advantages over the subscription model that has been around since academic journals were invented in the 17th century. They argue that science operates more effectively when findings can be accessed freely and immediately by scientists around the world. Better yet, it allows new results to be data-mined using powerful web-crawling technology that might spot connections between data – insights that no individual would be likely to make.

But if open access is so clearly superior, why has it not swept all before it? The model has been around for a decade but about nine-tenths of the approximately 2 million research papers that appear every year are still published behind a paywall.

Part of the reason is scientists’ reluctance to abandon traditional journals and the established ranking among them. Not all journals are equal – they are graded by impact factor, which reflects the average number of times that the papers they publish are cited by others. Nature‘s impact factor is 36, one of the highest going, whereas Biochemistry‘s is around 3.2. Biochemistry is well regarded – many journals have lower factors – but a paper in Nature is still a much greater prize.

Unfortunately, it is prized for the wrong reasons. Impact factors apply to journals as a whole, not individual papers or their authors.

Despite this, scientists are still judged on publications in high-impact journals; funding and promotion often depend on it. Consequently few are willing to risk bucking the trend. This has allowed several publishers to resist calls to abandon the subscription model.

Another reason for the slowness of the revolution is concern about quality. Unlike many traditional journals, PLoS One does not assess the significance of research during peer review; it simply publishes all papers judged to be technically sound. However, this concern proved unfounded. PLoS One now publishes more papers than any other life science journal and has an impact factor of 4.4.

The world of scientific publishing is slowly changing and the hegemony of established journals is being challenged. Shaken by the competition, more of them are offering variants of open access. At the high end of the market, Nature is about to face competition from eLife, an open access journal to be launched later this year.

Adding to the momentum, UK government research councils are increasingly insisting that the research they pay for be published in open access journals. The European Union is poised to do the same for the science it funds. In the US, a bill now before Congress would require all large federal funders to make papers freely available no later than six months after publication.

For UK science minister David Willetts, the motive goes beyond economics: “As taxpayers put their money towards intellectual enquiry, they cannot be barred from then accessing it.”

I agree that access is a public good, but making journals open to all won’t be enough. Most scientific literature is written by researchers, for researchers. The dry, jargon-laden language is frequently impenetrable to scientists outside the specialism, never mind the general public – a barrier higher than any paywall.Open access could be the key to unlocking this information. The model is seen as disruptive to publishers; I hope it might also be disruptive to scientists. By expanding the readership of scientific papers, open access could stimulate demand for a literature that is intelligible as well as accessible.

The difficulties of such a move should not be understated. The style of research papers has served its audience well for a long time, but a public-side pull on scientists would be no bad thing.

If more of us felt motivated to pitch our findings to the public it could bring benefits to all sides: a society more engaged with science and scientists more engaged with society. The stuttering debates on genetic modification, climate, vaccines, drug policy and energy show that we need to find ways to build more meaningful dialogue.

We can make a small start now. Have a look at my latest paper. It may commit a few jargon sins – I’m still getting my eye in – but it should explain why we worked out the structure of a protein from a norovirus that infects mice, and how that might help us tackle a human disease. I’m interested to know what you think.

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