Open Access e Open Science: l’intervista ad Elena Giglia – Matteo Di Rosa

Google English: "Open Access and Open Science: the interview with Elena Giglia

I share an interesting interview with Elena Giglia, head of the Open Access Project Unit of the University of Turin, published in the latest issue of APRE Magazine. We are talking about Scientific Communication and Open Access, some of the fundamental elements of Open Science. In the perspective of future implementations foreseen in FP9 and the increasingly central role of Open Science in the next and in the current framework program, this article is very timely.

In the light of the results presented by the European Commission, we try to understand first of all, with Dr. Giglia, what does not work in the current system of scientific communication?

I would say that the system as a whole presents some "chronic dysfunctions". Technically, publishers have limited themselves to reproducing paper magazines on the web, without fully exploiting the technology that instead would allow for example to write collaboratively or use machines to read and extract concepts in a few seconds. The average publication time of a scientific article has remained for 9-18 months: does it make sense in the web era in which a blog post is read instantly? But in addition to obsolete techniques, other distortions have been perpetuated. Not everyone knows that an author, when he publishes an academic book or an article in a magazine he receives no financial compensation; what is expected is the recognition by the scientific community for sharing its discoveries. Yet, commercial publishers have huge profits - around 38%, when pharmaceutical companies are 40% ... but they pay the raw material. In addition, 5 publishers share more than 50% of the market, creating an oligopolistic situation, which is never positive because rules and prices are dictated by a few.

Another paradox lies in the fact that every university in the world pays its research four times: salary the researcher; finances research; once this is published, it must "buy it back" by paying subscriptions to magazines - in my university, over two million a year -; finally, if the researchers want to reuse what they have published themselves, they have to pay re-use rights because the publishers have their copyright ceding. On the figures collected by publishers, however, nothing can be known by virtue of confidentiality clauses made to sign those who negotiate licenses at the national level.

If you think that in the last twenty years the price of scientific journals has increased by over 400%, while research funds have suffered drastic reductions, it is clear that libraries they had to cut subscriptions, so researchers as authors are read less and as readers can read less. Does it make sense in the Internet age, where everyone has access to what's on the net?

Does it make sense that today we continue to pay traditional publishers because in fact instead of spreading it they lock up research, which - let us not forget - is often produced with public funds? Can a doctor afford 10,000 euros for season tickets? The pirated site SciHub, with its six million monthly downloads, is not a solution but a clear symptom that access problems are there, and serious.

Let us ask ourselves then: why do the authors continue to publish in scientific journals? The answer lies in the criteria used for the evaluation of research, which is an indispensable yoke for a researcher who wants to make a career.

Traditionally, the authors - at least in the exact sciences for which reference databases exist - are judged by the number of citations that the publication receives, which in theory should be a sign of prestige and appreciation from the reference community. The average of the citations gives rise to an indicator called Impact Factor (IF), which is calculated from a commercial database, in turn owned by large publishers. From a statistical point of view, the Impact Factor is not a solid measure, first because it refers to the entire magazine and not to the specific article, and then because being an "average" applies to both the article that has had zero citations both to what has had the maximum, which are then judged in the same way. That said, the real problem lies in the fact that, in times of scarce research funds, the competition to get to publish in magazines with higher Impact Factor, more useful for evaluation purposes, has become unbridled, and has led to behaviors adaptive not always virtuous ranging from fictitious fragmentation into several articles to have more publications to real frauds - what with the Anglo-Saxon term is defined as "scientific misconduct" - or falsifications of data...."