Federal Research Public Access Act, the Research Works Act, and the open-access movement. - Slate Magazine

abernard102@gmail.com 2012-08-20

Summary:

“In the summer of 1991, Paul Ginsparg, a researcher at the Los Alamos nuclear laboratory, set up an email system for about 200 string theorists to exchange papers they had written. The World Wide Web was a mere infant—it had been opened to the public on Aug. 6 of that year. The string theorists weren’t particularly interested in making their research widely available... Ginsparg’s archive was a way for the theorists to communicate with one another... the novel system of communication would become the basis for a new model of academic publishing... By 1996, Ginsparg would write: ‘Many of us have long been aware that certain physics journals currently play NO role whatsoever for physicists. Their primary role seems to be to provide a revenue stream to publishers, a revenue stream invisibly siphoned from overhead on research contracts through library systems.’ The arXiv, as it came to be known, was by then used widely in physics; some mathematicians and computer scientists had also started using it... Since April 2008, researchers with funding from the National Institutes of Health have been required to submit their articles to a site called PubMedCentral, one of the arXiv’s offspring... This experiment in open-access publishing is now on the verge of ending altogether or becoming the new status quo, depending on which politicians win an important legislative battle. The Federal Research Public Access Act, reintroduced today by a bipartisan assortment of politicians, would broaden the open-access requirement to nearly all federally funded research... Today’s bill is a response to the Research Works Act, which was introduced in December... The invisibly siphoned revenue stream that Ginsparg referred to comes from institutional subscriptions, which don’t come cheap. A year’s print subscription to Cancer Genetics, say, will run you (without discounts) $5,010 per year. (Individuals can subscribe for $280.) Cancer Genetics, along with 2,637 other journals, is published by Elsevier, a multinational conglomerate that made $1.1 billion last year on $3.2 billion in revenue—a 36 percent profit margin. This is typical of the industry. It helps that the “referees” who peer-review journal articles perform the job for free. (Almost 5,000 scholars are now boycotting Elsevier in protest of price-gouging and other practices, in a movement started by a British mathematician on Jan. 21.) Erik Engstrom, Elsevier’s current CEO, made $3.2 million in 2010; his predecessor Ian Smith got more than $1.7 million as a parting gift when he left after eight months on the job... A journal article serves many purposes. One of them is to make money for publishers. Scientists and other academics publish in scholarly journals as a credentialing mechanism and, secondarily, to tell people about their work. Journals used to be crucial for both of these reasons, but in a world where academics could just post a paper up on their own websites, the primary purpose of a journal article is its professional validation. That’s why it makes some sense that the authors of a journal article should pay for the privilege of that validation, via peer review, rather than readers paying for the privilege of reading. That is the reasoning behind the Public Library of Science (PLoS), a nonprofit group of seven journals that launched in October 2003. The PLoS journals weren’t the first “open-access” journals, but they have become the standard-bearers of the rapidly growing movement. PLoS journals charge authors between $1,350 and $2,900 per article, which goes to cover overhead. The work is then freely available to all on the Web... Allan Adler of the Association of American Publishers, which has been leading the lobbying push against public-access mandates, says he doubts the open-access business model is ‘sustainable.’ However, PLoS brought in more than it spent in 2010, and its CEO, Peter Jerram, made $432,640 in 2010—it’s not a shoestring operation, even if it doesn’t come with millions. The open-access movement has been gathering steam. Harvard adopted an open-access policy in 2008. The policy requires faculty to grant their institution a nonexclusive right to freely distribute their scholarly articles. Cornell, Dartmouth, MIT, and the University of California-Berkeley followed in September 2009; as did Princeton in September 2011... Scientists joke about things like the minimum publishable unit (also least publishable unit, or, for short “publon”). Maximizing the number of publications while minimizing their intellectual content doesn’t serve any broader interest. But it’s the inevitable result when the number of publications (which is objectively verifiable) becomes disproportionally important in relation to the quality of insight. Academic administrators have grown increasingly concerned with the “impact factor” of journals... But by taking power away from journal publishers, open-access (and public-access mandates) should make for a healthier scientific ecosystem. It won’t immediately fix the “publon” effect, but charging for publication should exert at least a slight pres

Link:

http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/future_tense/2012/02/federal_research_public_access_act_the_research_works_act_and_the_open_access_movement_.single.html

Updated:

08/16/2012, 06:08

From feeds:

Open Access Tracking Project (OATP) » abernard102@gmail.com

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Authors:

abernard

Date tagged:

08/20/2012, 14:45

Date published:

03/01/2012, 13:29