Science for peace and development at UNESCO: an anthology by Nobel laureates - UNESCO Digital Library

See esp. pp. 143ff. "In November 2021, the GC adopted the Recommendation on Open Science (UNESCO, 2021), the first international standard-setting instrument to propose new practices for producing and disseminating scientific knowledge. The purpose of this Recommendation is to establish an international framework for open science policy and practice that recognizes disciplinary and regional differences in open science perspectives, respects academic freedom, embraces gender-transformative approaches, and addresses the unique challenges faced by scientists and other open science stakeholders – especially in developing countries. It also aims to bridge the digital, technological, and knowledge divides that exist both between and within nations....Will UNESCO be able to ensure that Open Science – including shared quantum algorithms, open-source synthetic biology tools, shared scientific infrastructure, and open-access knowledge – becomes the standard model for research?" 

There follows (pp. 149-155) a reprprint of Joshua Lederberg's 1996 essay, "Electronic scientific publications: options for the future." Lederberg was the Nobel laureate in Physiology or Medicine, 1958. "It is a special characteristic of that primary literature that its authors, on the whole, are totally uninterested in royalties, which indeed have generally not been available to them. Their gain from publication is recognition by their colleagues and the dissemination of knowledge in the spirit of science....

 I take the literature very seriously. To me it’s holy writ and I want to be sure that, in whatever format it is distributed, it will be accessible, its veracity can be attested by its being observable by everyone at will, and it should be an achievement that cannot be altered. But it’s also a dynamic place, as it should be, and effectively is an open forum. It could be more open than it is. We don’t have enough dialectic in our current modes of publication after the fact. There has to be almost a federal case before you can have a comment published on a prior article, and the electronic media will help to lower the threshold in that regard. It’s a ‘rumen’, which is a place for fermentation, for digestion, for re-examination of the given truths over a period of time, and it certainly has a dynamic quality taken in its totality, even if every brick of the edifice has been put firmly into place in a severely qualified process....

The authors above all want to make their work known to others. That is their superordinate goal in publication. In order to achieve it, they are certainly interested in having their work available at the lowest price and cost to their readership and, with varying success, this has been internalised in the practice of page charges, which are negative royalties. These are payments that authors are willing to make in order to help lubricate the system, in order to help have their work made available to the community and to others....

Libraries and publishers are increasingly at odds with one another. Pricing policies are leading to a black hole – especially with journals with an already limited subscription – the subscription base goes down; the subscription fees go up and there’s a necessary reaction of further retrenchment. The reductio ad absurdum will be a single subscription that will cost a million US dollars, and we will rely on interlibrary loan subject to rules of access for fair use to get copies of it. We’re approaching that situation with some journals and of course, it’s pure silliness and why print it at all in this case? In other words, why not make the transition to the electronic medium forthwith, when we’re heading that way anyway?  ...

I really have nothing to ask of the print publishers or of the ‘for profit’ electronic purveyors. Unless they are very selective – and they sometimes will be – about their value added, they will fall of their own weight as scientists become empowered to manage their own communications without the benefit of intermediaries.... But the majority of submissions would probably fall somewhere in between [the obviously good and obviously bad], and I would say: why not accept them but not put them in the premier site? We will not call it Grade B, but everyone will know that is what it means; if you did not make it in the first one, yes, you can have more or less automatic accessibility to the second one. Who will ever read it, who will ever want to look at it? That is another story, but at least it will be part of the available public record with the advantage of open accessibility, and we will have, I think, saved a lot of churning in going to three or four other journals in order to achieve that result. One of the aspects of electronic publication is we no longer have any excuse for rationing input. It matters little if the journal is five, ten or twenty thousand pages and particularly if, as I hope will be understood, we use page charges as the primary medium of financing that kind of a system. One of the other benefits of the page charge is