Immediate Open Access in the Biosciences: Prospects and Possibilities

"An open access article is freely available to all interested readers and is preserved for posterity (Suber 2003). At this time, open access to scholarly research in the biosciences remains partially realized. According to research published by Mark Ware in 2012, approximately 30% of STM content is open access in some form, whether immediately or after a delay (Ware 2012). This mixed approach remains in effect today. Publishers such as PLoS and BioMed Central make their articles immediately available to everyone upon publication. In the case of publishers like Elsevier and NPG, most of their articles are provided immediately to subscribers or licensees, and eventually to everyone else after an embargo period. In this article, “immediate open access” designates an article that is open access upon publication. It is feasible to distribute new articles online at little to no marginal cost, which supports the notion that open access is economically feasible. This contention has driven the acrimony between open access advocates and publishers, with advocates claiming that research content should be free and publishers responding that they continue to deliver worthwhile value in the scholarly publishing chain (Alliance for Taxpayer Access 2015; Anderson 2014). Both perspectives exhibit ends-based reasoning, and for that reason are overly simplistic. I support open access publishing, and also believe that publishers would have an essential role to play in a fully open-access world. Although the rancor between open access advocates and publishers is usually expressed in financial terms, economics is not the most important factor in this discussion. If online scholarly publication were simply a matter of more efficient distribution, then immediate open access would now be a reality (Clarke 2010). Michael Clarke made this observation in 2010, in the course of arguing that much of scholarly publishing practice supports the cultural values of the academy. These values are currently impervious to financial considerations. I will focus on Clarke’s piece in the next section of this paper. For now, it suffices to say that the imprimatur of journal publication remains essential to success as a researcher in the biosciences. As yet no new means of credentialing have supplanted publication in prestigious journals. As long as this is true, established subscription-based journals will remain an essential component of scholarly publishing in the biosciences ..."