Un-Wellcome | The Bookseller

"Benedicte Page's encounter with the Wellcome Trust prompts me to comment on their latest orchestrated and cleverly timed effort to open up a new front in the open access debates with an assault on the (pejoratively termed) 'luxury journals'. On point is Professor Randy Schekman, an eminent scientist of unimpeachable reputation recently endowed with the Nobel prize for medicine and editor-in-chief of the newly-launched Wellcome-funded prestige journal eLife. eLife is a direct competitor to the luxury journals that Professor Schekman now says are 'damaging science' (or is that just the Guardian headline writer?). How can a humble publisher respond in the face of such great forces for good (which I do entirely as an individual)? Do we just stand here and take it, yet again, as responsibility for flaws in the paradigm for academic discourse and reward are heaped at our door? The academy is not immune to the effects, and the benefits, of brand that pervade the rest of life. A trusted brand (a journal, say), the quality expected of its content, and the prestige that accrues by association cannot be cloned and must be earned. A priority (but certainly not the only) objective of science must be to communicate the results to those who can best build on them. This the prestige journals do in spades. Why shoot them down for that? But they alone cannot and should not be the sole or principal vessels for the highest quality in science. They should not be blamed for the fact that the academy has come to endow such high kudos to so few brands, kudos from rigorous standards of selection and peer review. eLife is a 'pure Gold' open access journal that aspires to match the prestige of the 'best' journals, but with no restriction on the quantity of articles published that meet the quality criteria. eLife has no declared business model beyond the deep pockets of three heavily endowed medical charities (Wellcome Trust dispenses more research funds each year than the government-support Medical Research Council). In the short term at least, sustainability is not an issue on the road to disruption, unlike the prestige journals already in the market. Should these be criticised, especially by representatives of a direct competitor with an undeclared business model, for moving prudently forward instead of leaping to "pure Gold" with no regard for sustainability? ..."