PerspectivesAre you interested in submitting a Perspective Article? Be sure to read The Science Advisory Board's Editorial Guides for Perspective Articles. Click here. The Success of Open Access by Wim D'Haeze, Ph.D. Open access to the scientific literature is per definition based on the complete removal of barriers that somehow restrict the accessibility of the literature. Thus, an open access article can be read by anyone in the world who has access to the worldwide web without paying a journal subscription fee or pay-per-view charges. The pioneers of open access publishing in the U.S. are the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences U.S.A. that became a couple of years ago a so-called hybrid journal offering authors the choice to publish their article as an open access article (which requires an additional fee of $1,000) or to publish their manuscript as a pay-to-access publication, and the Public Library of Science that publishes an increasing number of top level scientific journals exclusively in the open access mode. Throughout the past years, more journals switched, albeit in some cases hesitatingly, to hybrid journals (e.g., journals affiliated with the Britain Royal Society) and new fully open access journals appeared (e.g., the BioMedCentral series of journals). The question remains as to who pays the cost for open access publishing? In principal, the authors who chose for open access publishing are charged to cover the cost of publishing their article in contrast to pay-to-access articles where the readers contribute to the publication costs. Noteworthy is that the cost for open access publishing has increased during the past few months. Starting from July 1, 2006, PLoS has increased the publication fee from $1,500 for PLoS Biology and PLoS Medicine for the first time since its inception to $2,500 and to $2,000 for its other journals, numbers that apparently more accurately reflect the cost to publish an open access article. Unless the significant increase, the cost for publication in PLoS journals remains relatively low as compared to other journals – journals that are somehow more conservative in respect to open access publishing – for which the cost can raise as high as $5,500 for a 10-page article. Although in some rare cases, this fee may be waived for authors who do not have the funds to cover it, it may be perceived as a considerable disadvantage of open access publication for some and form a barrier for others. Fortunately, initiated by the Wellcome Trust in the U.K., more funding agencies are allocating funds to their scientists specifically to cover the cost of open access publishing. Starting from October 1, 2006, five major U.K. funding agencies, including the Medical Research Council, the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council, the Economic and Social Research Council, and the National Environmental Research Council, followed the Wellcome Trust in requiring their grant holders to deposit their published work in a publicly accessible repository. In the U.S., the National Institutes of Health has introduced a similar policy by which they strongly suggest, but yet not request, holders of NIH grants to add their publication to the PubMed Central database within six months after publication. To date, fewer than 4 percent of the NIH funded researchers have done so. However, this trend is likely going to change in the near future as the U.S. senate has recently introduced a bill that would necessitate putting research funded by federal agencies with a research expenditure of over $100 million per year on the internet to make it freely accessible to everyone. The latter decision is obviously a success for all supporters of open access publishing, including myself, however it may have some serious consequences. Many pay-to-access journals protect their publications by copyright agreements signed by the authors that may prohibit the deposition of the published manuscript in a publicly accessible database. Thus, this may influence the journal of choice to which a given manuscript supported by significant federal funds should be submitted to. In cases where the copyright agreements are less stringent, many papers will be published twice, once by the pay-to-access journal and once by the publicly accessible database. Although this sounds odd, this situation should further stimulate to redirect publishers of scientific journals towards open access publication so that in the near future all scientific papers will be published as open access papers. The income that publishers of pay-to-access papers need will be covered by charges to the authors and the latter cost should be covered by research grants and/or institutional budgets. A uniform open access system of scientific publications will indeed depolarize the current scientific publishing climate. Measuring the success of open access articles is a complex problem since most open access journals are relatively new and comparisons of the effect of open access publishing with already established pay-to-access journals are easily confounded by age and reputation. An easy criticism against open access publishing is that it is not proven yet that it substantially increases the citation rate of a given publication. A recent study (Eysenbach G. Citation advantage of open access articles. PLoS Biology 4(5):e157), however, renders this criticism now irrelevant. In this study, citations compiled by Thomson Scientific to 1,492 original articles were compared, 212 of which were published as immediate open access articles and 1,280 as pay-to-access articles, that were published between June and December 2004 in the hybrid journal PNAS. In the 4 to 16 months after publication, the open access articles gained a significant citation advantage over pay-to-access articles during the same period. They are twice as likely to be cited 4 to 10 months after publication and almost three times as likely between 10 and 16 months. As PNAS only delays open access for six months, the difference between the citation rates of open access versus pay-to-access publications may even be more striking for journals where the delay is longer or where articles are available to subscribers only. This study is important as it has convinced already many supporters of pay-to-access publications to make the switch to publishing in open access journals. A considerable downside of this study, however, is that it is only possible to evaluate a disperse population of articles and therefore, the author has adjusted the results for differences in the number of authors, past productivity or author seniority, time since publication, and a submission track which could independently relate to the probability of getting cited. Although the evidence from the current analysis argues convincingly for a time advantage in citation of open access articles, a more complete picture on how long lasting the citation advantage of open access articles is will be obtained when the study is extended over a considerable longer time span, which is currently under investigation. In my opinion, the current developments in scientific publishing and the changes in policies of some major funding agencies requiring grant holders to make their work freely accessible are likely to pave the way to a system in which all journals will be open access journals. This will indeed require major reorganizations of scientific publishers, including the design of strategies as to how to cover the cost of publication. One may opt that during such a conversion, it will become superfluous to keep producing hard copy journal issues as all articles will anyway be accessible via the internet and this will also substantially reduce the cost of publication. These and other factors are essential adaptations that scientific publishers will need to face and undergo in order to prepare the scientific communities for efficient and accurate scientific publishing in the 21st century during which it will be common to read large-scale organismal, system-biology based studies based on extensive data sets and databases and employing for instance four-dimensional monitoring and visualization techniques, indeed pieces of science that cannot be explained anymore on a sheet of paper to a handful of subscribers, but that are of mutual interest. Wim D’Haeze is Bio-Engineer in Chemistry and received his Ph.D. in Biotechnology at Ghent University (Belgium) in June 2001. His doctoral thesis work was focused on the understanding of several early steps of the symbiotic interaction between the Gram-negative soil bacterium Azorhizobium caulinodans and the tropical legume Sesbania rostrata. The initial steps require the production of bacterial compounds including signal molecules and complex surface polysaccharides that are pivotal for invasion of the plant tissue and the formation of new organ tissues. In the three subsequent years, he performed post-doctoral research at the Complex Carbohydrate Research Center at the University of Georgia (Athens, GA) dealing in part with the structural and functional characterization of azorhizobial extracellular polysaccharides. Currently, Wim D’Haeze is employed as Science Writer and focuses on a new horizon regarding the molecular basis of devastative neurodegenerative diseases, such as Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s diseases, in order to screen for and develop new therapeutics. In addition, he is also a freelance Medical Editor. E-mail: wim.dhaeze@sbcglobal.net ### << Previous Next >> [ View All Perspectives ] |
|