Skip to content

Open access to research

‘what we propose implies cultural change: a fundamental shift in how research is published and disseminated’ – Working Group on Expanding Access to Published Research Findings

The UK Government has accepted the recommendation of the Working Group, chaired by Dame Janet Finch, that by 2014 publicly funded scientific research be freely available to all on publication, a move described by the Guardian as  ‘the most radical shakeup of academic publishing since the invention of the internet‘.

Currently academic publishers recoup their costs by charging subscription fees, borne mostly by academic libraries. Finch proposes that cost of publication be borne instead by the producers of research.  Under this scheme (referred to as the ‘Gold’ option), authors would pay article processing charges (APCs – expected to be around £2,000 per article) to have their papers peer reviewed, edited and made freely available online.

An alternative favoured by some academics – the so-called ‘green’ option – would allow researchers to make their papers freely available online after they have been accepted by journals. Of course this is likely to seriously, or fatally, damage the revenues of publishers, including Britain’s learned societies, who survive on journal subscriptions.

Which begs the question – should publishers and learned societies realistically expect to continue as before, with revenues simply transferring from subscriptions to APCs?  Such a simple transfer seems unlikely as the whole ecology of scholarly publishing and the dissemination of research is already changing. Before the internet, the costs of peer review and disseminating paper-based research publications were costly and complex, involving proofing, typesetting, printing, publishing and distribution. Sensibly this was outsourced to professional publishers (for more on this see Ross Mounce’s guest post on UK Web Focus: Open Access to Science for Everyone).

But the Web is a disruptive force which has undermined many established business models, including newspaper publishing, bookselling, banking and education. So far, the academic publishing business model has resisted change, the printed-based subscription model having been applied virtually unchanged to digital publishing. This looks unsustainable in a world where the social web offers so much variety in the way we find, use, share and rate information of all kinds. Indeed, when Tim Berners-Lee created the Web in 1991, it was with the aim of better facilitating scientific communication and the dissemination of scientific research (Why hasn’t scientific publishing been disrupted already?)

The transition will not be without pain and Finch recognises the tensions between the interests of key stakeholders:

  • Publishers, whether commercial or not-for-profit, wish to sustain high-quality services, and the revenues that enable them to do so.
  • Funders wish to secure maximum impact for the research they fund, plus value for money.
  • Universities wish to maximise their research income and performance, while bearing down on costs.
  • Researchers themselves wish to see speedy and effective publication and dissemination of research results
  • Researchers also wish to secure high impact and credit for their work.

Probably the most important change in the ecology will be increased bargaining power for the producers of research.  As Finch notes:

…one of the advantages of open access publishing is that it brings greater transparency about the costs, and the price, of publication and dissemination. The measures we recommend will bring greater competition on price as well as the status of the journals in which researchers wish to publish. We therefore expect market competition to intensify, and that universities and funders should be able to use their power as purchasers to bear down on the costs to them both of APCs and of subscriptions.

The Wellcome Trust is adapting to an open access world and is factoring APCs into its funding.   In this interview the Trust’s Robert Kiley explains in some detail the financial implications of an open access publication policy and notes a downward pressure on APCs, $1,300 being the charge made by the Public Library of Science.

Academic publishers will not necessarily go out of business but their business model will have to change, and not simply by switching their revenue source from the the consumer to the producer. What we might see is the emergence of a variety of ways of consuming research, based on models evolved by the likes of Amazon and Google. In other words the publishers will have to respond with an attractive offer in return for the APC (for more on how journal might evolve see http://uksglive.blogspot.co.uk/2012/03/debate-future-for-scholarly-journals.html). Some suggest a greater role for tools such as Figshare (figshare.com) which hosts ‘the smallest piece of research to communicate’. In the new world of open access, peer review might be handled through knowledge blogs.

The upshot is that academics and their institutions now need to look seriously at dissemination.  Finch concludes that

representative bodies for key sectors including central and local Government, voluntary organisations, and businesses, should work together with publishers, learned societies, libraries and others with relevant expertise to consider the terms and costs of licences to provide access to a broad range of relevant content for the benefit of consortia of organisations within their sectors; and how such licences might be funded

How shall we in the social services respond to this disruption?  Is this a great opportunity to engage with our academic institutions and the Scottish Government to bring about the change envisaged by Finch? Can we use knowledge blogs for peer review?  How else might we use social media as part of the cultural change envisaged by Finch?

IRISS would be delighted to help facilitate open access to Scotland’s high quality research outputs.  Indeed, we were already considering the idea of an open access journal. Thoughts please!