Recently in Scholarly publishing Category

That's the screenshot of my reply to a review request from Theoretical Population Biology. It was a little uncomfortable for me to make that reply because (a) my co-author and I sent off revisions for an invited paper that will appear in a special issue¹ of TPB and (b) one of the editors was my major professor at Stanford and I shared an office with another of the editors for a year or two as a post-doc.

But as you can see, I shook off my discomfort and made a statement.

Nearly 5000 scientists have now signed the pledge.

Writing in the Boston Globe, Gareth Cook summarizes things this way:

Elsevier has settled on a business strategy of exploitation, aligning itself against the interests of the scientific community. Most of the intellectual work that goes into Elsevier's journals is provided for free, by scientists whose salaries are largely paid for by taxpayers. Then Elsevier charges exorbitant rates for its journals, with many titles running in the thousands of dollars a year. This sharply curtails the sharing of results - the fuel of scientific discovery - and makes it prohibitively expensive for the public to read what appears in its pages. Yet for Elsevier, this looks like success: In 2010 Elsevier reported revenues of about $3.2 billion, of which a whopping 36 percent were profit.

Remember that Elsevier boycott I mentioned yesterday? Well, I'm afraid that I'm likely to have one more paper appear in an Elsevier-published journal. About a year ago a collaborator and I were invited to submit a paper to a special issue of Theoretical Population Biology. If you'd asked me at the time, I could have told you it was published by Elsevier, but somehow it just didn't register.

Last night I was reviewing the final draft of the paper as revised in response to comments from reviewers. Then it hit me. This paper will appear in Theoretical Population Biology several months after I signed the boycott pledge. All I can say is that I'm embarrassed. I won't be submitting any new papers to TPB. Sorry Mark & Tulja.

Tim Gowers posted a blog entry a little over a week ago entitled "Elsevier -- my part in its downfall". Here's the nugget of what he had to say, but you should go read the whole thing if you are a publishing academic.

I am not only going to refuse to have anything to do with Elsevier journals from now on, but I am saying so publicly. I am by no means the first person to do this, but the more of us there are, the more socially acceptable it becomes, and that is my main reason for writing this post.

Lest you dismiss Tim Gowers as a crank, he's a Fellow of the Royal Society and he received the Fields medal in 1998 for work in functional analysis and combinatorics. He is just one of 1671 scholars who have signed an online pledge neither to submit papers to Elsevier journals, nor to edit Elsevier journals, nor to review papers for Elsevier journals. I made the number 1672 this morning. As Tim Worstall summarized the situation on Forbes.com

Academic publishing is a very good game indeed if you can manage to get into it. As the publisher the work is created at the expense of others, for free to you. There are no advances, no royalties, to pay. The editing, the checking, the decisions about whether to publish, these are all also done for free to you. And the market, that's every college libarary in the world and they're very price insensitive indeed.

I invite everyone who reads this blog to add their name to the list at The Cost of Knowledge. It's time to take a stand.

In December, Representatives Darrell Issa (R-CA) and Carolyn Maloney (D-NY) introduced H.R. 3699, the Research Works Act.

A BILL

To ensure the continued publication and integrity of peer-reviewed research works by the private sector.

That description is cut and pasted from the text at thomas.loc.gov. So far so good. We're all in favor of ensuring that peer-reviewed research continues to be published, and we're all in favor of integrity. But not so fast. Read a little further.

SEC. 2. LIMITATION ON FEDERAL AGENCY ACTION.

No Federal agency may adopt, implement, maintain, continue, or otherwise engage in any policy, program, or other activity that--

(1) causes, permits, or authorizes network dissemination of any private-sector research work without the prior consent of the publisher of such work; or

(2) requires that any actual or prospective author, or the employer of such an actual or prospective author, assent to network dissemination of a private-sector research work.

Sound harmless? Maybe even reasonable? Well, consider this:

The Director of the National Institutes of Health shall require that all investigators funded by the NIH submit or have submitted for them to the National Library of Medicine's PubMed Central an electronic version of their final, peer-reviewed manuscripts upon acceptance for publication, to be made publicly available no later than 12 months after the official date of publication: Provided, That the NIH shall implement the public access policy in a manner consistent with copyright law.

The Research Works Act would invalidate the requirement for peer-reviewed NIH-supported research to be deposited in PubMed Central.

The government [of the UK] has signalled a revolution in scientific publishing by throwing its weight behind the idea that all publicly funded scientific research must be published in open-access journals. ("Results of publicly funded research will be open access - science minister," Alok Jha, The Guardian, 8 December 2011)

I've written before that open access (and its variants) is one way to ensure broad public access to the results of scholarly research. And ensuring the broadest possible access ought to be a primary goal of any scholarly society involved in publishing. Those societies exist to enhance the work of scholars and to enhance the contributions scholars make to society. Both the work scholars do and the contributions that work makes to society depends on ready access to published scholarly work. The more widely available that work is, the greater the contributions to scholarship and the greater the contributions to society.

My concern about immediate open access has always been how to pay for the cost of publishing. In some fields, grants may be large enough to absorb the cost of authors fees, and some funders have made arrangements to ensure that funds are available to support immediate open access publication of work they support. That appears to be the approach that the government of the UK is taking. The science minister, David Willetts, seems to understand that.

We want to move to open access, but in a way that ensures that peer review and publishing continues as a function. It needs to be paid for somehow. One of the clear options is to shift to a system from which university libraries pay for journals to one in which the academics pay to publish. But then you need to shift the funding so that the academics could afford to pay to publish. (emphasis added)

The proposal represents a fundamental change in the way scholarly publishing has been funded for a century or more, and there are deeply entrenched forces that will oppose it. But if the change can be made to stick, and if it can be made to stick in a way that promotes wide public access to scholarly research in all fields, not just heavily funded biomedical fields, it is a change all scholars should embrace.

That's a screen shot of the BioOne home page on my iPad. Our mobile site went live yesterday. Now you can browse BioOne from your iPad, iPhone, Android, Blackberry, or other smartphone. Just point your browser to http://www.bioone.org and you will automatically be redirected to the mobile site. Enjoy!

Note: The location tag at the bottom of this post was inserted automatically by BlogPress on my iPad. I'm in DC for a BioOne Board meeting later today.

Location:New Hampshire Ave NW,Washington,United States

Open access week kicked off yesterday in Lesotho with support from UNESCO. Closer to home,

UConn is marking the celebration of Open Access Week (Oct. 24-30) with the launch of a new fund through the University Libraries that will support UConn authors publishing in open access journals.

...

To support free, immediate, online access to scholarly research, UConn Libraries, together with the UConn Health Center Library and the Vice President for Research, have started a fund that will provide support for the publication of scholarly articles in peer-reviewed, fully open access journals.

Beginning this week, the $35,000 UConn Open Access Author's Fund will provide up to $1,250 for each scholarly article written by any UConn faculty member, post-doctoral researcher, staff member, or graduate student, once they exhaust other funding avenues.

As I have written before, open access (and its variants) is one way to ensure broad public access to the results of scientific research. Another is to support the efforts of not-for-profit publishers, like the Botanical Society of America and those who are part of BioOne, who provide the widest possible access to their journals consistent with recouping their costs through subscription revenue.¹ Some fields of science and scholarship cannot support an "author pays" model of open access,² but they can support open archiving.³

On September 19, the faculty of Princeton University unanimously adopted an amendment to the Rules and Procedures of the Faculty of Princeton University that inserted the following paragraphs at the start of the section on copyright policy:

The members of the Faculty of Princeton University strive to make their publications openly accessible to the public. To that end, each Faculty member hereby grants to The Trustees of Princeton University a nonexclusive, irrevocable, worldwide license to exercise any and all copyrights in his or her scholarly articles published in any medium, whether now known or later invented, provided the articles are not sold by the University for a profit, and to authorize others to do the same. This grant applies to all scholarly articles that any person authors or co-authors while appointed as a member of the Faculty, except for any such articles authored or co-authored before the adoption of this policy or subject to a conflicting agreement formed before the adoption of this policy. Upon the express direction of a Faculty member, the Provost or the Provost's designate will waive or suspend application of this license for a particular article authored or co-authored by that Faculty member.

The University hereby authorizes each member of the Faculty to exercise any and all copyrights in his or her scholarly articles that are subject to the terms and conditions of the grant set forth above. This authorization is irrevocable, non-assignable, and may be amended by written agreement in the interest of further protecting and promoting the spirit of open access.

I am delighted to see the faculty of Princeton commit themselves to fostering the broadest possible access to scholarly works they produce. I hope that faculty at many other universities follow suit.

But one thing isn't clear to me.

The rules grant copyright to The Trustees of Princeton University. What happens if a faculty member signs a publication agreement that transfers copyright to another entity. Do Princeton's rules take precendence over the publication agreement? I can't see how they would,¹ but if they don't the new rules do little more than encourage faculty to be careful about the publication agreements they sign.

A few weeks ago I pointed to a news article about Aaron Swartz who was stealing articles from JSTOR, allegedly for the purpose of making them available free over the Internet. A few days ago JSTOR announced that it is making all content from the United States that was published before 1923 available for free. Content from other parts of the world published before 1870 will also be available for free. Here's some of what their announcement says.

On September 6, 2011, we announced
that we are making journal content in JSTOR published prior to 1923 in
the United States and prior to 1870 elsewhere freely available to
anyone, anywhere in the world. This "Early Journal Content" includes
discourse and scholarship in the arts and humanities, economics and
politics, and in mathematics and other sciences. It includes nearly
500,000 articles from more than 200 journals. This represents 6% of the
content on JSTOR.
While JSTOR currently provides access to
scholarly content to people through a growing network of more than 7,000
institutions in 153 countries, we also know there are independent
scholars and other people that we are still not reaching in this way.
Making the Early Journal Content freely available is a first step in a
larger effort to provide more access options to the content on JSTOR for
these individuals.
The Early Journal Content will be released on a rolling basis beginning today. A quick video tutorial about how to access this content is also available.

I am delighted to see JSTOR take this step. Some advocates of open access are likely to see it as less than a half step, but we have to remember that it costs JSTOR a lot of money to maintain the servers and Internet connections that make their content available. They can't make it all available for free (unless a wealthy benefactor gave them a very large endowment). This move balances JSTOR's need for revenue with everyone's interest in wide availability, free access where possible, to the scholarly literature.

Related articles

• 500K+ articles from JSTOR available to everyone for free (teleread.com)
• JSTOR Opens Access to Its Early Journal Content (Thanks, Aaron Swartz) (downes.ca)
• JSTOR Makes Early Journal Content Free (theawl.com)
• What a great move - JSTOR makes early journal content free to all (consortserials.wordpress.com)

That's not quite what George Monbiot says. It's not what he says at all. But he makes a good case that next to the ruthless capitalism of one set of business, Rupert Murdoch is a wimp. If you've followed this blog for a while, you've read my take on the business of scholarly publishing. You should also read Monbiot's. Here's a taste of what you'll find.

Who are the most ruthless capitalists in the western world? Whose monopolistic practices make Walmart look like a corner shop and Rupert Murdoch a socialist? You won't guess the answer in a month of Sundays. While there are plenty of candidates, my vote goes not to the banks, the oil companies or the health insurers, but - wait for it - to academic publishers. Theirs might sound like a fusty and insignificant sector. It is anything but. Of all corporate scams, the racket they run is most urgently in need of referral to the competition authorities.

...

The returns are astronomical: in the past financial year, for example, Elsevier's operating profit margin was 36% (£724m on revenues of £2bn). They result from a stranglehold on the market. Elsevier, Springer and Wiley, who have bought up many of their competitors, now publish 42% of journal articles.

More importantly, universities are locked into buying their products. Academic papers are published in only one place, and they have to be read by researchers trying to keep up with their subject. Demand is inelastic and competition non-existent, because different journals can't publish the same material. In many cases the publishers oblige the libraries to buy a large package of journals, whether or not they want them all. Perhaps it's not surprising that one of the biggest crooks ever to have preyed upon the people of this country - Robert Maxwell - made much of his money through academic publishing.

The knowledge monopoly is as unwarranted and anachronistic as the corn laws. Let's throw off these parasitic overlords and liberate the research that belongs to us. ("Academic publishers make Murdoch look like a socialist", by George Monbiot, The Guardian, 29 August 2011)

"Corn laws." I'll have to remember that one.