Hardin Scholarly Communication News

The Wellcome Trust, in partnership with the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC), and the U.S. National Library of Medicine (NLM) are joining forces to digitize the complete backfiles of a number of important and historically significant medical journals. The digitized content will be made freely available on the Internet – via PubMed Central (http://www.pubmedcentral.gov/) and augment the content already available there. The list of journals to be digitized will include the Annals of Surgery, Biochemical Journal, Journal of Physiology and Medical History. Digitization will commence in Summer 2004 and the first titles will be online early in 2005.
http://www.nlm.nih.gov/news/press_releases/intlpubmed04.html

Related News: PubMed Central Digitizing Back Issues of Journals not readily available in electronic form. To read more and view a list of journal titles go to: http://pubmedcentral.com/about/scanning.html

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) now offers an open access publishing option. PNAS authors may opt to pay a $1000 surcharge to make their articles available for free via PNAS Online http://www.pnas.org and PubMed Central http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov immediately upon publication. PNAS will offer this open access option as an experiment until December 31, 2005. PNAS will then continue to move toward an author-pays open access model, maintain the option in the same or modified form, or discontinue it. By introducing this option, PNAS strengthens its commitment to making the scientific literature more freely available than ever before, and hopes that its support of open access will encourage other scientific publishers to follow suit. PNAS will evaluate author participation and the financial impact of the open access option on PNAS revenue.

The open access option was approved overwhelmingly by the PNAS Editorial Board and unanimously approved by the Publications Committee of the National Academy of Sciences, which has oversight over PNAS. The open access experiment is PNAS’s latest initiative to promote the broad dissemination of science. Since January

2000, PNAS has provided free access to back issues online, and makes PNAS content free at both the PNAS Online and PubMed Central web sites 6 months after publication. Special features and papers from the National Academy of Sciences colloquia, as well as multimedia online supporting information, are available for free immediately upon publication. In addition, PNAS offers 145 developing countries free and immediate access to all journal content. Ranked by the Institute for Scientific Information as one of the world’s most-cited scientific serials, PNAS Online receives more than 1.5 million hits per week. The journal is a self-sustaining operation that is not funded by the National Academy of Sciences or the government.
[for the complete release: http://www.library.yale.edu/~llicense/ListArchives/0405/msg00096.html]

Oxford Journals, a Division of Oxford University Press (OUP), announced today that its flagship journal Nucleic Acids Research (NAR) is to move to a full ‘Open Access’ (OA) publishing model from January 2005. This represents a significant step towards maximum dissemination of scholarly research, a core part of OUP’s mission as a leading University-owned Press. NAR will adopt a mandatory OA model whereby authors pay a fee once their paper has been accepted, and all articles published online are immediately available without charge. To read more and view a diagram go to:
http://www3.oup.co.uk/jnls/press/2004/06/26/index.html

Just when you think you’ve got the hang of preserving the delicate papers of historic documents, along comes electronic parchment — as fragile as the real thing because rapidly changing technologies can render its content as unreadable as crumbing paper records. What’s a government archive to do with the electronic records of, say, active military folks who will need documentation in 30 years to claim veterans’ benefits or Food & Drug Administration records that document adverse reactions to drugs — long after today’s hardware and software are replaced by unimaginable innovations? The U.S. National Archives & Records Administration is in the midst of a plan to archive millions — billions — of electronic government documents "so that anyone, anywhere, anytime, far into the future, can access these records with the technology in use then," says outgoing NARA director John W. Carlin. In addition to making a great leap forward in government archiving, he predicts the new products and processes will benefit other archivists — including colleges and universities, libraries and archives, small businesses and large corporations. The first installment of an operational ERA is scheduled to be up and running in 2007. (U.S. National Archives & Records Administration Prologue Spring 2004) http://www.archives.gov/publications/prologue/spring_2004_archivist.htm

The Wellcome Trust has published "Costs and business models of scientific publishing," available at: http://www.wellcome.ac.uk/en/images/costs_business_7955.pdf . The report shows that that publishing a paper in the traditional way costs between £800 and £1,500 (US $1,427 and $2,677). With open access, the cost is £550 to £1,100 (US $981 to $1,963). The report shows open access is an efficient, affordable and high quality model sustainable for the long term, according to Dr. Mark Walport in a summary of the report in the Financial Times (April 30, 2004). Another article about the Wellcome Report is “Open access could reduce cost of scientific publishing,” by Susan Mayor, available at
<http://bmj.bmjjournals.com/cgi/content/full/328/7448/1094-d>.

In response to the evolving opportunities in serials information, ulrichsweb.com is now showcasing Open Access (OA) journals — free electronic full-text academic and scholarly journals from SPARC, PLoS, Biomed Central, the Directory of Open Access Journals, and other providers. You can now search for and directly access the home pages and full-text of hundreds of these exciting new research resources when you access Ulrich’s via UI Libraries web page (http://www.lib.uiowa.edu/hardin/databases.html#u). An "Open Access" search limiter on the Advanced Search screen lets users pinpoint Open Access titles. In addition, a new "Free" price limit lets users identify all of the free publications in Ulrich’s — whether print or electronic — including journals, magazines, newspapers, newsletters and other serials.

Peter Suber, editor of the SPARC Open Access Newsletter, summarized the report’s main conclusions relevant to the open access movement in issue #73. The complete summary is available at: < http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/newsletter/05-03-04.htm >. Selected relevant excerpts from Peter Suber’s summary are included below, with permission.)

[According to the Credit Suisse report,] there are "three pillars" of STM publisher profits:  copyright, peer review, and bundling.  STM publishers won’t be in trouble until one or more of them starts to fall.  The first two are secure but the third is teetering. Taxpayers and governments pay for scientific journal research three times over:  (1) through research grants to scientists, (2) through university subsidies that pay the salaries of researchers, editors, and referees, and (3) through university subsidies that pay for journal subscriptions.  This is not sustainable.  Eventually taxpayers and governments will wake up to what is happening and put an end to it.  But governments outside the U.K. are doing nothing to shift to a more sustainable model, and the U.K. government will probably do nothing before 2005.

Elsevier has higher profit margins on low-quality, low-submission journals than on high-quality, high-submission journals.  The lower rejection rates of the former bring down the cost per published paper without forcing a reduction in the price.  This is a reason for Elsevier to encourage bundling i.e. to reduce the freedom of librarians to cancel low-quality journals.  It’s also a reason why recent cancellations of the Big Deal will cut into Elsevier profit margins.

As profit margins decline, Elsevier will not have room to compensate by raising prices.  Its prices are already so high relative to its rivals that further increases will trigger more cancellations and increase interest in open access.

Open Access (OA) journals have lower costs per article than toll-access journals, but this savings is more than offset by the revenue per article generated by toll-access journals.

Open Access will not "undermine" or "destroy" the STM publishers, but it will reduce their profit margins and future growth.  OA threatens lower-impact toll-access journals more than higher-impact toll-access journals, but this is the bulk of the toll-access journal market.

Three other factors that will slow the adoption of OA:  (1) those who benefit financially from OA cannot easily act in unison and gain little by acting alone, (2) most authors transfer copyright to journals, and (3) a large number of journals still use the Ingelfinger rule, the in-house rule prohibiting "prior publication" of submissions. 
[From the SPARC Open Access Newsletter, issue #73]

An extract form the first of three editorials in PLoS Biology which address widespread misunderstandings about open access:

“Here we address…the perception that the publication-charge model puts an unfair burden on authors. Subsequently, we will address concerns about the long-term economic viability of the open-access model, the integrity and quality of work published in open-access journals, and the effect that open access will have on schol arl y societies….Perhaps the real misconception about the unfair burden that open access places on authors resides in the terminology –the term ‘author charge’ is itself misleading. Publication fees are not borne purely by authors, but are shared by the many organizations whose missions depend on the broadest possible dissemination and communication of scientific discoveries.
http://www.plosbiology.org/plosonline/?request=get-document&doi=10.1371%2Fjournal.pbio.0020105

An extract from the second of the three editorials titled "Open Access and Scientific Societies":

"Setting aside for the moment the question of how feasible it is for societies to alter their journals’ access policies, there is by now a broad consensus that widespread open access to scientific publications is good for scientists and good for science. Society members want to maximize the impact of their work—and articles that are freely available online are cited more frequently than those that are not.

Scientific societies perform an array of tremendously valuable functions for their constituents and disciplines. Researchers, educators, and others join societies for the many benefits of membership beyond simply discounted or “free” subscriptions to journals, so the concern that open-access publications would be the death knell of voluntary academic associations is misguided."
http://www.plosbiology.org/plosonline/?request=get-document&doi=10.1371%2Fjournal.pbio.0020156