Hardin Scholarly Communication News

“Harold Varmus won a Nobel Prize for changing how we think about cancer. Then he overhauled the NIH. Now he’s battling to make all scientific research free and universally available.”

Jamie Shreeve, Free Radical, Wired, June 2006. A profile of Harold Varmus, Nobel laureate, director of the NIH, and co-founder of the Public Library of Science.

Excerpt:
For centuries, journals have been the means both of disseminating scientific knowledge and building scientific careers. Accordingly, the journals atop the hierarchy draw the highest-quality submissions, which reinforces their lofty reputations, which in turn enhances the status of the scientists who publish there. This positive feedback loop puts the power in the hands of the journals, even though their existence depends entirely on the scientists who write, edit, and serve as reviewers, usually without compensation. Meanwhile, their colleagues can gain access only through subscriptions that their institutions pay for, sometimes dearly. (A yearly subscription to Brain Research, for instance, costs more than $20,000.) Worse, most of the public – scientists in developing countries, faculty and students in underfunded colleges, high schoolers, patients – have no access at all, even though taxes fund the government grants that support much of the research. Varmus asks: Shouldn’t this ancient system have changed with the Internet, which allows information to be disseminated cheaply and immediately searched, mined, archived, reviewed, and improved?…

“Our mission [at PLoS] is to transform how science publishing is done,” Varmus says. “We aren’t trying to torpedo the industry. But we are definitely going to change it.”…

Varmus is gratified that PLoS has established itself so quickly, but he’s frustrated at how slowly the scientific community is embracing his ideals. On the positive side, more scientists are sharing their work through listservs, preprint archives, and other informal networks that can be easily accessed through new searching and sorting tools like Google Scholar. On the other hand, the scientists at elite universities who can put the most pressure on the journals to change their policies have the least immediate incentive to do so, since they already have access to most of what they require through the subscriptions paid by their institutional libraries. Varmus also acknowledges that it’s easier for a scientist at his exalted level to call for career sacrifices, and things like boycotts, than it is for those still in the trenches to respond.

Behind Varmus’ office desk is a blowup of a photo taken 30 years ago of him paddling a raft down Wind River Country in Wyoming. He wears a fishing vest, his beard is bushy and wild, and he looks ecstatically happy. The picture was shot after his Nobel-worthy work with Michael Bishop appeared in Nature. “I’d like to think that if I could do it over again, I would publish it in an open-access journal,” he says - adding, however, that he knows the thrill of appearing in the most prestigious journal. “The change will come when scientists understand that they are in control. The publishers need us more than we need them.”

Open Access News, 6/1/06

The Impact Factor Game: It is time to find a better way to assess the scientific literature, PLoS Medicine, June 6, 2006. An editorial. Excerpt:

We would be lying if we said that our journal’s impending first impact factor is not of interest to us….However, for a number that is so widely used and abused, it is surprising how few people understand how a journal’s impact factor is calculated, and, more importantly, just how limited it is a means of assessing the true impact of an individual publication in that journal….Because a journal’s impact factor is derived from citations to all articles in a journal, this number cannot tell us anything about the quality of any specific research article in that journal, nor of the quality of the work of any specific author….Moreover, a journal’s impact factor says nothing at all about how well read and discussed the journal is outside the core scientific community or whether it influences health policy. For a journal such as PLoS Medicine, which strives to make our open-access content reach the widest possible audience –such as patients, health policy makers, non-governmental organizations, and school teachers– impact factor is a poor measure of overall impact….

After one in-person meeting, a telephone conversation, and a flurry of e-mail exchanges, we came to realize that Thomson Scientific has no explicit process for deciding which articles other than original research articles it deems as citable. We conclude that science is currently rated by a process that is itself unscientific, subjective, and secretive.

Even more importantly, it is time to reconsider the whole process of accurately assessing an individual paper’s worth not only to scientists, but also to the wider community of readers. First, although any measure of impact will remain flawed in some way, when assessing the impact of individual articles or of the papers of individuals or groups of scientists, it surely makes more sense to measure the citations specifically to those individual articles (or to papers by individuals or groups of scientists) rather than using a journal’s impact factor as a proxy measure. However, it is not clear whether Thomson Scientific could measure such individual article citations accurately. Second, we urge the company to take its responsibility seriously and increase transparency and accountability. Third, we suggest that the company’s staff engage in the ongoing debate among other shareholders of scientific publishing and recognize that, there are –finally– other ways of measuring impact and visibility of scholarly articles….

The opening up of the literature means that better ways of assessing papers and journals are coming—and we should embrace them.

Open Access News, 6/13/06

The June/July issue of Research Information has a special section on OA, Consensus is difficult in open-access debate, consisting of short interviews by RI’s Siân Harris with eight European leaders of the OA movement and one leading skeptic:

‘Open access is much wider than just readers not paying’
Martin Richardson, Oxford Journals

‘Academics have access anyway’
Michael Mabe, formerly of Elsevier

‘Text mining of subject archives will enable new facts to be discovered’
Robert Terry, The Wellcome Trust

‘Self-archiving should be mandatory’
Steven Harnad, University of Quebec in Montreal and University of Southampton
Update: Stevan Harnad has posted a corrected version of his interview.

‘The environmental community will embrace open-access’
Tim Smith, Institute of Physics Publishing

‘Many areas of research are funded by taxpayers but they do not see the results’
Matthew Cockerill, BioMed Central

‘The first priority should be awareness-raising’
Alma Swan, Key Perspectives

‘Our community is used to immediate release of preprints’
Jens Vigen, CERN

‘Get research authors to change their behaviour’
Leslie Carr, University of Southampton
Open Access News, 6/6/06

Starting this month, Elsevier is making six of its physics journals into hybrid OA journals, and will do the same for 30 more, in different fields, in the next two months. The announcement came from Carl Schwarz, Elsevier’s publishing editor for physics and astronomy, in a message to PAMnet this morning.

Excerpt:
From May onwards some Elsevier journals will be offering to their authors the option to pay a sponsorship fee to ensure that their article, already accepted for publication, is made freely available to non-subscribers via ScienceDirect.
Worldwide approximately 10 million researchers can already access these journals through institutional subscriptions. In a few instances, authors publishing in these journals have requested an option to make their articles freely available online to non-subscribers.

Six journals in Physics are the first to offer such an option. These are:

Nuclear Physics A
Nuclear Physics B
Nuclear Physics B Proceedings Supplements
Nuclear Instruments and Methods A
Physics Letters B
Astroparticle Physics

Thirty more journals across other fields such as Life and Health
sciences also plan to offer this option in the next two months.

The author charge for article sponsorship is $3,000. The fee excludes taxes and other potential author fees such as color charges which are additional. Information about selecting this option is now available on the journal homepages at www.elsevier.com as well as Elsevier’s author gateway site, authors.elsevier.com. The availability of this option will be offered to authors of the above-mentioned journals only after receiving notification that their article has been accepted for publication. This prevents a potential conflict of interest where a journal would have a financial incentive to accept an article.

Open Access News, 5/24/06

Facing Our Risk of Cancer Empowered (FORCE) has joined the Alliance for Taxpayer Access (ATA).

ATA is a diverse and growing alliance of organizations representing taxpayers, patients, physicians, researchers, and institutions that support open public access to taxpayer-funded research.

Declan Butler, Open-access journal hits rocky times, Nature; Published online: 20 June 2006

Excerpt:

The Public Library of Science (PLoS), the flagship publisher for the open-access publishing movement, faces a looming financial crisis. An analysis of the company’s accounts, obtained by Nature, shows that the company falls far short of its stated goal of quickly breaking even. In an attempt to redress its finances, PLoS will next month hike the charge for publishing in its journals from US$1,500 per article to as much as $2,500.

…The figures show that PLoS lost almost $1 million last year. Moreover, its total income from fees and advertising currently covers just 35% of its total costs. And although this income is increasing - from $0.75 million in 2003-04 to $0.9 million in 2004-05 - it lags far behind spending, which has soared from $1.5 million to around $5.5 million over the past three years.

To stay afloat, the firm continues to rely on the philanthropic grants that launched the project: $9 million from the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation and $4 million from the Sandler Family Supporting Foundation, both based in San Francisco (see table image). These covered 65% of the company’s operating costs last year, but are running out: at the end of last September, PLoS had assets of $3,393,265.

Read more at: http://www.nature.com/news/2006/060619/full/441914a.html

To follow comments on Declan Butler’s June 20 story in Nature on PLoS’ finances, there are two places to look: the Nature Newsblog and Declan’s own blog. There are now comments in both places.

Here’s an excerpt from Jan Velterop’s comment on Declan’s blog. Jan is the Open Access Director at Springer and the former publisher of BioMed Central.

The fact that the PLoS is not breaking even at this stage is not surprising. There seems to be a consensus in the publishing world that new journals - at least in the traditional subscription model - take about seven years to reach break-even. I personally think it’s more like 10 years; if ever. And here we are talking not just of new journals, but of new journals published in a new publishing model. The PLoS has done remarkably well, given all that.

But even if the top two PLoS journals don’t reach break-even, that’s not the end of the story. There is a well-known phenomenon in business that’s know as ‘loss-leaders’. It is quite conceivable that these two PLoS journals fulfil that role, pushing the PLoS brand reputation to great heights, and then enabling the organisation to capitalise on that brand with smaller, subordinate journals (’specialist’ or ‘community’ titles), which do make the surplus needed to sustain not only themselves but also the flagship loss-leaders.

Open Access News, 6/22/06

Nick Anthis, A Natural Conflict of Interest as Nature Criticizes PLoS, The Scientific Activist, June 22, 2006. Excerpt:

It’s not surprising that the article’s tone is so harsh (and that its bias is readily apparent), since Nature and the other commercial publishers have resisted the open access movement, something that threatens to undermine their profit making ability. Although PLoS is still trying to get up off the ground and reach the break-even mark, it has only been publishing for less than three years, and it has largely been a success, with its flagship journal PLoS Biology already earning the impressive impact factor of 14.7.

Still, it’s worrying to see such a large gap between PLoS’s earnings and expenses, and it’s important that PLoS takes decisive action to address this situation, since all of academia’s eyes are watching every up and down of the tangible symbol of the open access movement.

PLoS began with incredibly ambitious goals. Although the idea of forming a successful open access publishing organization would have surely been intimidating enough, PLoS went a step further by trying to compete directly with the top scientific journals in various fields. So far the results have been positive, but there’s a long way to go to prove the staying power of open access.

PLoS has quite a bit working against it, and, unfortunately for PLoS, there’s little room for failure, as Nature’s response shows.

Open Access News, 6/23/06

David Secko, Author fee spikes at PLoS, TheScientist, June 19, 2006. Excerpt:

Open access publisher Public Library of Science (PLoS) is raising its publication fee for the first time since its inception in 2003, hiking rates by up to two-thirds the original cost. Advocates of the open access model say the increase reflects how much it costs to publish an article, and does not suggest that the publisher or the model are failing. Starting July 1, the fees, which are paid by authors to offset production costs, will increase from $1,500 for PLoS’s flagship journals (PLoS Biology and PLoS Medicine) to $2,500, and to $2,000 for its other journals.

“The reason we’re increasing the fees is so that they more closely reflect the cost of running the journals,” said Mark Patterson, director of publishing at PLoS. “We have to move slowly but surely towards a financially sustainable organization and this is part of putting us on that path,” Patterson told The Scientist. He said the journal wasn’t in financial trouble, and instead had grown to a point that it thought the scientific community was ready to absorb more costs….

Matthew Cockerill, publisher at BioMedCentral, another open access publisher and sister company to The Scientist, said article publication charges are converging to approximately $2000-3000 USD for open access journals. BMC currently charges between $605 and $1750 per article, and has been “transitioning to this fee,” he told The Scientist, “which we feel is a good representation of our costs.”

“It takes time for any system to find its equilibrium,” said Cockerill, “so things like PLoS and BMC adjusting its publication charges is all part of the settling down process.” He added that bigger commercial publications such as Springer charge $3000, “but if they do find that some publishers can break even charging $1,500 or $2,000, they will find it difficult to charge what they do.”

In addition, Patterson admitted that the increased fees at PLoS may be a barrier to some authors. “Some scientists will not have access to the funds needed to pay the new publications fees,” said Patterson, “and we don’t want this to block someone with a great piece of work.” PLoS is therefore still retaining its fee waiver policy, he said, where authors can request not to pay the publication charge….

Open Access News, 6/20/06

Press Release, May 26, 2006

Washington, DC — BioOne is pleased to announce that it has partnered with Portico to preserve the electronic editions of participating journal content and to further ensure long-term access to digital material. Portico is a non-profit service dedicated to the long-term preservation of peer-reviewed electronic journals. A collaborative partnership with the library community, BioOne appreciates and is strongly committed to long-term preservation initiatives. The participation in Portico is a key new development in BioOne’s evolving archiving strategy.

Building on the partnership established in 2004 with JSTOR, this agreement enhances BioOne’s long-term commitment to ensure preservation of digital content. The BioOne titles not participating in JSTOR’s Biological Sciences Collection will be archived with Portico, and JSTOR will preserve the e-version of titles in its collections using the Portico archiving infrastructure that it helped develop and continues to support. Access to archived content in JSTOR will be in accordance with the moving wall, while access to archived content in Portico will be made available under the terms of the standard, pre-defined trigger events.

As part of the agreement with Portico, BioOne will make an annual financial contribution to support the Archive’s ongoing operations and has designated Portico as an official delivery platform for post-cancellation access claims. BioOne will make this contribution on behalf of, and at not cost to, participating publishers.

Portico was launched in 2005 with support from JSTOR, Ithaka, The Library of Congress, and The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. It developed out of the Electronic-Archiving Initiative launched by JSTOR in 2002, with a grant from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and building upon the Foundation’s seminal E-Journal Archiving Program. The mission of Portico is to preserve scholarly literature published in electronic form and to ensure that these materials remain accessible to future scholars, researchers, and students. With the inclusion of BioOne’s journal publications, nearly 3,500 titles have now been entrusted to the Portico archive. For more information on Portico, please visit http://www.portico.org.

BioOne was founded as a unique partnership among librarians, publishers and scholars to provide an outlet for independent non-profit publishers to publish biological science journal content online in a cost-effective and sustainable manner. Celebrating its fifth anniversary in 2006, BioOne now provides access to 84 publications, most peer-reviewed journals, published by 69 organizations and is available to more than 1,400 institutions worldwide. For more information regarding BioOne, please visit http://www.BioOne.org or contact Todd Carpenter, Director of Business Development at BioOne, at todd@arl.org.

PLoS has issued a press release on PLoS ONE (June 7, 2006). Excerpt:

The Internet-fueled reinvention of the scientific journal took an important step forward with the announcement of PLoS ONE, a pioneering system for the publication and creative use of scientific and medical knowledge. PLoS ONE is the latest innovation from the Public Library of Science, a non-profit organization making the world’s research literature a freely available public resource. PLoS ONE will return control over scholarly publishing to the research community by bringing together research from all areas of biology and medicine, offering authors an efficient and highly effective means to communicate their results and ideas, and providing the community with powerful new tools for navigating and adding value to the published research literature. “Scientists are eager to apply the awesome power of the Internet revolution to scientific communication, but have been stymied by the conservative nature of scientific publishing,” said Michael B. Eisen, co-founder of PLoS and an assistant professor at the University of California, Berkeley. “PLoS ONE redefines what a scientific journal should be – eliminating needless barriers between authors and their audience and transforming the published literature from a static series of articles into a dynamic, interconnected, and constantly evolving resource for scientists and the public.” …

PLoS ONE will launch later this year and will be accepting submissions from the beginning of August.