By Annie Chen and Michael Allegrezza
When scientific publishing was developed in the 19th
century, it was designed to overcome barriers that prevented scientists from disseminating
their research findings efficiently. It was not feasible for scientists to
arrange for typesetting, peer review, printing, and shipping of their results
to every researcher in their field. As payment for these services offered by
publishers, the researchers would transfer the exclusive copyrights for this
material to the publisher, who would then charge subscribers access fees. To
limit the printing costs associated with this system, journals only published articles
with the most significant findings. Now, nearly 200 years later, we have
computers, word processors, and the Internet. Information sharing has become
easier than ever before, and it is nearly instantaneous. But the prevailing model
of subscription-based publishing remains tethered to its pre-digital origins,
and for the most part these publishers have used the Internet within this
model, rather than as a tool to create a new and better system for sharing
research.
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| Figure 1. Trend lines show an annual increase of 6.7% for serials expenditures vs 2.9% for the Consumer Price Index over the period 1986-2010, relative to 1986 prices. |
In theory, digitization should have
decreased costs of communicating science: (authors can perform many of the
typesetting functions, articles can be uploaded online instead of printed and
shipped, etc. In practice, however, digitization has actually increased the price of journals. Statistics
from the Association of Research Libraries show that the amount spent on
serials increased 6.7% per year between 1986 and 2011, while inflation as measured
by the US Consumer Prices Index only rose 2.9% per year over the same period (Figure 1).1 Shawn Martin, a Penn
Scholarly Communication Librarian, explained, “Penn pays at least twice for one
article, but can pay up to 7 or more times for the same content,” in the
process of hiring researchers to create the content, buying subscriptions from
journals, and paying for reuse rights. To
be fair, the transition phase from print to digital media has been costly for
publishers because they have had to invest in infrastructure for digital
availability while still producing print journals. Many publishers argue that
while journal prices may have increased, the price per reader has actually
decreased due to a surge in the ease of viewers accessing articles online.
Regardless of whether increasing
journal prices was justified, a new model for academic publishing emerged in
the 1990s in opposition: open access (OA). There are two ways of attaining open
access: Gold OA, when the publisher makes the article freely accessible, and
Green OA, which is self-archiving by the author. A few years ago, Laakso et al. conducted a quantitative analysis
of the annual publication volumes of Direct OA journals from 1993 to 2009 and
found that the development of open access could be described by three phases:
Pioneering (1993-1999), Innovation (2000-2004), and Consolidation (2005-2009).2
During the pioneering years, there was high year-to-year growth of open access
articles and journals, but the total numbers were still relatively small. OA
publishing bloomed considerably from 2000 to 2009, growing from 19,500 articles
and 740 journals to 191,850 articles and 4,769 journals, respectively. During
the innovation years, new business models emerged. For example, BioMedCentral,
later purchased by Springer in 2008, initiated the author charge. In 2004, some
subscription-based journals began using a hybrid model, such as Springer’s Open
Choice program, which gave authors the option of paying a fee to make their
article openly available. During the consolidation phase, year-to-year growth
for articles decreased from previous years but was still high, at about 20%.
The introduction of open access
journals has sparked fierce and passionate debates among scientists. Proponents
of open access believe scientific research should be available to everyone from
anywhere in the world. Currently, subscription fees prevent many people from
accessing the information they need. With open access, students and professors
in low- and middle-income countries, health care professionals in
resource-limited settings, and the general public would gain access to
essential resources. For instance, Elizabeth
Lowenthal, MD, at the Penn Center for AIDS Research, recently published a paper
in PLoS One analyzing variables that influence adherence to retroviral drugs in
HIV+ adolescents living in Botswana. Her decision to publish open access was
because “the article will be of most direct use to clinicians working in
Botswana and I wanted to make sure that it would be easy for them to access
it.” Open access also provides re-use rights and may facilitate a
more rapid exchange of ideas and increased interactions among scientists to
generate new scientific information.
However, there may also be some downsides
to increased access. Open access may increase the number of articles that
people have to sift through to find important studies.3 Furthermore,
people who do not know how to critically read scientific papers may be misled
by articles with falsified data or flawed experiments. While these papers often
get retracted later on, they may undermine the public’s confidence in
scientists and medicine. Wakefield’s (retracted) article linking vaccines to
autism, for example, may have contributed to the rise of the anti-vaccine
movement in the US.4 Furthermore, many open access journals require
authors to pay for their papers to be published to offset the cost of
publication, and some people have taken advantage of this new payment system to
make a profit through predatory journals (a list of predatory OA journals can
be found here: http://scholarlyoa.com/publishers/).
It is clear though, that the expansion
of open access from 1993 until present time suggests that open access can be a
sustainable alternative to the traditional model of subscription-based academic
publishing.
In addition to facilitating access to
scientific articles, the Internet has also created opportunities to improve the
peer review process. Peer review was designed to evaluate the technical merit
of a paper and to select papers that make significant contributions to a field.
Scientists supporting the traditional
model of publishing argue that the peer review process in some open access
journals may not be as rigorous, and this may lead to the emergence of a “Wild
West” in academic publishing. Last year, reporter John Bohannon from Science magazine sent a flawed paper to
304 open access journals, and of the 255 journals that responded, 157 accepted
the paper, suggesting little or no peer review process in these journals.5
However,
even high-impact journals publish papers with flawed experiments.6
Michael Eisen, co-founder of PLoS, wrote, “While
they pocket our billions, with elegant sleight of hand, they get us to
ignore the fact that crappy papers routinely get into high-profile journals
simply because they deal with sexy topics…. Every time they publish because it
is sexy, and not because it is right, science is distorted. It distorts
research. It distorts funding. And it often distorts public policy.”7 Nature, for example, published two
articles last year about acid-bath stem cell induction, which were later retracted
due to data manipulation. However, according to Randy Sheckman, editor-in-chief
of eLife, “these papers will generate
thousands of citations for Nature, so
they will profit from those papers even if they are retracted.”8
With
digital communication, peer review for a manuscript could
shift from a rigid gate controlled by 3 or 4 people, who might not even be
active scientists, into a more dynamic, transparent, and ongoing process with
feedback from thousands of scientists. Various social media platforms with
these capabilities already exist, including ResearchGate9 and PubMedCommons.10 Some open access
journals are using different strategies to address these issues in peer review.
eLIFE, for example, employs a fast, streamlined peer review process to decrease
the amount of time from submission to publication while maintaining
high-quality science. On the other hand, PLoS One, one of the journals
published by the Public Library of Science, judges articles based on technical
merit alone, not on the novelty.
We
polled a few scientists at Penn who had recently published for their thoughts
on open access and peer review. Most people did not experience a difference in
the peer review process at an open access journal compared to non-open access.
The exception was at eLIFE, where reviewers’ comments were prompt, and the
communication between reviewers and editors is “a step in the right direction,”
according to Amita Sehgal, PhD. To improve the peer review process, some
suggested a blind process to help eliminate potential bias towards well-known
labs or against lesser-known labs.
The
digital revolution is changing the culture of academic publishing, albeit slowly.
In 2009, the NIH updated their Public Access Policy to require that any published
research conducted with NIH grants be available on PubMed Central 12 months
after publication.11 Just
last month, the publisher Macmillan announced that all research papers in Nature and its sister journals will be
made free to access online in a read-only format that can be annotated but not
copied, printed or downloaded. However, only journal subscribers and some media
outlets will be able to share links to the free full-text, read-only versions.12 Critics such as Michael Eisen13 and John Wilbanks14
have labeled this change merely a public relations ploy to appeal to demands without
actually increasing access. It will be interesting to see if other publishers
follow this trend.
Scientific
communication has yet to reap the full benefits in efficiency made possible by
the Internet. The current system is still less than ideal at furthering ideas and
research with minimal waste of resources. But this generation of young
researchers is more optimistic and may revolutionize scientific publishing as
we know it. “I think [open access is] the future for all scientific
publications,” says Bo Li, a postdoc at Penn. “I hope all research articles
will be freely accessible to everyone in the world.”
A companion opinion article by Penn PhD student Brian S. Cole can be found here.
This article appeared in the Penn Science Policy January 2015 newsletter.
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| Annie Chen |
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| Michael Allegrezza |
1Ware M, Mabe M.
(2012) The stm report. http://www.stm-assoc.org/2012_12_11_STM_Report_2012.pdf
2Laakso M, Welling P,
Bukvova, H, et al. (2011) The
development of open access journal publishing from 1993 to 2009. PLoS ONE.
3Hannay, T. (2014)
Stop the deluge of scientific research. The
Guardian: Higher Education Network Blog.
http://www.theguardian.com/higher-education-network/blog/2014/aug/05/why-we-should-publish-less-scientific-research.
4Wakefield
AJ, Murch SH, Anthony A, Linnell, et al.
(1998) Ileal lymphoid nodular hyperplasia, non-specific colitis, and pervasive
developmental disorder in children [retracted]. Lancet. 351:637-41.
5Bohannon, J. (2013)
Who’s afraid of peer review? Science.
342(6154): 60-65. DOI: 10.1126/science.342.6154.60
6Wolfe-Simon F,
Switzer Blum J, Kulp TR, et al.
(2011) A bacterium that can grow by
using arsenic instead of phosphorus. Science.
332(6034) 1163-6. doi: 10.1126/science.1197258.
7Eisen M. (2013) I
confess, I wrote the Arsenic DNA paper to expose flaws in peer-review at
subscription based journals. it is NOT
junk. http://www.michaeleisen.org/blog/?p=1439.
8(2014) Episode 12. The eLIFE podcast. http://elifesciences.org/podcast/episode12
9ResearchGate.
http://www.researchgate.net/
10PubMed Commons. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmedcommons/
11NIH Public Access
Policy Details. http://publicaccess.nih.gov/policy.htm
12Baynes G, Hulme L,
MacDonald S. (2014) Articles on nature.com to be made widely available to read
and share to support collaborative research. Nature. http://www.nature.com/press_releases/share-nature-content.html
13Eisen M. (2014) Is
Nature’s “free to view” a magnanimous gesture or a cynical ploy?. it is NOT junk. http://www.michaeleisen.org/blog/?p=1668
14Van Noorden R. (2014)
Nature promotes read-only sharing by subscribers. Nature. http://www.nature.com/news/nature-promotes-read-only-sharing-by-subscribers-1.16460