‘The saddest aspect of life right now is that science gathers knowledge faster than society gathers wisdom,’ wrote Isaac Asimov in 1988.
Today we see a growing contrast between the speed at which research and science are being carried out and our capacity to openly share and explore this knowledge. In the last two years, the tension that has developed around this question of access has led to some big shifts in public policy in the United States, Europe, Australia and elsewhere.
No one denies the right of publishers to derive revenue from the sale of content which has had value added. However, in most scientific journal literature the main intellectual input comes from researchers, who act as both authors and peer reviewers.
Let me give you a hypothetical: what’s wrong with this picture?
Mary is a talented student who has sailed through an undergraduate degree and just finished a doctorate. She was the first person in her family to go to university and has come home overjoyed to tell her single mother that she has had her first article accepted for publication.
‘Mary, that’s marvellous,’ her mother says, and pauses before asking, ‘How much will you get for that?’ She asks the question in all innocence, then listens, puzzled and patient, while Mary explains that there is no payment for the article, but rather the honour and recognition of having been published.
What Mary’s mother doesn’t know is that the journal in which the paper will appear is indeed a for-profit operation and is sold only to the institutions which can afford the steep cover price.
Mary is a typical researcher. She produces her work because she has a commitment to her research, wants to be recognised and to have a career based on that recognition. Her work can be described as giveaway research literature, and the idea that such output should be freely and openly available has been around, at least in some disciplines, for over 20 years.
No one denies the right of publishers to derive revenue from the sale of content which has had value added. However, in most scientific journal literature the main intellectual input comes from researchers, who act as both authors and peer reviewers. The publisher does little more than repackage their work. In the days before the internet that was a necessary service and cost, but times are strikingly different now. The business model for the provision of access to research findings is being disrupted by new understandings and new methods.
We all know of spectacular cases where existing models have been disrupted and end up failing. Think of photography.
However, scholarly publishing and its market have had some complicating characteristics, which have been widely acknowledged and discussed. Chief among these is what economists call ‘moral hazard’, in which the main consumers of a service, in this case researchers, are divorced from its real cost.
These costs are, to the lay person, stunningly high. At my own university about two thirds of the $12 million library resource budget, the fund which supports the acquisition of the scholarly literature, is consumed by subscription costs each year.
It’s time for change, high time. We have the motive. We have the means. We have the opportunity.
Let me cite as one small example the experience of my university, the Queensland University of Technology, which 10 years ago became the first university in the world to develop a considered policy on making its peer-reviewed research available in this way. Since then others have introduced similar policies, including MIT, Harvard, University College London and ANU.
When my university set out on this journey, we saw researchers steadily become interested in getting their material out in the open. From the beginning, the university provided authors and research centres information about how their work was travelling once it was made available in this way.
As soon as an author’s work appears in the university’s open access institutional repository, they are provided with information allowing them to understand where their work is being downloaded, which of their papers are the most popular from their output, and so on. Of course, the journals also produce citation statistics, which are often used, controversially, to rank and evaluate research.
What we can say is that there is a definite correlation between the availability of research and the way that it is picked up in the literature of that discipline as measured by the usual bibliometric tools. The greater the visibility of the researcher, the greater the impact on other metrics that matter to them, and that matter to their institution. Some faculties report attracting much wider readerships in rural and developing areas that do not have access to the journals, and even attracting new research students who discover the university’s research on the web.
If we put research into an institutional repository at the same time as that research has been accepted for publication in a traditional journal, this is a model that coexists with subscriptions, known as the green model. It can be thought of as author initiated, or author-with-institution initiated. If it is a publisher initiated form of open access, we call it the gold model.
In the last two years the public policy debate, particularly in United Kingdom, has focused on whether the gold or the green model should be favoured by funding agencies, the government and disciplines themselves. In the last 10 years what was once small-scale innovation and experimentation has moved to centre stage in terms of policy, debate, and complex and often confusing responses from powerful and influential publishers.
In 2014, despite the increased level of public policy attention, much remains to be done to achieve the goal of true accessibility for the world’s research.
One of the most telling critiques here is the one which, with some justification, points at the leadership of our universities and faculties in the research world, and asks: ‘Where are you leading us?’
According to German life scientist Bjoern Brehms, science has an infrastructure crisis. Young scientists need three things: support in new ways of publishing and disseminating, more structured and responsible approaches to the management of the data, and more responsible management of academic and scientific software.
They need this support above all from their institutions, but it is at best patchy.
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The public debate is confused. Peer-reviewed research literature remains pinned down. We can not only see the advantage of optimal accessibility, but also the imperative that it be available in such a way as to allow re-use and new discoveries from existing output. We need to achieve the goal of maximum access and optimal re-use. We need to do as well as see.
The great physicist Niels Bohr wrote at a dramatic time in world history that ‘the best weapon of a dictatorship is secrecy, but the best weapon of a democracy should be the weapon of openness’.
In our century, huge challenges just may be met by extraordinary science, and the best weapon of that extraordinary science will be openness.
Ockham’s Razor is a soap box for all things scientific, with short talks about research, industry and policy from people with something thoughtful to say about science.