Freedom of the Owner of the Press

[bemildred]

About a new model for scientific publishing ...

One indication that you've stirred up a hornet's nest is that your opponents start sending impassioned letters to Congress, hinting that you're an insidious threat to the public welfare.

Over the last year or so, policymakers and legislators have been peppered with mailings instigated by the Assn. of American Publishers, warning of a development that "raises the specter of government censorship and encroachment upon scholarly discourse and academic freedom."

The publishers were referring specifically to a proposal by the National Institutes of Health that would have required any NIH-funded research paper to be posted on a public archive within six months of its publication in a subscription-only scientific journal. But their attack was really one front in a war that is challenging the basic economic models of scholarly publishing — and that was launched from (where else?) UC Berkeley.

"We started because we were outraged at the system," Michael Eisen told me last week. A biologist at UC Berkeley and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Eisen is co-founder, with Patrick O. Brown of Stanford University and former NIH director Harold E. Varmus, of the Public Library of Science, which publishes five journals of peer-reviewed scientific papers and has plans for many more.

LA Times

[mike_c]

1. the current model for scholarly publishing REALLY needs revision....

It's a relic of the days when published papers-- printed, bound, and distributed-- were the best way to disseminate the results of new scientific study. The peer review system that is used to insure the publisher against publishing low quality articles works well, but the underlying model, which is essentially a publishing business model, is increasingly archaic. Worse, it increasingly restricts the availability of new information rather than facilitating it, because many of the most important journals are VERY expensive, and their publishers make jealous use of copyright laws to protect their publication rights. This is really in direct conflict with the scientific community's open disclosure paradigm.

As usual, it's a conflict between the business interests of the publishers and the free information standards of the scientific community. In the past, that struggle didn't exist because paper-and-ink publishing was the BEST model for disseminating information, and publisher's customarily provided authors with 100 or so "reprints" of their articles that they could distribute freely to close colleagues. Now however, electronic media are increasingly better ways to disseminate new information (but with the caveat that they are still not necessarily the best way to archive historical literature). For example, few journals provide reprints any longer-- the author simply gets a PDF file of the article to print and distribute personally. Many journals make their contents available online as PDF publications, but often to journal subscribers only-- to protect the publisher's business model at the expense of scholarly freedom. Many journals now have multiple subscription rates, with the lowest cost gaining limited access to online versions only, with printed versions costing substantially more. So publishers are trying to play the game from both ends, while still protecting their business model.

As a scientist, I find this state of affairs immensely frustrating. I and my colleagues write papers, but the information in those papers often becomes controlled by publishers whose interests are better served by restricting their distributions than by facilitating them.