Open-access journals debated

Here's an idea: Instead of paying over $20,000 for a year-long subscription to a scientific journal, get it for free. Sounds great, right?

  

    Open-access publishing has been championed by its chief advocates as a researcher's best friend and a librarian's saving grace. By creating online journals that do not charge subscription fees, open-access publishers say scientists can have unlimited access to information on new developments in their fields. Librarians, for their part, are saved the pressure journal subscriptions put on their crunched budgets.

  

    But there is, of course, a catch.

  

    In order to cover the journals' production costs, open-access publishers are charging authors to put their articles in print--a move some say would drain important grant money from many research projects. In addition, many non-profit scientific societies, which use revenues from their journals to pay for such things as infrastructural costs, travel grants and scholarships, say the open-access publishing model could hinder rather than further scientific progress.

  

    Virginia Gilbert, head of collection development for Perkins Library, said Duke's libraries currently pay less than $100 a year for some subscriptions, but more than $15,000 or $20,000 a year for others.

  

    This year, the Medical Center Library had to cancel 525 of its 1,753 subscriptions due to rising journal prices. The University announced recently that it is cancelling $400,000 worth of titles from scientific publishing giant Reed Elsevier, because Elsevier wanted a no-cancellations contract that could have left the University vulnerable to unbridled price increases.

  

    "The industry needs to rethink its cost structure and find more cost-effective way of delivering services and processing their publications," Thibodeau said. She cited open-access models as possibilities, such as those used by the nonprofit Public Library of Science and for-profit BioMed Central.

  

    Duke administrators said they admire open-access efforts, but are not yet convinced that they are founded on a viable financial model. Both BioMed Central and PLoS operate at a loss on their open-access journals. Thibodeau noted that although BioMed Central expects to break even within a few years, they rely on institutional licenses for support.

  

    PLoS stays afloat because it is backed by a $9 million grant from the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation--a situation that could turn sour when the grant runs out in 2007. PLoS co-founder Harold Varmus, a Nobel laureate, said the venture will survive by utilizing alternative sources of income, such as advertising and sponsorship.

  

    Vice Provost for Research James Siedow was skeptical that this plan would work, however, noting that there are too many scientific journals in proportion to the number of potential advertisers.

  

    Thibodeau noted that PLoS, like BioMed Central, is turning to institutional memberships to help sustain its open-access journals. "For $100,000 per year for an institutional membership, the authors at the university would only have to pay 75 percent of the fee of $1,500 per published article," she said. "A nice offer, but $100,000 is a fairly high fee that the institution must pay."

  

    Even should publishers prove that they can break even with their open-access journals, Siedow said there are other problems associated with this model. For instance, he said, many researchers would not be able to afford the authors' fees that back the current open-access publishing model.

  

     While PLoS charges $1,500 to publish an article, The Chronicle of Higher Education reported that other publishers' estimates were much higher--anywhere from $3,000 to $10,000. Siedow, a member of the American Society of Plant Biologists, said his society would probably have to charge around $3,500 per article, assuming the journal's current situation of net income, which supports the society's other endeavors.

  

    Although Varmus claimed that scientific societies could fund themselves through other avenues, Siedow said this assertion was either naive or thoughtless. "He's well-intentioned but maybe a little impractical," Siedow said.

  

    Given the "more practical" fees of $3,000 to $10,000 per article, many authors would be unable to publish without extra grant money or funding from their respective universities.

  

    "It's unlikely the University would be able to pick up the fees," said Provost Peter Lange, noting Duke's large volume of published research. He said the more feasible option would be for researchers to write the authors' fees into their grant proposals.

  

    Siedow noted, however, that the authors' fees could be written into large grants, such as those from the National Institutes of Health, but not into smaller grants.

  

    "With some grants from the [National Science Foundation], for example, you can't pay $2,000 to publish an article without dramatically reducing the money available for research," Siedow said. "And remember that $2,000 is an artificially low estimate."

  

    Duke administrators said a number of other concerns surround the open-access publishing debate. Lange, for example, said he was concerned that the fee structure could have a discriminatory effect across scholars working at different kinds of institutions, doing different kinds of research. "Unintended consequences can be substantial, so it's a situation we need to analyze carefully," he said.

  

    Lange said there is also the issue of a transition period, which could be problematic if universities are stuck paying both traditional subscription fees and helping out with authors' fees to open-access journals. Open-access agitators claim the transition period will not last long, saying that open-access journals will continue to grow in prestige and popularity, forcing traditional publishers to decrease prices or go out of business.

  

    Others, including Duke administrators, were not so sure that the transition would be painless. "There are too many big publishers to make a quick transition to open-access publishing," Siedow said. According to The Chronicle of Higher Education, there are currently around 700 open-access journals, compared with more than 20,000 traditional journals.

  

    Nancy Gibbs, head of acquisitions for Perkins Library, said there is also the issue of long-term storage for open-access journals, which are published exclusively in electronic format--a format that will not necessarily survive should the publisher be bought out or stop publishing.

  

    Administrators noted that open-access publishing is not the only alternative to traditional publishing. The Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition strives to lower subscription fees by expanding the non-profit sector's share of overall scholarly publishing activity. Other ventures offer delayed open access to their journals.