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May/June 2006: Issue 130
Scholarly Publishing Update
Letter From the Library Director
In previous articles, I have discussed scholarly publishing issues, including the open access (OA) publishing movement which is attempting to make scholarly information more rapidly available on the Internet without access fees. Two of the reasons why this movement has gained in popularity are the rapidly rising costs of providing access to journal articles and the increasing potential of the Internet and the World Wide Web to provide access to information more efficiently and effectively.
There have been several developments recently related to scholarly publishing. These developments fall into several broad categories, including proposed legislation and policy mandates, changes in options offered by publishers, and studies of open access publishing.
NIH Policy, the Cures Act and FRPAA
In April of 2005, the National Institutes of Health released a public access policy (http://publicaccess.nih.gov/overview.htm) recommending that NIH-funded researchers and employees of NIH deposit their journal articles in the National Library of Medicine’s PubMed Central (PMC) database within a year of publication in a journal. Statistics show that compliance with this recommendation has been very low (about 3-4%) during the past year. The NIH Public Access Working Group, which has representatives of scientists, publishers, librarians and consumers, recently recommended that the policy be revised to require that NIH employees and grantees deposit their articles in PMC within six months of publication. Dr. Elias Zerhouni, the Director of NIH, is currently considering the recommendations of the committee.
Last December, Senator Joe Lieberman proposed a bill called the American Center for Cures Act. While the bill includes many different initiatives, one section calls for a requirement that NIH-funded researchers deposit copies of their journal articles in PubMed Central within six months of acceptance for publication in a journal. Very little action appears to have been taken on this proposal. However, Senators Lieberman and Cornyn proposed another bill last month entitled the Federal Research Public Access Act (FRPAA – www.arl.org/sparc/resources/frpaa.html).
FRPAA calls for all federal agencies with more than $100,000,000 annually in extramural funding to require that their employees and grantees deposit all of their journal articles in PMC within six months of publication. Needless to say, lobbying is being done both for and against this proposed legislation. Some for-profit publishers are concerned about protecting their profit margins, and some societies which support their association activities with profits from their journals are concerned about how a potential loss of journal subscription revenues might affect these activities. Consumer advocacy groups contend that information resulting from research funded in whole or in part with tax money should be made freely available, and some library groups support the open access movement and proposed legislation because they think it will make the process of scholarly communication more efficient and effective. A recent Harris poll showed that 82% of Americans polled wanted open access for publicly-funded research (www.taxpayeraccess.org/media/Release06-0531.html).
On June 13th, the US House Appropriations Committee finalized its FY 2007 appropriations bill for the Department of Health and Human Services, which included a provision that would require authors funded by NIH to deposit their articles in PubMed Central within twelve months of publication. This bill will be considered by the full House of Representatives soon.
Publisher Developments
Several of the major scientific, technical and medical (STM) publishers, such as Elsevier, Springer, Blackwell and Oxford, have begun offering open access options for publishing journal articles. When a journal article is accepted for publication, the publisher will give the author a choice of having the article published online immediately and made freely available, or of publishing the article in the traditional way, with the article only available to those who pay a subscription or pay-per-view fee. Publication fees vary widely, with some as low as $600 and as high as $3,000, as publishers experiment with different pricing models. Authors are responsible for paying the fees, but many major funders of scientific research allow publication fees to be paid from grant funds. While some people have expressed concern about the cost of the fees, a recent study showed that some open access journals do not charge publication fees and that many traditional journals have been charging significant page and color charges for many years.
For the past three years, BioMed Central (BMC – www.biomedcentral.com), a for-profit open access publisher, offered institutional memberships which included publication fee waivers to all employees of the subscribing institutions. The UAMS Library paid for the institutional membership for UAMS. However, BMC changed its pricing structure this year and discontinued the publication fee waiver. Therefore, UAMS authors having articles accepted by one of the 150+ BMC journals will be responsible for paying the publication fees, which vary by journal title.
Public Library of Science (PLoS – www.plos.org) now publishes seven open access journals. PLoS is a non-profit organization of physicians and scientists supporting free access to the world’s medical and scientific literature. PLoS Biology, the first journal published by PLoS, has the highest impact factor of any biology journals tracked for impact factors by the Institute for Scientific Information.
Studies of OA Publishing
A recent study (http://biology.plosjournals.org/perlserv?request=get- document&doi=10.1371/journal.pbio.0040157) by Gunther Eysenbach, a researcher at the University of Toronto, concluded that open access articles in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences “are more immediately recognized and cited by peers” than the non-OA articles in the same journal issues. A study (http://www.alpsp.org/publications/pub11.htm) which was published last October and sponsored by the Association of Learned and Professional Society Publishers, AAAS and HighWire Press, stated that there was not enough evidence to conclude that the peer review processes used by traditional publishers were better than those used by open access publishers.