Open Access - an Update
(March 17th 2008) Since 2002, the OA movement has been gaining momentum every day - a reaction to increasing pressure from scientists, governments and funding agencies. A short review of the last year by Karin Hollricher.
"An old tradition and a new technology have converged to make possible an unprecedented public good. The old tradition is the willingness of scientists and scholars to publish the fruits of their research in scholarly journals without payment, for the sake of inquiry and knowledge. The new technology is the internet." These are the opening words of the Budapest Declaration of 2002, that, in effect, launched open access publishing (OA). Let's review the major advances in OA of the last twelve months (for more details see the excellent summaries by Peter Suber, a prominent OA activist at Earlham College, USA:
www.earlham.edu/~peters/hometoc.htm).
Scientists got a slap in the face from the European Council (EC). European politicians didn't have the heart officially to mandate OA, arguing instead for a "balanced and fair system". It seems that they don't like to sit on the fence, though, as the FP7 grant agreements contain an unofficial OA mandate. The EC requires submission of an author's peer-reviewed postprint, which it has the authority to disseminate in any way it sees fit.
However, in December 2007, the brave European Research Council (ERC) made a crystal-clear statement in support of full OA, requiring that "all peer-reviewed publications from ERC-funded research projects be deposited on publication into an appropriate research repository where available, such as PubMed Central, ArXiv or an institutional repository, and subsequently made open access within 6 months of publication. The ERC considers essential that primary data - which in the life sciences for example could comprise data such as nucleotide/protein sequences, macromolecular atomic coordinates and anonymized epidemiological data - are deposited to the relevant databases as soon as possible, preferably immediately after publication and in any case not later than 6 months after the date of publication." ERC-funded scientists never worry about having to publish their precious data in third class journals since the agency pays OA charges.
More and more learned societies and national funding agencies are embracing OA. In the vanguard is Great Britain: six of seven Research Councils and all ten members of the UK Pub Med Central Funders Group demand OA for papers. Others that adopted mandatory OA last year include the French funding organisation, Agence Nationale de la Recherche, the Flanders Research Foundation, the Swiss National Science Foundation and the Istituto Superiore di Sanità, main funder of medical research in Italy. And there were many more. Despite having made an early move towards OA by linking it with funding policy in 2006, the German Research Foundation (DFG) still only recommends that funded scientists make their results freely available as soon as possible.
What have the publishers been doing? To date, the Online Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) lists 3,194 journals as granting OA. In 2006 they listed 2,500 journals and 500 more last year. That's an increase of 20 percent per year. Peter Suber writes on his blog that, "by informal estimate, the fields with the largest advances in OA data during 2007 were archaeology, astronomy, chemistry, the environment (including climate change), geography (including mapping), and medicine (especially, genomics and clinical drug trials)."
Publishers grant OA at different levels. OA campaigners have sorted them into different categories according to authors' rights: "white" publishers (not offering any OA), "yellow" (OA for pre-prints), "blue" (OA for final draft post-refereeing) and "green" (granting archiving, pre- and postprints). Green and blue publishers that endorse self-archiving of papers after print are mandated by many universities and funding agencies. In fact, many funding organisations offer help in establishing and maintaining these rapidly growing databases.
Some leading publishers are lobbying hard against full OA. On the other hand, some are giving it a try. The German Max Planck Society is undertaking a two year experiment with Springer. The publisher provides access to all its content for researchers affiliated with a Max Planck Institute and publishing in Springer's journals. The society's press release neither says whether researchers not publishing in Springer's journals will be excluded nor does it give any information about contract details. That agreement may help the Max Planck Society to reduce its costs for journal subscriptions, but it is certainly not in the spirit of OA, making scientific results available to people throughout the world.
The access to raw data, wherever they may be available, is also usually restricted by publishers. Astonishingly,
Nature Biotechnology started recommending that authors deposit raw data from proteomics and molecular-interaction experiments in a public database before submitting their manuscript so that reviewers and readers could better understand the authors' conclusions. On
Nature's blog, Maxine Clarke, Publishing Executive Editor of
Nature, writes: "For further information and links to the public databases, see the full text of this editorial:
Nature Biotechnology 25, 262 (2007); doi:10.1038/nbt0307-262b". Click on the link, though, and you will get a nasty surprise. No access without subscription!
