Publishers Experiment With Open-Access Journals

Proponents of open-access publishing, in which research papers become freely available on the Web after appearing in a peer-reviewed journal, have scored another victory. The first was the creation four years ago of PubMed Central, an NIH-funded Web repository. In July, egged on by open-access advocates, the House Appropriations Committee recommended that NIH develop a method by which all papers based on NIH-funded research would become freely available. NIH’s response amounts to converting PubMed Central from a voluntary archive to a mandatory one.

Publishers of some journals allow their content to appear in PubMed Central, but many, fearing loss of flexibility in their business models, have been critical of mandated open access. Recent technology investments, new nimble competitors such as online-only journals, and the high cost of peer review, have squeezed profit margins across the industry.

Librarians, by contrast, tend to welcome open access because they believe it will save them money on subscriptions. The number of journal subscriptions purchased across all fields has been dropping by 3–7% per year for decades. Among scientists, open access has received scant attention, although small groups both for and against it exist. For example, this summer, 25 Nobel laureates signed a letter to Congress supporting open access because it would bring increased visibility to scientists’ work and give the public access to the latest medical research.

NIH’s new guidelines are likely to affect physics less than biomedicine, says Martin Blume, editor-in-chief of the American Physical Society’s journals. Most physics journals allow authors to post their peer-reviewed papers on the preprint server arXiv.org . “We’ve learned to complement arXiv,” Blume says. Still, he opposes government-mandated open access. In particular, he rejects the claim that a government-run repository will be more stable over the long term. “This is a ridiculous argument,” says Blume, who points out that 111 years of Physical Review are archived online. “It’s not going to disappear.”

Responding to pressure, publishers are experimenting with their own open-access models. For example, the Optical Society of America’s online journal Optics Express derives its income solely from charging authors. Anyone can view its papers. The main attraction to authors is the speed of publication, says editor Michael Duncan. The publication also saves money by forgoing copyediting. But, he adds, “a bad thing about [these business models] is that they discriminate against authors from developing countries.” More than 60% of the papers in physics journals are from non-US authors and the percentage from authors in developing countries is increasing.

This month, the American Institute of Physics (which publishes Physics Today) is announcing its own trial with open access: Starting in January, for three publications, authors can pay $2000 for each article to be freely and immediately available. According to AIP Executive Director Marc H. Brodsky, “The main goals of this experiment are, first, to see if the idea of open access has any traction in the physical science community and, second, to see whether prepublication article payments produce enough participation to make meaningful reductions in library subscription prices for online journals.” The three AIP publications in the trial are Journal of Mathematical Physics, Review of Scientific Instruments, and Chaos: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Nonlinear Science. similar experiments are under way with all Springer journals.

Ironically, over the long run, open access could be damaging to the science community because many professional societies use revenue from their publishing operations to fund public outreach and education. says Duncan, “The authors—or funding sources—may look at the cost of publishing and say they will support that but nothing else.”