New York Times commentary argues that all research papers should be free
DOI: 10.1063/PT.5.8169
The headline for a 13 March New York Times Sunday Review article took the form of an open question: “Should all research papers be free?” The Times classified it as a “news analysis.” But in fact the almost impassioned opinion piece urges universal open access to scientific publications.
Author Kate Murphy, a Houston journalist who writes frequently for the Times, opens by praising graduate student Alexandra Elbakyan from Kazakhstan. Elbakyan “is believed to be hiding out in Russia after illegally leaking millions of documents,” thereby—as Murphy puts it—taking “a stand for the public’s right to know by providing free online access to just about every scientific paper ever published.”
The RT network, which calls itself “three global news channels broadcasting in English, Arabic and Spanish,” calls Elbakyan the “Robin Hood neuroscientist” behind the “Sci-Hub research-pirate site,” which in turn calls itself first “in the world to provide mass & public access to research papers.”
Murphy’s praise of Elbakyan continues:
Her protest against scholarly journals’ paywalls has earned her rock-star status among advocates for open access, and has shined a light on how scientific findings that could inform personal and public policy decisions on matters as consequential as health care, economics and the environment are often prohibitively expensive to read and impossible to aggregate and datamine.
The commentary invokes the views of the ardent open-access advocate Michael Eisen , the Berkeley biologist who cofounded the Public Library of Science . Murphy quotes him, including with this: “The real people to blame are the leaders of the scientific community—Nobel scientists, heads of institutions, the presidents of universities—who are in a position to change things but have never faced up to this problem in part because they are beneficiaries of the system.”
She scants consideration of not-for-profit scientific publishers like the American Institute of Physics (AIP), but strongly criticizes for-profit publishers:
Journal publishers collectively earned $10 billion last year, much of it from research libraries, which pay annual subscription fees ranging from $2,000 to $35,000 per title if they don’t buy subscriptions of bundled titles, which cost millions. The largest companies, like Elsevier, Taylor & Francis, Springer and Wiley, typically have profit margins of over 30 percent, which they say is justified because they are curators of research, selecting only the most worthy papers for publication. Moreover, they orchestrate the vetting, editing and archiving of articles.
In that final sentence, Murphy briefly acknowledges that whether or not open access can or should be made free, it’s not costless. She briefly acknowledges that reality at one other point when, concerning the author-pays approach, she reports that “that financial model requires authors to pay a processing charge that can run anywhere from $1,500 to $3,000 per article so the publisher can recoup its costs.”
She quotes an industry spokeswoman who denounces the theft of content. She also quotes Peter Suber, Harvard’s director of the office of scholarly communication, about libraries’ journal subscriptions: “The prices have been rising twice as fast as the price of health care over the past 20 years, so there’s a real scandal there to be exposed.”
The opinion piece touches on measures being taken to widen access to scientific publications:
Private funders such as the Wellcome Trust, Howard Hughes Medical Institute and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation have ... begun making grants contingent on open access to resulting articles, as well as possibly to the underlying data.
Researchers in some disciplines, such as physics and mathematics, have started open access journals to protest journal publishers’ paywalls or have formed consortiums that will cover the fees publishers charge authors to make their work open access.
Murphy explicitly alludes to the existence of publishers that aren’t for-profit companies:
“We are starting to see a shift to an era of experimentation and implementation on how open access can work,” said David Crotty, editorial director for journals policy at the nonprofit Oxford University Press , which has been moving toward exclusively open access formats when starting new journals.
Murphy also mentions a federal “directive requiring agencies that make more than $100 million in research grants to develop plans so that recipients release their findings to the public within a year of publication.” She means the 22 February 2013 memorandum to the heads of executive departments and agencies by John P. Holdren, the presidential science adviser who heads the Office of Science and Technology Policy.
But she doesn’t mention the progress that has ensued by and among multiple stakeholders, as reported and analyzed recently in an online essay at the Scholarly Kitchen by Fred Dylla, AIP executive director emeritus. Dylla included what he called a “bottom line” paragraph:
So three years out from the directive, 1) public access policy is in place for 98% of the research funding from US federal agencies starting in the last year, 2) a robust article identification system is in place from Crossref that is already tracking more than 11,000 funding agencies worldwide, 3) CHORUS , a public-private partnership, is actively assisting the agencies with implementing their public access plans, 4) TDM [text- and data-mining] solutions are beginning to appear, and 5) agencies, supported by various stakeholders, are making some headway on data management.
Dylla called these results “remarkable, given the slow pace of government, the large number of stakeholders and the complex systems involved.” He added, “It is difficult to find other examples where the US Congress, the Administration, and the private sector worked in concert to get something done that is so helpful to so many citizens in just three years.” (On 22 March, he will host a free webinar with Q&A, “Building bridges in the scholarly publishing community.” Disclosure: I worked for and with the now-sort-of-retired Dylla for a quarter century.)
Murphy reports that Harvard’s Suber doesn’t condone Elbakyan’s “guerrilla tactics” and that he warned, “Unlawful access gives open access a bad name.” But she never squares those concerns with what she offers at the end, where she boosts Elbakyan’s claim that support is to be found even in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights:
Until the system changes, Ms. Elbakyan said she would continue to distribute journal articles to whoever wants them. Paraphrasing part of the United Nations Charter, she said, “Everyone has the right to freely share in scientific advancement and its benefits.”
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Steven T. Corneliussen, a media analyst for the American Institute of Physics, monitors three national newspapers, the weeklies Nature and Science, and occasionally other publications. He has published op-eds in the Washington Post and other newspapers, has written for NASA’s history program, and was a science writer at a particle-accelerator laboratory.