The Economist and U.S. News press hard for open access

In the UK, controversy over open access to scientific publications has been blossoming , while in the US, major national newspapers have been mainly silent about it. But articles have appeared lately in two major news magazines circulated in the US: the Economist and U.S. News and World Report. In places, the articles exhibit tendencies, even biases, that have been questioned in the past in journalism and commentaries on open access.

Both articles contain insinuations, for example, that free access means costless access. The U.S. News piece asserts that because ‘an open-access journal allows anyone to easily and without cost read any of its published material, a large-scale migration to the platform would ease many of the financial burdens posed by subscription journals.’ Without cost to the reader, yes — but not without cost. The Economist piece opens by giving the notion a moralistic spin: ‘If there is any endeavour whose fruits should be freely available, that endeavour is surely publicly financed science. Morally, taxpayers who wish to should be able to read about it without further expense.’ Later that article declares, ‘Support has been swelling for open-access scientific publishing: doing it online, in a way that allows anyone to read papers free of charge.’ Free of charge, yes — but not free of cost.

The costlessness fallacy relates closely to the tendency to conflate research results with the professionally processed and archived products of scientific publishing. The Economist mentions ‘making research paid for by’ public funds ‘easy to get hold of,’ as if a submitted manuscript equates to a finished, peer-reviewed and archived journal article. U.S. News speaks of ‘taxpayer-funded research grants [that] go toward the very research that ends up published’ and of a journal’s need to attract ‘groundbreaking research,’ all as if the research is the manuscript, and the manuscript the finished product of scientific publishing.

The lengthy U.S. News piece seeks a certain comprehensiveness. It lacks, or nearly lacks, some other questionable tendencies that lurk here and there in the Economist piece. Those are the tendencies

• to undervalue publishers’ added-value arguments showing why raw research manuscripts do not equal finished publishing products,
• to scant the reality that varied stakeholders in this complex information-age transition have been seeking common ground and workable, sensible solutions,
• to under-recognize that scientific journals have long since entered the Internet age,
• to underemphasize the difficulties that one-size-fits-all mandates would bring, and
• to paint all scientific publishers as ruthless profiteers suppressing openness and enlightenment — as when the article calls publishers’ blind, impartial peer review processes ‘secret,’ or when it suggests that the ‘journal publishers who have mediated’ the exchange of scientific knowledge are now ‘becoming an impediment to it.’

Nevertheless it’s probably fair to say that even the U.S. News piece reflects something of the tone of the Economist‘s closing line: ‘A revolution, then, has begun. Technology permits it; researchers and politicians want it. If scientific publishers are not trembling in their boots, they should be.’

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 is a science writer at a particle-accelerator laboratory.