The Guardian and the Economist press for open access in scientific publishing

APR 16, 2012

Two articles in the UK show little patience for publishers’ added-value arguments

Last week in the UK, the Guardian‘s article “Wellcome Trust joins ‘academic spring’ to open up science ” began by exclaiming, “One of the world’s largest funders of science is to throw its weight behind a growing campaign to break the stranglehold of academic journals and allow all research papers to be shared online.” The Guardian predicted that “the intervention of the Wellcome Trust, the largest non-governmental funder of medical research after the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, is likely to galvanise the movement by forcing academics it funds to publish in open online journals.”

Now an Economist article begins by exclaiming, “When research is funded by the taxpayer or by charities, the results should be available to all without charge.” The article’s cartoon illustration shows a man in a lab coat who has just unlocked a 10-foot-tall book with the title Research and is throwing away the padlock.

Conflating raw research results with the peer-reviewed, edited, produced, and archived products of scientific publishing, the Economist charges that the academics and taxpayers who were responsible for creating publicly funded research “have to pay to read it,” that publishing academic journals is “a licence to print money,” and that this “is not merely absurd and unjust; it also hampers education and research.”

The article stipulates, “Clearly the cost of producing a journal is not zero,” but asserts that “the internet means it should be going down, not up.” It mentions that some 9500 researchers have joined a boycott of the commercial scientific publisher Elsevier, reports that in “several cases the entire editorial boards of existing journals have resigned to start new ones with lower prices and less restricted access,” and laments that “the incumbent journals are hard to dislodge.”

The article strongly advocates open-access mandates:

There is a simple way both to increase access to publicly funded research and to level the playing field for new journals. Government bodies that fund academic research should require that the results be made available free to the public. So should charities that fund research. This would both broaden access to research and strengthen the hand of “open access” journals, since many researchers would then be unable to publish results in closed ones.

Near the end, the article argues that open access “to research funded by taxpayers or charities need not mean Armageddon for journal publishers.” It mentions that some publishers put time limits on pay barriers and allow researchers to post their papers online. But it asserts that “a strongly enforced open-access mandate for state- and charity-funded research would spur them to do more.”

The Economist‘s final lines require quoting: “The aim of academic journals is to make the best research widely available. Many have ended up doing the opposite. It is time that changed.”

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.