As a scientist and citizen I want to see the universal adoption of the open access model of academic publishing, because it will be better for science and better for society.
Open access, where costs are met upfront by the author and papers are free to readers, would improve science by making all published results and ideas easily accessible to researchers across the world and so fuel the engine of discovery. At present, far too much of our research is locked behind paywalls that restrict access and stall progress.
By shifting ownership of scientific literature away from commercial publishers, open access also provides a clear acknowledgement that the bulk of its value comes from publicly funded scientists and not from publishing companies. This is an overdue correction that will also facilitate the spread of scientific information beyond the research community and among the wider public who, through their taxes and donations to charity, have a moral right to its outputs.
In a connected world, more and more people are realising that they need – and deserve – access to the scientific literature they have paid for, be they patient groups seeking to understand the latest medical research or citizens trying to grapple with research that impacts public policy on important issues such as climate change, drug use or genetically modified foods. Arguably, most members of the public would not be able to understand the primary scientific literature even if they had free access, but the mere fact of its availability – through a shift to open access – should stimulate a healthy demand from the public for more digestible reports from the scientists they support. Direct exposure of the scientific community to the public appetite for research results could even have positive effects on the formulation of research priorities.
With all these benefits on offer, why has the scientific community been slow to adopt open access modes of publication? Surely the ethos of open access chimes with the long-standing tradition of free exchange of information within the scientific community?
The problem is due to resistance from publishers, who see open access as a threat to a subscription model that generates massive profits and, in the UK, to a lack of resolve from the research councils who disburse government funds to scientists. The research councils have been encouraging their funded scientists to adopt open access since around 2006, but they have not provided coherent financial support or taken sufficient steps to enforce compliance.
As a result, although all publicly funded science in the UK should now be published through one of the open access routes, rates of uptake remain low. The research councils have only recently begun to monitor rates of compliance, so figures are hard to come by, but some reports suggest they may be as low as 5%. The Wellcome Trust, a major medical research charity, has shown that simplification of the funding mechanism that enables authors to recover open access charges can increase compliance dramatically. Even so, the trust has been disappointed to learn that compliance rates among its funded scientists are only around 55%.
The lack of robust incentives or sanctions from funders fosters a lackadaisical attitude among scientists, who must also bear some of the responsibility for the slow adoption of open access. Though most would readily agree that open access is a good thing, they can lose sight of that during the arduous process of shepherding new results into the literature. For too many, the distractions of negotiating with reviewers or dealing with multiple rounds of submission and rejection at different journals can mean that the final step of sorting out open access arrangements simply drops off the radar.
The situation is not helped by the variation in terms and conditions on open access between different publishers and even between different journals from the same publisher. It's hard to keep up and too many scientists are simply ignorant of the options available to them. Too many presume that publication in the highest ranking journals such a Nature or Science, which is widely regarded as vital for success in funding and promotion applications, is incompatible with open access modes of publishing. But this is simply not the case. Not only do most high ranking journals permit open access publishing (albeit often via sub-optimal routes that involve a six- to 12-month delay), but the stable of serious and quality open access journals (eg the Public Library of Science), in which every paper is free to readers, is growing fast.
None of these problems is insurmountable. I am encouraged both by funders announcing their intention to bolster policies on open access and by the attention drawn to the issue by the recent boycott ofacademic publishers Elsevier. The publishers may not like it, but it is time for scientists to take proper control of their work to make sure that the publicly funded science is made truly public.
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