Liz Ferguson, Publisher & Bob Campbell, President
Blackwell Publishing, Oxford, UK 

https://doi.org/10.36866/pn.59.25

Open access continues to be a topic for lively debate among authors, societies and publishers. There are three types of open access:

• Pay-to-publish, or ‘author pays’ publishing
• Self-archiving in institutional, subject or personal repositories
• Free access to articles of a certain type, or after a certain time period, or to certain groups of customers (e.g. developing world), for journals which are usually subscription-based.

Over the past year the debate has gained pace with interest from the UK Government and the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) among many others. After an unusual second round of reports and responses between the UK House of Commons Select Committee on Science and Technology and the Government itself, the Government held its line on pay-to­publish open access not being demonstrably better than the current model, but indicated that the Research Councils might begin to include money in grants for publishing.

The Research Councils have, in fact, just stated that they will allow grantees to request money for publishing and that they will encourage recipients of grants to deposit their work in a repository (with the choice of repository left to the individual). The NIH has produced a clear but controversial policy requesting all recipients of NIH grants to deposit the author’s version of the accepted manuscript on PubMedCentral within 12 months of publication. The Wellcome Trust is likely to announce a similar scheme in the near future.

It is clearly attractive to have articles available on an open archive as exposure is widened and there is some evidence from the physics community in particular to suggest that citations might be boosted. Articles published in the Astrophysical Journal with self­archiving in the AstroPh server gain approximately twice the citations of articles in the same journal that have not been self archived. There are, however, possible negative consequences that must be considered and these are of particular importance to societies. The table above summarises the main arguments for and against author self-archiving.

We have had many discussions with societies about the implications of both the author pays model and self­archiving; the remainder of this article will focus on the latter.

We carried out a survey towards the end of 2004 into society members’ attitudes towards their societies and publications. The results clearly showed that the primary reasons members join societies are for reduced rate conference attendance and for the journals: all members of the Physiological Society, for example, are entitled to free online access to The Journal of Physiology and Experimental Physiology as a benefit of membership. If many of the articles published in the journals are available free of charge elsewhere on the internet, and can be found relatively easily through new services such as Google Scholar, a large part of the reason for joining the Society will have disappeared. Additionally, librarians are not so easily able to measure usage of the journals and are more likely to cancel: this could seriously undermine the financial stability of many journals and their societies.

Is there really a problem with access to published research? The Journal of Physiology and Experimental Physiology make their topical reviews available free of charge to all readers immediately on publication, both journals are available in developing countries free of charge or at appropriate rates through various philanthropic schemes, and all the content of both journals is made available free of charge after 1 year.

Taking these factors together with the wide availability to members and to more than 2,000 institutions worldwide, one wonders what the journals stand to gain from initiatives such as the NIH’s requesting deposition of the author’s version within 12 months. Version control should be considered, particularly if the Wellcome Trust goes through with a plan to create a UK PubMedCentral equivalent that might make a PDF that differs from the published version. One should also ask why, if a journal offers free access after 12 months anyway, there shouldn’t simply be a link to the official version on the journal’s own website.

Blackwell and the societies we publish for are in the process of adapting to the changes that some of the funding bodies and the academic community clearly want. We are launching a trial called Online Open with some participating journals (including the journals of the Physiological Society) which will allow authors to pay for their articles to be made available on an open access basis within the journals’ sites. We are reviewing usage data with societies to jointly determine embargo periods for individual journals to allow them to comply with requests from bodies such as the NIH while protecting what are, for many societies, their primary sources of income. Once the relevant embargo period is over, authors will be able to post their accepted versions of manuscripts on any repository they choose. From this summer we will allow authors to retain the copyright of their own articles in the journals that we own; some societies, including the Physiological Society, will be doing the same.

The open access debate has developed a great deal over the past 12-24 months. We started this article by introducing the three types of open access; we are responding to all three by experimenting with new models that meet the requests of the research community and its funders. We are doing so in a manner that allows us to always keep in mind the need for learned societies to maintain their income. We look forward to the continued development of scholarly publishing.