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rstanley{at}uabmc.edu
According to Robinson, OA manifests itself in two ways: (1) as author-pays journals that allow anyone to access all articles free of charge (there is no subscription charge; the journal covers the cost of publication through subsidies, sponsorships, or by charging authors—or the authors' funding body or employer—a fee to publish their material); (2) as institutional or subject repositories, which are online collections of materials, including research papers. In this latter model, the repository would be managed by a university, an institution, or a funding body. Research papers archived in these repositories would not necessarily be peer reviewed or formally copyedited. The publishers would be responsible for the cost of organizing the review process.
The American Roentgen Ray Society is a member of a group of not-for-profit medical and scientific societies and publishers known as the Washington, DC Principles Group for Free Access to Science, which was formed in 2004. Members of this group adhere to the following guidelines:
Not long after the formation of the DC Principles group, the contents of the AJR were made freely accessible 2 years after publication. When a variety of studies showed that the majority of hits for online articles occurred primarily within the first 12 months of publication and dropped significantly thereafter, the AJR, in May 2007, shortened the timeframe for free availability to 12 months. While this does not meet the OA goal of being instantly available upon publication, it certainly increases the online accessibility of the AJR content.
As many of our readers are aware, Nobel Laureate Harold Varmus has been the driving force behind OA. He promoted the development of PubMed, a resource that is constantly used by our readers, authors, and reviewers. In October 2000, Varmus, along with Patrick Brown and Michael Eisen, cofounded the Public Library of Science (PLoS). This advocacy group was founded on the principle that if the scientific publishers, many of whom are for-profit, were unprepared to act in the best interest of science and participate in OA, then the research community that supplied all of the material for these publications would flex their muscles and force them to cooperate. PLoS's first action was to circulate an open letter encouraging scientific publishers to make their research literature available for distribution through free online public archives such as the U.S. National Library of Medicine's PubMed Central [3]. This letter, signed by nearly 34,000 scientists from 180 countries, prompted significant steps by many scientific publishers toward freer access to published research. Not surprisingly, the publishers' responses fell far short of the reasonable policies advocated. And, while well intended, very few of the researchers remained committed to their principles and stopped sending their submissions to these journals, which largely ignored the mandate for making their scientific content freely available.
Several years ago, at the urging of the PLoS, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) requested, but did not mandate, that researchers funded by the federal government deposit copies of their final research papers in PubMed Central. After 2 ineffective years of the NIH policy, the U.S. House of Representatives and the Senate have backed provisions in their respective 2008 Labor Health and Education Appropriations bills that will require the final published papers of NIH-funded researchers to be deposited in PubMed Central. While the advocacy groups consider this an important step for public access to research, additional language in both bills states "NIH shall implement the public access policy in a manner consistent with copyright law." It appears in the minds of some that this single sentence will essentially vitiate this mandate. Brian Crawford [4], chair of the Association of American Publishers Professional and Scholarly Publishing Division Executive Committee, states, "The mandatory deposit of copyrighted articles in an online government site for worldwide distribution is in fundamental, inherent, and unavoidable conflict with the rights of copyright holders in those works." His comments indicate that if the bill becomes law, publishers likely will challenge its legality based on existing copyright law.
As I have attempted to familiarize myself with the pros and cons of OA, I have realized that many of the arguments of the OA advocates have not yet been shown to hold water. In the same JTH article cited above, the author continued by discussing the five strands to the open access argument, which he listed as:
Regarding the library funding crisis, OA advocates claim that prices that are set by profitmaximizing publishers are determined not by costs but by what the market will bear. Thus, for the high-profit publishers, the overhead charges are more than adequately covered by the excessive subscription fees to the universities, who produced the knowledge, as well as to the individual subscribers. In contrast, the American Roentgen Ray Society is able to keep its subscription prices relatively low and make the publication more widely accessible, thanks to the subsidization of editorial input by the universities. Bergstrom and McAfee [5] suggest that a university should form a list of the expensive journals and have a policy that discourages faculty participation in the operation of these journals unless the university can receive overhead expenses related to the journal participation. This would be an example of a university flexing its muscle, which in essence is the product of their faculty. These authors cite a Website that lists the prices of approximately 5,000 academic journals [6].
Another commentary by Edwin V. Sperr, Jr. [7] presents arguments in favor of the Open Access concept. He, too, emphasizes that librarians and scholars need to work together to preserve the system of scholarly communication and that researchers must realize the power they have and demand more open access to their own work.
Concerning the library funding crisis, budgets for university libraries have been falling at the same time that the subscription costs to the libraries have increased. And this occurs at a time when research and development have been increasing and more studies are being submitted for publication. BMC, an OA publisher launched in May of 2000, was initially thought to be the answer for hard-pressed university libraries. As stated in their online Website: "The traditional business model for scientific publishers relies on restricting access to published research, in order to recoup the costs of the publication process. This restriction of access to published research prevents full use being made of digital technologies, and is contrary to the interests of authors, funders, and the scientific community as a whole. The traditional subscription-based model is also becoming increasingly unsustainable, as increasing amounts of research is being published while library budgets remain static" [8].
It is, however, becoming increasingly clear that there is a rising production cost for the OA publishers as well as the non-OA publishers. And who pays the cost? According to John Sack [9], in a recent letter, the largest research institutions have to foot the largest bill in the author-pays model, so it concentrates— rather than distributes—the cost. Furthermore, the largest research institutions have requested that their libraries pay these "membership" costs since the costs sound exactly like subscriptions. Some libraries around the country have provided funding for this new OA model so that it could be tested. However, BMC has had to increase its charge to the libraries as its start-up funds were exhausted and further subsidization was uncertain. Because of the rising costs, several prominent universities around the country have cancelled their membership in BMC. Columbia University dropped out in 2006. Yale University ended its support for BMC in July 2007. Emory University also discontinued its membership as the cost continued to rise. Thus, it appears that OA will not solve the library funding crisis in the near future.
There are no data as of yet to show that the lack of access to published literature is impeding research. The overall online availability of journals appears to have enhanced rather than impeded research. A study by Thompson–ISI, the creators of the journal Impact Factor, analyzed 148 OA journals in the natural sciences. They concluded: "To date, no clear effect has been observed. Though there is some suggestion in aggregate of a slightly more rapid accumulation of citations, this effect is, so far, minimal. The wide distribution of these OA journals has not yet been shown to have any appreciable effect on their appearance in lists of cited references in other journals" [10].
At least with regard to research in radiology, I have not been able to rationalize the outcry for publicly funded research being accessible to the public. It is my impression that the scholarly communication system in medicine is not designed for communication between researchers and the public at large. Television, radio, newspapers, and other types of patient information from medical societies such as the ARRS do a better job. The ARRS is a participant in a new project called patientINFORM, which has been created by the American Heart Association, the American Diabetes Association, and the American Cancer Society [11]. PatientINFORM creates articles that relate to important papers published in multiple journals from 23 different medical publishers and societies. It is unreasonable that the entire journal system should be strong-armed into conforming to the OA concept, especially considering that a very large amount of the research in radiology is not government funded.
With regard to the needs of the developing world, access to the journals does not appear to be the real problem. Rather, the fundamental problem appears to be lack of basic infrastructure, such as functioning libraries with computers capable of accessing the Internet or communities of active researchers capable of using all of the available information.
OA advocates believe that publishers and societies are making unjustifiable profits from the publication of their journals. Admittedly, some of the commercial publishers do operate with a sizable profit margin. But most of the societies, such as the American Roentgen Ray Society, are not-for-profit and they just break even. The ARRS runs conferences, educates its members through the AJR and newsletters, offers CME, scholarships and fellowships, and even funds research through its Scholar Program. Not surprisingly, societies such as ARRS are asking for caution and fiscal responsibility in the rush to provide OA. Any new model of scholarly communication must be sustainable. A recent survey titled "The Facts About Open Access" [12] would suggest that many of the OA journals are struggling to stay alive. At least from the data, there is sparse evidence that the author-pays model is creating a sustainable challenge to the existing subscription model.
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