Publishing Models in Flux

The Internet is profoundly changing how scientists work and publish. The open access controversy continues to bedevil leading journals, influential research and funding organizations, and national and international government agencies.

The Association of Research Libraries provides a good introduction to open access in Framing the Issue. The debate is also featured in leading journals, such as Nature's Web Focus and earlier WebDebates.

Prominent organizations are involved, e.g. the Wellcome Trust's study Costs and Business Models in Scientific Research Publishing and support for digitizing backfiles for retrospective open access, cf. Medical Journals Backfiles Digitization Project.

Congress is getting into the fray regarding access to NIH-funded research, new NIH policy and NIH Public Access compliance instructions (revised 2008), See also an Open Letter to the U.S. Congress Signed by 25 Nobel Prize Winners and the website of the Alliance for Taxpayer Access. Further information is available in an NIH Notice, Annenberg School review (Dec. 10, 2004), and in NIH Open-Access Plan FAQs.

Dutch universities are providing open-access in DAREnet. Britain's House of Commons has endorsed open access, cf. Scientific Publications: Free for All? (recent comments). Research Councils UK has called for a policy more liberal than NIH's. In The Devil You Don't Know, Joseph Esposito emphasizes the role of individual authors and "upstart media built with the innate characteristics of the Internet in mind."

There are basically four models:

Commercial Publishing (user pays)

This model maintains the status quo where libraries or users pay for ongoing access to digital content. As a publisher of over 1800 journals, Elsevier has a large stake in changes to the current publishing paradigm. It has been criticized for the so-called "Big Deal," bundling less important journals with key titles at over-all reduced cost, but limiting libraries' ability to select titles individually.
Elsevier's comments on ... publishing ... and implications of Open Access ... argues that costs are being transferred from institutions and libraries to researchers and their sponsors and claims that open access has not proven its financial viability. John Wiley & Sons has responded in the British inquiry. Commercial publishers are tweaking policies and practices to confront the challenges of open access to maintain their predominance, cf. Springer Open Choice.

Open Access (producer pays)

This model makes digital access completely free to users. Authors, or their sponsors, pay fees upfront to defray production costs; peer-review is unchanged. This alternative to traditional subscription-based publishing is championed by nobel laureate and former NIH director Harold Varmus. He was instrumental in starting NLM's PubMed Central, which contains many open access titles, but also hybrid ones, which is also the case with BioMed Central. Preeminent in promoting open access, the Public Library of Science (PLoS) started new journals as existing ones were slow to embrace open access. Other titles may be found in the Directory of Open Access Journals. The open access viewpoint is supported by the Budapest Open Access Initiative, the Bethesda Statement on Open Access Publishing, and the Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge in the Sciences and Humanities. Open access is having a profound impact on publishing, whether or not it succeeds in supplanting the commercial model.

Hybrid Models (fee/free mixture)

There is considerable variation in this model, often a crisp delineation between free/fee, but also scattered fee/free access articles in the same journal. Various society publications face financial challenges and have responded with partially free access, cf. Blood editorial: Open access, yes! Open excess, no! and BMJ Paying for bmj.com. Leading scientific societies, as well as Stanford's HighWire Press, have endorsed the DC Principles for Free Access to Science, which supports this approach. HighWire boasts about 3/4 million free articles. This news item from the Chronicle of Higher Education typifies the debate from this viewpoint: Scientific Societies' Publishing Arms Unite Against Open-Access Movement. While some free access is better than none, managing the variations of free backfiles, recent issues free, and scattered articles free presents challenges to libraries trying to license and track these complex and changing policies and makes it difficult for users to know what kind of access is available for a given article.

Digital Repositories (local archiving)

There are various initiatives to archive pre- or post-prints of articles locally. These rely largely on voluntary contributions of papers at individual institutions. Perhaps the best example is DSpace at MIT, although it is having difficulty getting faculty to contribute, cf. Papers Wanted. Recently, BioMed Central has set up Open Repository, a fee-based hosting service, to make it easier to create local repositories. Other open-source software to create local repositories include: Cornell's DPubS, EPrints.org, Fedora Project, and Greenstone Digital Library. For general background, consult Lynch's Institutional Repositories: Essential Infrastructure for Scholarship in the Digital Age. Journals' policies on allowing local archiving vary, cf. Summary Statistics and Growth-Charts Journal and Publisher policies on author self-archiving (Eprints/ROMEO version). The jury is out on coordination of access to local repositories.