University of Tromsø
Paper in Documentation Studies, Intermediate Course Supplement
Spring 2003
Open Access
– for better or for worse?
Candidate 28159
Tromsø, 15th May 2003
© Candidate 28159 2003
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Table of Contents
2 Publishing in Science – the Whys and Wherefores
2.1 The Purpose of Scientific Publishing.
2.2 Scientific Publishing and the Public Sphere.
3 The Traditional Scientific Journal
4.3 Differences and Their Effects
5 Remediating the Document Complex.
5.1 The Structure of a Scientific Paper
6 The Social Life of Scientific Papers and Journals
6.1 Who Will Publish and What Will Be Published?
The first scientific journals were started in the last half of the 17th century (Philosophical Transactions, Le Journal des Sçavans). The advent of Gutenberg’s printing technology, papermaking and an organized postal system, together with the growth of science itself, were the circumstances that made such journals both desirable and possible.
The organization of the journal publishing activities has gradually changed from being controlled by science to being controlled by professional, for-profit publishing houses.
Until the advent of the internet, this has been the best form of organization, though it clearly has its disadvantages.
Open Access is a way of organizing scientific journal publishing in order to exploit the advantages of the internet. In this paper, I will try to compare the traditional publishing organization with that of Open Access in order to find the differences; both with regards to internal differences and with regards to the effects of these differences on the workings of science. When these differences and effects are discussed, their impact on dissemination and openness will be the criteria for finding them beneficial to science or not.
I will in the following only look at the publishing of scientific papers in journals. Many of the arguments could no doubt be equally valid for the publishing of series of papers, less so for monographs. Such an analysis could possibly be the theme of another paper; I will here limit myself to the scientific paper.
The scientific paper generally has a number of traits [1] that makes it possible and interesting to study it on its own:
· It is not published in order to give the author income. The income-generating potential of a scientific paper is, for all practical purposes, non-existent. Other scientific publications, like the textbook, the popular science paper or the monograph have, in varying degrees, an income potential and to some extent an economic motivation for the scientist.
· It is of a length that does not lend itself to publishing separately.
· The major cost of a paper does not lie in its publishing, but in the research leading to the paper.
· It is not published in order to be read, but to be archived so that it can be read if the need should arise. Moreover, spending time reading papers are not a goal to be achieved, but a necessary but costly part of scientific activities.
Many of these traits, which set scientific journal publishing apart from general journal publishing, will be important in the following discussion.
Publishing is an integral part of scientific work, and has been an important part since the early history of science.
Publishing has a number of functions. Science rarely goes forward in leaps; usually a scientist builds upon the work of earlier scientists, adding a small part of new knowledge to a vast repository of knowledge. [3] This repository can only exist and be explored through publishing. Publishing thus prepares a foundation to build upon, and furnishes information on paths that has been trodden before, with or without success. If successful, there is no need to spend resources on going it again; if unsuccessful one should have a very good reason for going it again before resources be spent upon such an exercise.
Scientific results also should be disseminated wider than only to the scientific community. Results should be made available for industry, commerce and government to exploit to the best for society. In large, science is funded by society. By making results public, science can contribute to the welfare of society.
Furthermore, publication makes research widely available for criticism and judgement by scientific peers. This is important in order to ensure that scientific results are original, re-creatable and truly scientific.
For the scientist, publication is also a part of the career process. By publishing, she demonstrates her insight and her competence. Publishing is the major aspect being evaluated when it comes to tenure, promotion, salary upgrades and so forth.
Habermas (1989) is concentrated upon the political and literary public sphere. He mentions science only in passing, and then mostly as a part of the literary public sphere.
One should note, however, that the development of modern scientific publishing follows, at least in the 17th and 18th centuries, the path of the literary public sphere. Scientific journals emerge in the second half of the 17th century, and science gradually frees itself from the power and censorship of the church and the court. At the outset, one could see science as a part of the literary public sphere; matters of science and technology were discussed by the same public in the same arenas. In the spirit of the age of enlightenment, scientists wrote for the general public, to spread knowledge as widely as possible. Gradually science became more professional and less a matter of personal interests of the rich. Science evolved its increasingly specialized vocabulary and formed specialized sub-disciplines. Meaningful participation in scientific debate increasingly demanded familiarity with the vocabulary and the knowledge base already built up. Without this competence, one would not be listened to, nor be invited to voice one’s opinion.
Today’s scientific journals direct themselves to the scientific community. This means that meaningful access to their contents is restricted to those who have studied the subjects for a long time. In this sense, one could say that science has withdrawn from the public sphere and instead created a number of scientific spheres, where only the select few have access. It is easy to see this as a de-democratization of science. On the other hand, the system of higher education in the western world has expanded the number of students by a number of magnitudes so that there are more citizens competent to access these scientific spheres. Capitalism demands a well-educated labour force in order to exploit the economies of division of labour, so the educational systems of the capitalist economies expanded through the 19th and 20th centuries, transforming even higher education from an arena for the select few to a common public good. This led to a great expansion of science and a continuing division of sciences into sub-disciplines. Scientific publishing grew with science, both as a result of and a pre-requisite for the growth in science itself.
In order to fulfil science’s responsibility for disseminating results to a wider public, a number of journals of popular science have been created. These are not the subject of this paper. Museums and public libraries are other arenas where science is disseminated to the wider public, as a continuation of the ideas of enlightenment.
The first scientific journals were published in 1665. The scientific journal has of course developed in the more than 300 years since then, but the basic model has been remarkably unchanged.
The journal gives space and audience to scientists informing other scientists of their work and the results of their work, in the form of papers collected and published together, at a regular interval under a common heading – the name of the journal. Most journals limit themselves as to subject, more or less narrowly.
The journal receives papers from scientists and lets them undergo a more or less rigid examination by fellow scientists in order to ascertain whether the paper is of an acceptable quality for publication. Often, an editor will suggest minor changes or major revisions of a paper, before it is accepted for publication. This review and editorial work is performed by scientists.
After acceptance starts the tedious work of publishing – typesetting, proofreading, layout, printing and distribution. These parts of the job, and that of marketing and managing subscriptions, are – more often than not – left to a professional publisher. Digitalisation has to some extent led science to perform more of the menial chores, leaving only the professional publishing tasks to the publishers. [4] The publisher finances his part of the production of the journal, through subscription fees. In order to do that, the copyright to the paper has been transferred from the author to the publisher, so that the publisher has the right to bar non-subscribers from having access to the publication in order to maintain the income needed for the publishing.
The model described above is not the only model practised – e.g. some scientific institutions do all the work themselves, other journals are wholly operated by a publisher – but it could be said to be the “general” model. I will base the discussion in this paper on this model. Some of the argument will be equally valid for other models, but extending the discussion to alternative models I will leave for possible later papers.
It should be noted that the advent of electronic publishing has not yet made any substantial impact on the organisation of scientific publishing. Some journals have found other models for their publishing, but generally, the players and their acts are the same. Of course, electronic editions of journals have been made available, as add-ons to or as substitutes for the paper editions, but this is not a major structural change. These electronic editions impose, through technology, access barriers parallel to the practical access restrictions of the paper editions. And they also deny you access to volumes you have had access to, if you choose not to renew your subscription. With a paper edition, nobody can take away the volumes you have received while a subscriber.
Science has always had an interest in as wide a dissemination of scientific writings as possible. Technologies to support such a wide dissemination have been lacking until text became digital. Two main strategies have been followed in order to give free access to digital scientific literature:
– Self-archiving, i.e. publishing electronically (on the internet) copies of manuscripts sent to a journal for publishing, either before publishing (preprint) or after publishing (postprint). The earliest really successful self-archiving project is Paul Ginsparg’s pre- and postprint archive arXiv, established at Los Alamos National Laboratory in 1991, now moved to Cornell University (Feder 2001). The monthly submission rate lies at about 3000 papers (arXiv.org 2003), mainly in physics, mathematics and computer science.
– Publishing digital journals, i.e. establishing (or transferring existing journals to) wholly electronic journals that have no paper parallel.
Both strategies have their drawbacks. Self-archiving could be a breach of contract in that scientists have to sign over their copyright to the publisher when submitting an paper to a journal. As not all authors self-archive their paper, self-archiving cannot become a substitute for the complete journal for e.g. a scientific library. Digital journals have no subscription income to offset publishing costs.
A number of initiatives have been going on with the goal of creating free access to scientific literature. Still, only a minor part of what is published is freely accessible. In 2001, the Open Society Institute arranged a meeting in Budapest, trying to accelerate progress in the direction of free access. This resulted in The Budapest Open Access Initiative or BOAI (Budapest Open Access Initiative n.d). This initiative is supported by a number of institutions and individuals.
Open Access, as described by the Open Access Initiative (Budapest Open Access Initiative 2002), points at the major problem with the traditional model described in part 3 The Traditional Scientific Journal . That model depends upon publishers to restrict access to publications in order to finance the publishing. Such a restriction on access is wholly contrary to the interests of science, which is, or at least should be, dedicated to the widest possible dissemination of results.
A restriction on access, in the form of a price per copy of a journal, is a necessary device for a paper-based journal. Distributing an extra copy has significant costs that have to be covered. A free paper-based journal will necessarily be restricted to distribution in a given number of copies. Who gets these copies will not be decided by any rational means like the recipient’s use for the information, but by arbitrary means. A price will both be an efficient means of assessing usefulness [5] and of securing financing of the costs incurred in the distribution. In a capitalist economy, a publisher in a competitive market [6] will sell journals at a price equal to or higher than his marginal cost of production and distribution (Ferguson and Gould 1975, 230–231).
Electronic distribution has insignificant marginal costs. According to economic theory this means that in an efficient market, price should be quite near 0 (Ferguson and Gould 1975, 248).
Open Access means access unhampered by pecuniary, technological or administrative restrictions, for all purposes which does not infringe upon the authors’ ideal rights of control over the integrity of their work and the right to be properly acknowledged. This is achieved by financing publishing by other means than by selling copies or subscriptions. This means that distribution can only be electronic, as paper-based distribution will incur costs that cannot be covered.
The fundamental difference between Open Access and traditional publishing lies in the difference in financing. This difference, moving the responsibility for financing from the reader side to the author side, has major consequences. A major consequence already mentioned is that it necessitates a transition to electronic publishing only. That means that the scientific journal itself will be open to major changes.
Open Access also means that publishers no longer have ownership to the contents of published papers; this will change their role in the production complex. Authors may get new roles; readers will be different and may have new roles. The printers will have no place in Open Access. In all, the total production complex will be redesigned.
Moving from paper to digital journals has in itself consequences. Paper and digital media are different, and other forms of publishing, e.g. newspapers, have been markedly changed in form and function with the transition to a digital life.
This need not be so. A digital journal need not be more than a paper journal archived and distributed in electronic form, in a format suitable for printing, e.g. PDF. Today’s electronic versions of journals published on paper are like that. The goal of such a remediation is ease of access and distribution.
The paper is not published alone; it is published as a part of a journal. The journal publishes a number of papers together with book reviews, discussions, letters to the editor, editorial comments etcetera. This is a part of an even larger document complex, where other documents like preliminary versions of the paper, reviewer comments, and background material like data, interim reports, work reports, correspondence and so forth, could be included.
In the following, I will look at both the paper itself and at the larger document complex surrounding the paper. I will demonstrate that the paper is remediated differently from the document complex itself; the document complex outside the paper will through remediation both change more and increase its visibility and accessibility.
Aristotle (1996) describes (or, rather, prescribes) the structure of the classic Greek drama. In order to be a well-constructed drama, it has to have certain elements and a certain structure.
Similarly, the scientific paper has certain elements and certain structures. Day (1998, 11–13) describes a structure often used in natural sciences (IMRAD). Other branches of science have developed other structures that meet their needs, though the structure or reasoning of IMRAD seems to gain importance also outside the natural sciences. This may be the result of the status and image of exactness of sciences, where the basic natural sciences traditionally has the highest status and the human and social sciences often are seen as inferior, inexact sciences.
The overwhelming mass of published material a scientist has to read in order to explore or keep up with a field makes it necessary that what is published is easy to read and understand (Day 1998, 13). A well-defined structure can be seen as representing redundancy (Eco 1989, 51). Redundancy increases the chances of transmitting the intended message. Structure could also be seen as part of a scientific code minimizing the need for verbal transmission of the message.
These structures have evolved over almost 350 years; this implies that the present structures should be well suited to the needs of science. These structures have however not developed in a vacuum. They are the result of the workings of different forces, e.g. the interests and needs of science; typesetting, printing and binding technologies; distribution systems and the economics of science and publishing.
In principle, electronic publishing opens the same set of possibilities for the scientific paper as for other kinds of literature, primarily hypertext, interactivity and integration with other media.
While the traditional paper has a linear structure, it also contains hypertextual elements like the citation and the footnote or endnote. The first is referring to text(s) outside the paper itself; the other are referring to text in another place in the same paper. In an electronic paper, such hypertext elements may become active hypertext links, giving access to the text or work referred to.
Non-textual media are not uncommon in traditional scientific papers. Depending on subject photos, drawings or graphs have been used to illustrate papers. Before printing illustrations were no more costly to produce than text, they both needed manual labour to reproduce. With printing illustrations became more expensive relative to text and this has restricted the use of illustrations. The same goes for the use of colour, both in text and in illustrations. The electronic paper has no such need for restriction on illustrations or colours, even if they need higher transmission and storage capacities they are not significantly costlier to store or transmit than black text, and neither does this entail the use of other technologies than for the text itself. That illustrations may be more costly to create will still restrict their use to some extent.
Sound or moving pictures have had no place in traditional scientific publishing. Both sound and moving pictures have been changed from analogue technologies to digital in the last decades. As digital media, they can easily be incorporated in a digital scientific paper. This could enhance the communicative powers of the paper. It could also open possibilities for sciences or subjects where non-textual material is central, as e.g. music studies.
A fundamental trait of the scientific journal is that it should be archived in perpetuity. As far as I can ascertain, one has not yet found a satisfactory way of archiving journals in a digital format, relying on printouts for archiving even all-digital journals. This could account for the sparing use of colour in the sample of digital journals (both all-digital and parallel digital/paper) that has been studied for this paper. Although an archive copy could be printed in colours, printouts for scientists would regularly be made in black and white hence it could be argued that the digital version should not use colours. Conlon and Martin (2003), in an all-digital journal, present a number of statistical graphs in black and white that could easily have been coloured, and colour could lead to an easier reading of the graphs. Jacquez and Greiling (2003), also in an all digital journal, presents geographical statistical data as coloured areas on a map of Long Island. In this case, colour enhances readability greatly. One could possibly argue that the more the information content is enhanced by colours, the more is the use of colours justified even if it results in higher costs in paper-based journals and in discrepancies between electronic papers and paper copies in electronic journals.
One of the traits of the scientific paper is that it should be brief, i.e. that it should present its problem and discussion in as limited space as possible, while maintaining clarity. This is both a matter of reading economies, i.e. that reading takes time and the shorter, the better for the reader; hence for the scientific community; and of publishing economies – space costs. While the latter problem is tied to paper-based technology, considering reading economies will be equally important in a digital environment. The steadily increasing amount of published papers makes it important to consider the costs to the scientific community of the work time of scientists, spent reading material in preparation of new research or teaching.
Brevity is not the same as number of pages. Page numbers are a result of a combination of text length and typography. Ease of reading, an important part of reading economies, is dependent on typography. One could expect that all-digital journals in this respect would be markedly different from all-paper or hybrid journals, where printing and distribution would favour typographical practises suited to minimise number of pages, not ease of reading. In the (admittedly small) sample of papers I have browsed I have not been able to identify any such difference favouring ease of reading more in all-digital than in other journals. This could be a transitional situation; digital journals are a new phenomenon. As other media, digital media will model themselves on their predecessors, presenting themselves as enhanced but still recognisable versions of older media. The first printed books were in appearance very like their hand-copied forerunners, the important change was in production technology. For digital journals distribution technology and economies is the most important aspect, when they have established themselves one could expect that they in time will distance themselves from paper-based journals in other respects, too.
Behind a paper lies often data that have been collected and analysed as a part of the research project resulting in the paper. This can have many forms like artefacts, tissue samples, statistical data, tape or video recordings. Some materials, which lend themselves badly to paper based publication due to their nature or to their bulk, lend themselves well to digital publication.
Such material can easily be published in such a way that it can be referred to in the paper, and so that it is accessible to other researchers. They may want to analyse the material in order to gain a better understanding, to criticize or check the conclusions of the paper or to perform other analyses on the same material.
A paper-based journal has a certain format, including a rather constant number of pages, and a fixed publishing interval. A (near) constant number of pages per issue is due to a number of practical issues: printing technology, printing costs and distribution costs. It is also used to ensure that the journal has enough papers coming to be sure to be able to fill the coming numbers, by levelling out the seasonal or occasional tops and bottoms of scientific productivity. This can be done either by being restrictive, so that only a percentage of received material will be accepted for publishing or by establishing a queue of papers accepted and waiting for publishing.
The electronic journal has no technical reasons to limit the number of papers or pages published per issue; this should be a matter of quality only. A journal that today turns down papers solely for economic reasons will in an all-electronic format be able to publish more. One could still argue for the need to eliminate seasonal variations, but a major problem for scientists is the time lag between writing a paper and having had it published. In sciences that move fast, waiting for a year or two to see results published, is detrimental to scientific work.
One could ask if not a regular publishing pattern is superfluous in an electronic journal. Papers could easily be published continuously as they are accepted for publication. A major distinction between journals and series of paper would then disappear. Archiving and referencing requires some kind of structure, and the preferred ones are still the issue and the page, requiring or at least giving a picture of some kind of regularity or pattern of publishing. BioMed Central, a leading Open Access publisher, seems to favour a pattern of annual volumes, with monthly issues of papers. These papers are numbered consecutively within an issue, and each paper has page numbers starting from 1.
In a paper journal, the journal issue has a physical and tangible existence. It contains papers; it has a binding, a list of contents, possibly editorial material like editorial, advices to authors, news etc. and maybe advertisements. An electronic, restricted access issue of a paper journal seems to loose the surroundings of the issue or the journal, i.e. all extraneous material is stripped off. See e.g. Biotechnology Advances (2003) on Elsevier’s ScienceDirect service [8] . The opening page of the journal is a simple list of links to volumes and issues, leading to the papers in some electronic format. A link to the journal’s homepage is given, but as this is a paper-based journal, the homepage does not contain papers and very little other material either.
The all-electronic journal has no paper counterpart in which to store everything but the scientific papers. To take the BioMed Central publication International Journal of Health Geographics (n.d.) as an example, the homepage is a very important feature of the journal. It is not the only access road to the papers, they are stored in a well-indexed database with papers from other journals, but it is a focal point of activities centred on the journal. It contains, first of all, links to the kind of editorial material that was missing from the electronic version of the hybrid (both paper and digital version) journal. It is also used to highlight current papers and to bring relevant news. Whether you enter the homepage in order to access new or old material, the editorial material will always be new, as opposed to when thumbing an older issue of a paper journal.
While the paper format in both the electronic and hybrid journal is a clear continuation of the paper format developed over almost 350 years, the electronic journal itself seems to mime the internet newspaper more than the paper journal. It uses frames to divide the screen in different parts, with the focused material in the centre, short and important notices at the top of the centre, menus above and to the left and advertisements in the upper, lower and right margins. As with editorial material, advertisements surrounding the papers are current no matter how old the material itself is. This makes it possible to sell marketing space based on the impact of older material, something that is impossible in a paper-based journal.
Important parts of the document complex surrounding the paper and the journal are abstracts and citation indexes. These documents are designed to make information available in the sense of pointing to literature that can be of interest for a researcher researching a specific problem. While access to information is a problem that Open Access may cure, defining what information it could be interesting to access is still a problem. Abstracts are short, condensed summaries of the contents of a paper. Abstracts are often published together with the paper, as an opening paragraph, but abstracts are generally also published separately, in books or in separate journals. The idea of the abstract is to make a condensed version available for first inspection and evaluation, so that only the more interesting papers must be made available in full version. That distributing the full version of a digital paper is as easy as distributing an abstract, should not lead to the conclusion that abstracts could be done away with. Reading economies, i.e. the cost of time spent reading, makes it imperative that abstracts be maintained even in a digital journal. It is correct, however, that the abstract lends itself to digital distribution just as well as the paper does. In digital journals, abstracts are often published with the paper, as a separate or distinct part, making it available for separate searching. Paper journals also print abstracts with papers, but as these are not available separately they are not a help in searching for literature, only when browsing papers already found – one starts with reading the abstract, if it is found interesting one goes on to the paper itself. A digital abstract published with the paper is also accessible at an earlier date than a separate abstract being prepared after the publication of the original paper. In this way, a digitalisation of the journal makes information more accessible.
The citation index is a list of scientific publications that have cited a given paper. While citations in a paper lead to scientific publications that have been built upon, citation indexes shows how a given paper has been used in new research. This is of interest to the scientist in that being cited shows that research has been useful, an argument that may be handy in a tenure or salary discussion. A citation is also a useful way for a researcher to locate interesting papers, following citations trails will often be a good way of getting an overview of the literature written about a problem. Traditional citation indexes are by necessity published after the original paper, in fact after the paper has been used by another paper that has been published and indexed. This makes for a substantial time lag. While even digital citation indexes cannot be published until a paper has been used for another publication, digital journals make it possible to publish citation links with the paper. For an example see Boulos et al. (2002), where the paper links to another paper that has cited it. While this functionality at present seems somewhat limited as it is confined in this case to other papers from the same publisher, it reminds us that references in a digital world may be hyperlinks, at least if the target of the reference is itself published on the internet. In this way, a reference can give immediate and instant access to the source being referenced.
One should note that when it comes to abstracts and citations, hybrid and all-digital journals have the same functionality.
When a paper is submitted to a scientific journal, the normal procedure (i.e., in a quality journal) is that it is reviewed by two highly qualified researchers in the same field. They give their comments and recommendations, and the paper is reworked according to their recommendations, and then resubmitted. Traditionally, the various stages of the paper and the comments of the peer reviewers have not been made public. In part, this is due to economies – both printing and distribution costs would increase. As this argument is not valid in a digital journal, one would expect that this kind of material could be published with the paper. BioMed Central (BioMed Central n.d.) is one publisher that has a policy of publishing both the various versions of the paper submitted, the reviewers’ comments and the authors’ response to comments for some of their journals, including all medical journals. BioMed Central also invites reader comments to papers.
Electronic Transactions on Artificial Intelligence (Linköping University Electronic Press 1999) practises a real peer review process. When a paper is submitted, it is posted for public comment for a period of three months. After that, the author decides if revisions are necessary before the paper goes on to a formal peer review by two anonymous researchers. Their comments are also, although anonymously, posted with the paper when it is published.
Such practises add much to the already overwhelming volume of information, but they have an important function in making scientific debate more democratic. Publishing review comments, and possibly also reader comments, makes a published paper not only a statement standing alone, but makes it a part of a discussion where in principle everyone can take part. For an example of reader comments, see Conlon and Raff. (2003), for an example of published peer review see Tan et al. (2003). Open, non-anonymous peer review makes undemocratic and unwanted practises like suppressing alternative views, taking personal considerations etc. more difficult to sustain. Opening the journal for discussion also makes real-time scientific debate possible even in smaller journals that in a paper version would publish 2–4 times a year. A debate, in order to hold the readers’ interest, has to be conducted over a short time span with the shortest possible time between contributions. In a paper-based journal, this is virtually unachievable, so scientific debate has generally been conducted outside scientific journals. In a digital journal, debates can be conducted almost real-time, and as a part of or closely linked to the journal or paper in question. This could make journals more important arenas for scientific debate, and through Open Access also widen both the audience and the participation in such debates.
Open Access also makes it easier to start new journals, creating new arenas for scientific thought and debate. This means that dissident voices could have an easier path to recognition, as it will be more difficult to suppress dissident views. As I understand Thomas Kuhn (1996), easier access to publishing could make possible a higher rate of paradigm shifts in science, or at least facilitate an accelerated process towards such shifts.
Digital journals are a new phenomenon, and much that has been published on the internet earlier have had serious flaws compared with traditional journals – lack of peer review, lack of long-time archiving, lack of indexing and abstracting, lack of mechanisms to become visible, dependency on unstable URL’s etc. This means that the concept of digital journals is met with scepticism and that they are seen as inferior or second-rate compared to paper journals.
This could mean that papers published in such journals will be met with scepticism; consequently, researchers in general will try to have their papers accepted by traditional journals – leaving second-rate research for the digital journals. In sciences where it is essential to publish quickly, in order to establish priority or because advances are being made at a high pace, digital journals will have advantages over paper-based journals and will easier attract first-rate research.
As the economic advantages of digital publication coincides with a generally tough economic climate for research institutions, one can foresee that publishing gradually will move towards digital publishing, making paper-based publishing increasingly a domain for the most prestigious and economically viable journals. A number of journals that are not exclusively journals of research but also serve as membership journals of some association or profession will be markedly different from the exclusively scientific journals when it comes to income structure, hence their transition to digital publishing will follow other paths, if they ever let go of the paper edition at all.
The effect of having to pay to have papers published, may lead to a tougher scrutiny of material sought published, depending on the model for distributing publishing costs in the research institution. Second-rate papers may be less likely to be published, at no major loss for science – actually, publishing less may be an advantage to science. The cost of reading and keeping up with what is published is one of the major problems facing a scientist. If Open Access means that more will be published, or that mechanisms to search for papers of high relevance is weakened, the problem of information overflow will increase.
Having to pay for publication could also lead to poor institutions publishing less and rich more. This will be a disadvantage (unless this corresponds to the quality of research in the institutions) and will make scientific debate less democratic, something clearly not in the interest of Open Access. Some provisions are made in Open Access journals for accepting papers without payment from poor or third world institutions, resulting in higher fees for those who pay. This is a complex picture, where library spending also has to be taken into account. If we see paying for publishing as an alternative to paying for access, the relative change of the distribution of total expenditure between rich and poor institutions will decide if digital publication will redistribute resources from rich to poor institutions or vice versa.
It is also clear that while today private research institutions, e.g. pharmaceutical companies, contribute to the income streams of scientific journals through their subscriptions. If one hazards a guess that such private institutions are likely to have a relatively low rate of publication, their financial contribution to scientific publishing will be smaller after a transition to Open Access. Such institutions, needing scientific publications in order to perform their own science but not publishing themselves, will be free riders under Open Access.
Scientific publications are mainly used for two purposes: Creating new scientists and creating new science. In both cases, one tries to find the best science to build upon. In most sciences, there is a hierarchy of journals, from the very top where only a select handful of first-rate papers are accepted, to the run-of-the mill mediocre journals having a problem to find papers to fill the volumes. The best journals contain papers that are often cited, and are said to have “impact”. These journals can command the highest subscription rates.
A paper journal receives attention as it is received in the mail. A digital journal has to conceive mechanisms that ensure the same kind of attention. BioMed Central lets you define your field(s) if interest, and undertakes to e-mail you a personalized list of contents of research published by them, every 7, 14 or 30 days at your discretion. This is a more immediate and personalized awareness service than e.g. library lists of journals received. It also gives instant access to interesting papers.
An academic library can only subscribe to a number of journals, and increasing subscription rates have meant that an average library subscribes to increasingly fewer journals. This means that a researcher has to make a trade-off between using what is high quality and what is easy accessible, unless his or her library happens to subscribe to the top journals in the field in question. We can generally assume that ease of access will mean a higher likelihood of being cited.
This is good news for Open Access which gives access on the computer desktop, without the researcher even having to visit the library. It will even mean that Open Access papers will be cited to a larger extent than their academic quality merits. This in turn will imbue Open Access journals with impact, making them even more worthy of being cited, creating a spiral making Open Access journals more accepted. If this leads to a faster transition to Open Access publishing (provided that would be beneficial), it is good for the scientific community. Open Access also means access for the general public, disseminating results wider than only the scientific community. Open Access journals are, unlike their hybrid counterparts, open for indexing by general search engines, thereby bringing science directly to the public.
If it leads to second-rate science becoming the most visible and most cited, while first-rate research becomes increasingly hard to access, it is detrimental to science.
Access today is, as described earlier, a question of competence. It is however also a question of both technology and of economy.
Before the era of the photocopier, access meant either subscribing to a journal or borrowing a copy from a subscriber. When the amount of published material was small, a scientific institution could afford to subscribe to most of the interesting journals. With a strong growth in scientific publishing, institutions have had to concentrate their economic resources on the journals most important for their research.
With the photocopier came the possibility of acquiring copies of papers from subscribers, but both this practise and borrowing journals carry costs. It is a difficult cost trade-off between subscribing and acquiring copies or borrowing.
The idea of Open Access is for everyone to have unlimited and unrestricted access to what is published. Meaningful access will still be available only for those with the necessary competence – but they no longer need to be a part of a research institution or be located near one, to have access.
With traditional publishing, access is a question of distribution, not of technology. All who need access will know how to read printed material. [9] Open Access is dependent upon access to computer technology and modern telecommunications. For the majority of the scientific community this should not present a problem. However, there are at least two groups for whom this will not be beneficial:
1. The computer illiterates, or computer resistant, for whom the use of computers for any task is a problem or a nuisance. For them Open Access will pose a problem, and they will prefer traditional publications, this again could affect the quality of their research or teaching. The role of the computer in higher education ensures that computer illiterates are an endangered species, and there are no conservationist groups around to save it.
2. Scientists in developing countries or other countries where the funding of scientific institutions may be a problem. Both computers and modern telecommunications may be rare or at least scarce commodities.
Creating a scientific paper and journal, and distributing it, necessitates a lot of labour and includes a number of professions. Changing technology changes their roles. There are a lot of possibilities, some aspects are possibly more important than others. And nothing can be said for sure about the future. Below, I will try to point out aspects of change that I believe could be important.
Under Open Access, publishers do not own what is published, and cannot gain income from controlling access. Their future may seem bleak.
However, publishers have amassed expertise and experience in many trades that is still necessary in order to publish a high quality journal – typesetting, copyediting, layout, computer operations etc. This expertise can be made available to the journals on a pay-for-service basis. Such a model could of course tempt the journals into trying to do everything themselves, but that is not a smart way of using resources. A division of labour where publishers perform the technical work and scientists the scientific work will be the model that best utilises the resources of both professions. Doing otherwise would, in economic terms, imply that scientists are better at publishing than at researching, which would be a sorry state of affairs.
It follows from the fundamentally digital life of the new journal, that there is no place for printers in the production of journals. Printing will be done on a paper-by-paper basis by the individual reader, meaning that printing will be done on office printers. This will be more costly than traditional printing if we look only at the printing cost per printed page.
University libraries often subscribe to journals through an agent. Such agents will have no place in the life of a digital journal.
The first scientific journals were dependent upon the development of a modern postal service for their distribution. Going digital will mean that the same journals stop using and paying postal services, making it more difficult to sustain postal services at their old level of service.
Digital journals will mean a bleak future for the journals department of a scientific library in that journals will not have to be paid for, received, found space for, lent out and kept track of.
Qualified personnel will still be needed to guide students and researchers to the best and most relevant journals for their studies and research. Teaching information retrieval and quality assessment to students and researchers will be even more important when journals are freely accessible, than today.
Helping researchers finding the best journals to publish in will also be a much-needed function.
In addition, Open Access opens up possibilities for publishing locally produced papers and theses; this needs qualifications that libraries and librarians often possess.
In this case, the author is a scientist. In a digital world, the author takes over the role of the typesetter. [10] This is not a result of digitising the journal, but a result of text-processing software for desktop computers.
The author may also face the task of financing his or her papers in a new model for publishing; this could also be an institutional responsibility. If the choice is between cost-free (to the author) traditional publishing and fee-based digital publishing, digital publishing will have problems establishing itself as a viable alternative. A rational author will choose the low-cost, high impact traditional publishing instead of the costly, low impact digital publishing. Obviously, financing models that makes the economic differences invisible to the authors must be designed in order to make researchers able to make decisions that are rational both to the researcher and to science as a whole.
The author in his or her capacity as author is the one major player whose role seems to be the least changed by a transition to Open Access publishing.
The editors, who are also scientists, may find themselves with new tasks in a remediated journal. As journals may become more of an arena for debate, they may have to take on the role of chair in the ongoing discussions.
The pace of the journal will also quicken, making editing a more central part of everyday life than is necessarily the case today. This may make the life of an editor both more interesting and challenging, but also more of a burden.
As we have seen, remediating the scientific journal has had little impact on the design of the scientific paper itself. Hypertext features have been implemented, but otherwise it seems much the same. This may change as the digital scientific paper matures.
A major change has come to the journal itself. It has modelled itself on internet newspapers, incorporating a lot of their features and their “look and feel”.
Access to scientific papers change profoundly with Open Access – only access barriers (technology, economy or competence) to technology represents barriers to access to science, except for the necessary barrier of scientific competence.
There are also profound changes to the document complex surrounding the papers. Both access to additional material and participation in or insight into debates is greatly enhanced. This changes both the scientific debate itself and participation in the debate.
Bolter and Grusin (2000, 46–47) write about remediation as aggressive or transparent. Aggressive remediation refashions the older medium entirely, while transparent remediation tries to absorb the older medium and make discontinuities invisible. It seems that while the scientific paper is currently being remediated in a transparent and absorbing fashion, the rest of the document complex is being remediated in a more aggressive fashion, exploiting more of the possibilities of the new medium. The the journal is presented as a new, hypermediated experience at the same time as it is trying to achieve some immediacy as the “new journal” opens up as an arena for more direct communication.
With some notable exceptions, Open Access seems to open up science in a more democratic direction, with better access and better possibilities for participation.
As openness and dissemination are primary goals of scientific publication, it would seem to be an obvious conclusion that Open Access represents a better way of organising scientific publishing than traditional journal publishing is. I have pointed to a few arguments to the contrary, only the actual development of scientific publishing and further research can show whether Open Access really is the better way.
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[1] One will easily find examples of papers that do not, wholly or in part, conform to my list of traits. The general picture should however be as shown.
[2] It has been difficult to find literature discussing this fundamental aspect of science. My “grand view” is based on what seems to be tacit knowledge in the scientific community, but rarely discussed directly. Technical aspects of scientific publishing are discussed in Day 1988, especially pp. 1–14. Publishing as a part of the social fabric of science is discussed in Storer 1966, esp. pp. 151–159.
[3] The paradigm shifts of Thomas Kuhn (1996) are a valid argument against this view. However, paradigm shifts are not everyday phenomena, so for the daily workings of science one can adopt an incrementalist view.
[4] This development is not in the interest of science. If we take for granted that science is better at research than publishers are, and that publishers are better at publishing than scientists are, dividing the chores according to specialties will be a more efficient use of resources. Unfortunately, the scientists in general see no relationship between their own labour and institutional income or cost, while there is a clear relationship between costs of publishing and the budget allocated for their scientific expenditures.
[5] Utility, in economic terms. In this paper I will assume that basic economic terms and principles are known, without discussing them or documenting them. As this is not a paper in economics, I will use economics as a tool and not as a theme for discussion.
[6] The fact that the market for scientific journals must be seen as a market with monopolistic competition does not affect this argument.
[7] In preparation for this paper, I have browsed through a number of digital versions of paper-based journals made available to The University of Tromsø through its subscription to Science Direct, a service from the well renowned science publisher Elsevier. A small handful of papers have been studied in more detail. Likewise, I have browsed through a number of journals published by BioMed Central, a major Open Access commercial publisher, and a few papers have been studied in detail. From both sources, I have selected papers in biological or medical subjects for further analysis. As paper journals have been a staple diet for years, no more studies have been done for this paper. No systematic studies have been made; I have generally only tried to find a few examples to illustrate important points in my argument. A systematic study on a larger scale might have resulted in discoveries of other important effects of remediation.
[8] You need to be a member of an institution that subscribe to Elsevier’s Science Direct in order to gain access.
[9] I have chosen to ignore the very problematic question of language in this paper.
[10] Just as journalist have taken over their functions in newspapers, an experiment that has shown that an academic education does not guarantee control over grammar, spelling, punctuation or vocabulary.