European inquiry into scientific publishing

The European Commission (EC) has announced that it plans to investigate the economic and technical evolution of the scientific publication markets in Europe.

Philippe Busquin
European Commissioner for Research

The announcement, in a press release from the European parliament in Brussels, Belgium, stated that "the study will deal with the main topics of the current public debate, such as the future of printed scientific reviews, the risks associated with increases in the price of publications in terms of access to information for researchers, open access to research findings for all and the need to reconcile authors' rights and the economic interests of publishers."

The EC investigation is in response to the growing concerns within the research community about the future of scientific publishing. The debate about publishing in Europe led to the Berlin Declaration initiative in October 2003 (see Open Access Now, December 1, 2003). 'The Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge in the Sciences and Humanities' encouraged European researchers to change their publishing habits. The initiative was led by Germany's Max Planck Society, and the Declaration has now been signed by research agencies and institutions from across Europe and beyond.

Philippe Busquin, the European Commissioner responsible for research, stressed that the organization of the scientific publishing market has a significant influence on European scientific research. "Scientific publications not only serve to disseminate research results, they also constitute a tool for evaluating the quality of research teams," says Busquin. "Our objective of establishing a genuine European Research Area, and our aim to raise the profile of European research, mean that we have to examine the scientific publishing system."

The European research community has seen fierce debate about Open Access publishing in recent months. European researchers are responsible for 41.3% of all scientific publications, compared to 31.4% for the USA. The European continent is home to several of the largest commercial scientific publishers, as well as the London-based Open Access publisher BioMed Central (publisher of Open Access Now). European funding agencies and charities, such as the Wellcome Trust (see interview in this issue), have expressed a commitment to supporting Open Access publishing. The EC study comes on the heels of UK House of Commons Science & Technology Committee inquiry into scientific publications (see the Open Access Now inquiry page); a report from this committee is to be published in July.

The EC investigation seeks to "identify measures at European level which could help to improve conditions governing access to and the exchange, dissemination and archiving of scientific publications while guaranteeing a high level of quality, diversity and protection of authors' rights." The inquiry will examine recent changes in scientific publishing in Europe, identify the driving forces and the sources of resistance, and will assess the consequences for users (be they authors, readers, or libraries). It is currently unclear what form the inquiry will take, but the results are expected to be published in a report next year.

http://europa.eu.int/

Baby steps from the market leader

The world's largest publisher of scientific and scholarly journals will now allow authors to post their full-text articles on their own websites or institutional repositories.

Stevan Harnad with Elsevier's Pieter Bolman,
at the INIST Open Access conference in Paris, 2003

Authors who have published in any of Elsevier's 1,800 journals can now post a copy of their article on the Internet. Karen Hunter, Senior Vice President for Strategy at Elsevier, outlined the 'postprint' policy in a letter to Stevan Harnad on May 27, 2004. The policy change has since been clarified on the news section of the company's website.

Hunter emphasized a number of restrictions. The online copy must be author-generated and cannot be a PDF or HTML version downloaded from Elsevier's ScienceDirect website. The posting must include the article's citation and a link to the journal's home page or the article's DOI (digital object identifier). And the author cannot deposit the article in a repository other than at their own institution.

Harnad, an academic who is heavily involved in promoting self-archiving of academic works, enthusiastically welcomed the announcement. "Elsevier has demonstrated that - whatever its pricing policy may be - it is a publisher that has heeded the need and the expressed desire of the research community for open access and its benefits to research productivity and progress." Harnad has been campaigning actively for years to encourage researchers to use self-archiving to provide access to their work. "One could not have asked for more," he says.

Peter Suber, Editor of The SPARC Open Access Newsletter was also keen to stress the importance of the policy change. "We may all disagree about how well it matches public definitions of Open Access, how it weighs against other Elsevier policies, or even how much it was foreshadowed by earlier Elsevier actions. But there is no question that it marks significant progress for Open Access. Permission for postprint archiving is all that authors need to provide access to the final, peer-reviewed editions of their own work. Elsevier deserves our thanks for adopting this most helpful policy."

"The open access ball is now clearly in the research community's court," wrote Harnad in a response to Elsevier's announcement. "Let researchers and their employers and funders now all rise to the occasion by adopting and implementing institutional open access provision polices." Suber encouraged authors to seize the opportunity to make their work 'open access' and appealed to other publishers to follow suit, by supporting this form of Open Access without immediately changing their business models.

Other Open Access supporters were less effusive. David Goodman of Long Island University commented, "I do not think any scientist would consider Elsevier's policy a fully satisfactory permanent arrangement, and all would prefer that the edited version from the publisher could be posted," while Bob Parks, Professor of Economics at Washington University at St Louis, said "I guess each baby step in the right direction is good, but honestly this is a baby step compared to the position before which allowed preprints without restriction or request."

Jan Velterop, Publisher at BioMed Central was equally skeptical: "What Elsevier now 'allows' is what they were never really in a position to prohibit anyway, a point that Harnad has been making for a decade. Any move towards more open access is good, of course, but this is the tiniest of steps in that direction. The key is whether authors are more likely to take it up now than they were in the past. They would be well-advised to publish in Open Access journals, and so to provide a structural solution to the access problem."

http://www.elsevier.com/