Society
for Scholarly Publishing
Issue
Status Report
June 2004
Open
Access:
A Matter For Definition
Prepared
by Barbara Meyers
Member,
SSP Board of Directors
and
President,
Meyers Consulting Services
Table
of Contents
Issues and
Players
Such a Time to be Alive
Whence Open
Access
Open Access
Definitions
Association of College and Research
Libraries
Association of Research
Libraries
Berlin Declaration on Open Access
Bethesda Principles
BioMed Central Open Access
Charter
Budapest Open Access
Initiative
CreateChange.org
Directory of Open Access
Journals
International Council of Scientific and
Technical
Information and
co-signatories
International Network for the Availability
of
Scientific Publications
Organisation for Economic Co-operation
and
Development
Open Access now
Public Library of Science
Washington, D.C. Principles for Free
Access
to Science
World Summit on the Information
Society
Some Pros &
Cons
Open Access Endorsements (Those in
Favor)
European Research Organisations as
signatories
of the Berlin Declaration
Coalition of Major Library and Public
Interest
Organizations
UN World Summit on the Information
Society
Wellcome Trust
Open Access Detractions (Those
Opposed)
Elsevier
Rockefeller University
Press
Oxford University Press
American Institute for Biological
Sciences
American Meteorological
Society
American Diabetes
Association
Federation of American Societies for
Experimental
Biology
Some Position
Statements
Association of Learned and Professional Society
Publishers
Blackwell Publishing Ltd
Publishers International Linking
Association
International Association of Scientific, Technical and
Medical
Publishers
National Health Council
Public Library of Science
Experiments and
Initiatives
Arabidopsis
Book: American Society of Plant Biologists
and
BioOne
BMJ.com: BMJ Publishing
Group
The Company of Biologists
E-BIOSCI
Entomological Society of America and Florida
Entomological Society
eScholarship Repository: University of
California
The FIGARO Project
Nucleic Acids Research: Oxford University
Press
Physiological Genomics: The American Physiological
Society
Comments on Open Access within
Responses to the United Kingdom House of Commons
Science and Technology Committee
Inquiry into Scientific
Publications
American Association of Law Libraries, American Library
Association,
Association of Academic Health Sciences Libraries,
Association
of College & Research Libraries, Association of
Research Libraries,
Medical Library Association, Public Knowledge, and
Scholarly
Publishing & Academic Resources
Coalition
Association of Learned and Professional Society
Publishers
Blackwell Publishing Ltd
The Chartered Institute of Library and Information
Professionals
Electronic Publishing Trust for
Development
Elsevier
Institute of Mechanical
Engineers
Institute of Physics
International Union of
Crystallography
John Cox Associates
Oxford University Press
The Physiological Society
Public Library of Science
Royal College of
Psychiatrists
The Royal Society
SHERPA
Society for General
Microbiology
Society of Endocrinology
University of Southampton
SPARC Europe
Wiley
World Cancer Research Fund
International
World Summit on the Information
Society
Who will
pay?
Where do we go from
here?
Concluding
Comments
Reading
List
Resources
Acknowledgements
Introduction
The Society for Scholarly Publishing
(SSP) is an international nonprofit professional association
founded in 1978. The mission of SSP is to advance scholarly
publishing and communication, and the professional development
of its members through education, collaboration, and
networking among individuals in this field. SSP provides the
opportunity for interaction among members in all aspects of
scholarly publishing, including journal and book publishers,
librarians, manufacturers, and web
editors.
This is the first Issue
Status Report published by the Society. It came about in
response to member requests that SSP declare a position
regarding open access publishing. From its beginnings,
SSP was predicated on the concept that the Society would serve
as a neutral forum for all opinions generated by the numerous
perspectives arising from the diversity of its membership—a
membership spanning the communication process from author to
reader. This Issue Status Report establishes a mechanism for
the Society to maintain its neutral role yet provide a
balanced information source to its members and the larger
scholarly communications community.
It is important that the reader realize
that the extensive number and length of quotations found in
this report arose out of a desire to ensure accuracy (and any
question of bias) in the presentation of opinions expressed by
the variety of individuals and organizations. Critical
concepts are best conveyed in their original state without any
potential for even the slightest perceived permutation through
synthesis or summation.
To help the transition from original report text to a
quotation and back again, throughout the report quoted
passages are italicized.
The Society’s intent is not to
influence, but to inform by way of a relatively compact text
and an exhaustive reading list,
which also contains references cited in the text. The report highlights
the critical events that have taken place as the issue has
developed over the last few years, places those events in
historical context, and provides extensive quotes of all
published perspectives relevant to the open-access concept.
The reading list points to a
fairly comprehensive body of supportive and supplemental
materials. Serious readers are urged to avail themselves of
the citation linking to the full text (most offered via open
access). The intent for providing this extensive bibliography
is to assist the reader in becoming more conversant with the
depth and breadth of perspectives in the community that can
only be skimmed here. Follow-up reading is encouraged in order
to gain the most from this information.
Issues and
Players
The issues surrounding open access
publishing are almost as numerous as the journals it concerns.
Recent mass media attention on
the scholarly publishing process has brought about both
internal and external examination of key aspects in the
process, namely:
·
the extent and quality of peer
review
·
the technologies and costs associated
with the capture and display of
information
·
the technologies and costs associated
with the various distribution channels
(formats)
·
the pricing policies and subsequent
business models exercised by the various types of scholarly
publishers
·
the ever-increasing expectations of the
principal consumer (i.e., authors and researchers/scholars)
with regard to the method of information delivery along with
its cost, availability, and extent of access (bibliographic
versus full-text)
·
the impact of new technologies and
current publishing economics on other sectors of the
communication process, namely, authors, libraries, and allied
industries such as aggregators and subscription
agents
·
the technological challenges to
ensuring the accuracy and accessibility of archives both
present and future along with the potential impact of author
archives and repository archives
·
the overall sustainability of the
scholarly communication process.
On both the individual and collective
bases, these issues are too extensive in their composition and
reach to be examined and discussed in this report, but they
are identified here for the purpose of reminding the reader at
the outset that open access publishing does not exist in a
vacuum. In fact, the complications arising from each issue
that impact on the very process of scholarly publishing create
a context not to be ignored as the reader postulates the
changes that may occur in publishing based on the degree of
acceptance that the various open access models will
experience.
Through this Issue Status Report, SSP
endeavors to provide an overview of the publicly held
positions from as many players in the community as was
feasible and appropriate to give the reader a balanced body of
information. The sectors of the communication process most
vocal about the issue of open access publishing include
authors (mainly coalitions of researchers in scientific,
technical, and medical membership organizations), commercial
and nonprofit publishers (specifically professional societies/
associations and university presses), libraries, and
third-party vendors (aggregators, etc.).
Such a Time to be
Alive
“What an extraordinary
time it is in scientific and medical publishing.” Neil Turner
(2004) starts his review of PLoS Biology (BMJ, January 2004)
with this extremely positive sentence that harkens back to the
old Chinese adage (or curse) about interesting times.
What has brought us to this
extraordinary point in time? Most articles written about open
access to the full text of primary literature hold the same
premise as a mystery novel — follow the money. The escalating
cost of scientific journals is cited as the primary suspect
(some even deliver a verdict of guilty to commercial
publishers as the prime culprits). These articles, which
have become nearly a separate body of literature in and of
themselves as they posit a multitude of perspectives, create a
maelstrom of information.
To make matters just that
much more confusing, the lines that some attempt to draw
between publishers and everyone else (academic administrators,
librarians, government funding agencies, and researchers) are
not that clear either. Richard Horton, editor of The Lancet,
reported that he is now hearing concerns voiced by scientists.
“They [scientists] cite new biases with open-access models,
which could further distort an already uneven playing field
for authors. If
new journals are to be funded by authors, they ask, will this
approach not favour those authors who can pay….? The Public
Library of Science [PLoS] denies that it will introduce new
barriers … That may be the intention, but if the avoidance of
a new barrier to publication depends, for example, on a means
test, authors in resource-poor settings might be dissuaded
from submitting their work to author-pays journals because of
the fear of stigma or a reluctance to be the beneficiaries of
western charity.” (Horton, 2003).
Karen Hunter, Senior Vice
President, Elsevier, wrote in the March 23, 2004, edition of
Nature (“Open Access: yes, no, maybe) about a speech given
last month by Paul Saffo, research director of the Institute
of the Future.
His message was that “we were living in a period of
‘unprecedented uncertainty.’ I [Hunter] cannot imagine a more
apt description”
(Hunter, 2004a).
These statements of concern by
two seasoned publishers reflect just how muddled the opinions
and perspectives can appear with regard to messages sent and
received between all the players in the scholarly
communication process. For the sake of focus and brevity, this
report will concentrate now on the open access issue without
major forays into many other important related areas such as
copyright, global information dissemination, relevant library
and publishing standards, institutional repositories and the
open archives initiative. Each of those topics deserves
singular treatment, but at least a nod is given to most
through the reading list.
Whence
Open Access?
The concept of open-access (OA)
publishing does not have a long history compared to the
350-year run of scholarly journals. But OA did appear a few
decades prior to the most recent (2001) and highly publicized
example of the Public Library of Science (PLoS), which has
spawned so many column inches of published opinion and as many
lines of text on various listservs.
The first examples of open
access to published scholarly information are found in the
field of education. Peter Suber, Senior Researcher, The
Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition
(SPARC), cites 1966 as the
year when the first “open access” (the term was not in use at
that time) source of bibliographic information came into
existence. This was the ERIC (Educational Resources
Information Center) database, launched by the U.S. Department
of Education and the National Library of Education (coverage
began with books and journal articles have since been
added).
The first notation of an early
free online peer-reviewed journal comes in 1987 with New
Horizons in Adult Education published by the Syracuse
University Kellogg Project. Two years later Stevan Harnad
launched the online journal, Psycoloquy, sponsored but not
published by the American Psychological Association, that
became peer-reviewed in 1990. Also in 1989, Charles
W. Bailey, Jr. started free online publication of The
Public-Access Computer Systems Review, adding a peer-reviewed
section in 1992.
Free online peer-reviewed
journals continued to appear in each subsequent year. As of
March 1, 2004, the Lund University Libraries’ Directory of
Open Access Journals (DOAJ) lists 766 titles covering topics
from agriculture and food sciences to technology and
engineering.
Suber’s use of both the
terms “free” and “open access” points to one of the pivotal
issues in the current debate among librarians, publishers,
scientists, and funding agencies—that of definition. There aren’t hundreds
of definitions for the term “open access,” but in the last
24-plus months a number have been offered. Certainly enough to
make one take pause and think to ask what someone means by
“open access” rather than presuming your definition is the
same as that of your colleague.
Open
Access Definitions
The following definitions
describe open access publication from a variety of
perspectives (quoted directly from the relevant websites,
published statements from meetings, press releases, or
publications).
Association of College and
Research Libraries (ACRL)
[ACRL Scholarly
Communications Committee, 2003. “Principles and Strategies for
the Reform of Scholarly Communication.” Approved by ACRL Board
of Directors on June 24, 2003 at the American Libraries
Association (ALA) Annual Conference.]
“ACRL supports the
following principles for reform in the system of scholarly
communication:
·
the broadest possible access to published research and
other scholarly writings
·
increased control by scholars and the academy over the
system of scholarly publishing
·
fair and reasonable prices for scholarly
information
·
competitive markets for scholarly
information
·
a diversified publishing
industry
·
open access to scholarship
·
innovations in publishing that reduce distribution
costs, speed delivery, and extend access to scholarly
research
·
quality assurance in publishing through peer
review
·
fair use of copyrighted information for educational and
research purposes
·
extension of public domain
information
<
Last Edited
07/13/2004
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