Date: Wed, 21 Jul 2004 14:54:27 +0530
From: Subbiah Arunachalam
Friends:
Here is an interview with Robert Terry, Senior Policy Advisor at the
Wellcome Trust, UK. It appeared in the latest issue of Open Access Now, a
part of The Scientist. I thought that this should be read widely in India.
Regards.
Arun
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http://www.biomedcentral.com/openaccess/archive/?page=features&issue=18
Wellcome support for Open Access
Funding bodies play a major role in the Open Access debate as they provide
the money that pays for scientific research. Funders have the right to
influence how their money is spent and how research results are
disseminated. The Wellcome Trust is the UK's leading biomedical charity,
spending over �400 million (over US$700 million) each year on research.
Robert Terry, Senior Policy Advisor at the Wellcome Trust, talked to Open
Access Now about why the Trust supports Open Access.
The Wellcome Trust spends a lot of money supporting biomedical research in
the UK and around the globe. Over the next five years the Trust expects to
fund top-quality research to the tune of �2 billion (around US$3.6 billion).
It seems only reasonable that the Trust be interested in how scientific
findings are published and shared. To guide its decision-making the Trust
commissioned two studies of the economics of scientific publishing. The
results were so compelling that the Trust issued a position statement (see
Open Access Now, November 3, 2003
http://www.biomedcentral.com/openaccess/news/?issue=8) expressing
unequivocal support for Open Access models. "The Wellcome Trust supports
open and unrestricted access to the published output of research, including
the open access model, as a fundamental part of its charitable mission and a
public benefit to be encouraged wherever possible," said the statement.
Robert Terry is the Senior Policy Advisor in the Strategic Planning and
Policy Unit of the Wellcome Trust. "The unit is responsible for horizon
scanning, policy and strategy on behalf of the Trust," explains Terry. As
well as directly funding researchers, the Trust runs two libraries; one is a
history of medicine library and the other is an information service for the
general public. "The advisory committee of these libraries first raised the
question of Open Access a few years ago. I led a small in-house group that
began to research the issue. It became clear that one of the things that we
didn't understand (and we wondered whether other people understood or not)
was the real economics of the market."
"In fact researchers on the whole are not directly paying for anything.
There are really very few people in the biomedical research area that are
paying for their own research. It's actually funders like ourselves and the
research councils who are paying," Terry reminds us. "The funding bodies are
the last players to get involved in Open Access. There needs to be a really
significant step in raising consciousness among the funders, to see whether
or not we can get things to change."
The economics of publishing
The Trust commissioned SQW, an economic and management consultancy company,
to investigate the scientific publishing sector. In September 2003, the
Trust published the results in a report entitled 'An Economic Analysis of
Scientific Research Publishing
http://www.wellcome.ac.uk/en/1/awtpubrepeas.html'. Terry agrees that many
people had begun to examine these issues, but the report provided an
in-depth insight into how the economics of the scientific publishing
industry influence the way in which scientific knowledge is disseminated. "I
think that it was perhaps the first time that it had been pulled together in
quite that way," says Terry. "For someone coming to this topic for the first
time it pulls everything together in a fairly straightforward way. The
report was certainly highly influential in the Trust. It encouraged the
Trust to come out and say that we now believe in Open Access publication."
"When you look at it from an economic point of view it is clear that you
have a failing market," explains Terry. "Researchers give away their
research data free to journals that then retain copyright. Then researchers
and the users of that information obtain the information via libraries. So
it is libraries that are paying the cost of re-accessing that information
once it has been peer-reviewed and published. What we end up with is a very
dysfunctional market," he notes. "The producers and the consumers are
completely separated from any market forces, hence subscriptions can rise
year on year and the people who are demanding the product are more or less
oblivious. When you review the last ten years you come to fairly shocking
figures of rises of 200% in journal subscription prices and the realization
that certain commercial publishers are making large profits. And that is
money that is leaving the system. It's going to shareholders or to learned
societies. As a funder, we have to start thinking about how money that we
are pumping into the system is leaving the system for a completely different
purpose from our mission. That's really what started to drive us. So we
began to consider what the alternatives are and how this could be organized
in a much better way."
------------------------
"As a funder, we have to start thinking about how money that we are pumping
into the system is leaving the system for a completely different purpose
from our mission."
Robert Terry
------------------------
"We published our statement to say that we think that the system is not
working well. It became clear to us that the dissemination of research is
actually a research cost and that by delegating that activity to others
(journals and their publishers) we have actually got locked into a very
inefficient system. We felt that there must be better ways to share
information and make the Internet as efficient as possible in the
dissemination of research and increasing knowledge."
Open Access saves money
The Wellcome Trust committed itself to paying the costs of Open Access
publishing and encouraging researchers to deposit their work in open
archives. But Terry's group wanted to have a better understanding of the
true costs involved in Open Access publishing and the alternative publishing
models, so they commissioned a second study by SQW. "The second study
basically filled in another gap in the evidence base," recalls Terry.
"People were questioning whether authors-pays models (though in reality they
are 'funder-pays' models) are efficient, economical and commercially viable.
They expressed concern about the sustainability of these models. That's why
we commissioned the second report which is about the actual costs involved
in peer-reviewing research papers, managing manuscripts and dissemination on
the Internet."
The second Wellcome report 'Costs and Business Models in Scientific Research
Publishing http://www.wellcome.ac.uk/en/1/awtpubrepcos.html' was published
in April 2004. "I think that it was really interesting because we tried as
much as possible to talk to commercial publishers, learned society
publishers and Open Access publishers," says Terry. The report provides
evidence that an author-pays model offers a viable alternative to
subscription journals. The Trust concluded that "Open Access publishing
should be able to deliver high-quality, peer-reviewed research at a cost
that is significantly less than the traditional model while bringing with it
a number of additional benefits."
The report concluded that savings of up to 30% might be achieved. The
research shows that publishing a research article in the traditional way
costs between �800 and �1,500 (between US$1440 and US$2700). Under Open
Access the cost is about 70% of that, at �550 to �1,100. "I feel fairly
confident with what we have come up with," says Terry. "Nobody has actually
disputed the figures; they might disagree with the conclusions, but they
haven't disputed the figures. The savings could even be more, because the
costs that we identified were the 'first-copy' costs."
"If we move to an Open Access system it allows for interesting other models
to start being used. For example, you might think about introducing a
submission fee to cover the costs of peer review. That would suddenly reduce
the publication costs down to around US$500-600 by having a very small
submission charge." The idea is that a submission charge would be paid by
authors of all articles that are peer-reviewed, rather than the situation at
present where the only charges that are paid are from authors whose work is
eventually published - so they, in effect subsidize the cost of rejecting
articles. Terry reminds us that currently many journals have page charges
and extra charges for color figures. "It seems to have been forgotten, or at
least it is never mentioned by the commercial publishers, that authors have
been paying page charges for years and these are often much higher figures
than are talked about for Open Access."
The need for increased advocacy
"The rationale for doing these two studies was to move the whole debate away
from the economic issues," says Terry. "In a sense, the economics don't
matter in that it should be viable to move towards another system - and that
system should be more efficient and less expensive. And on top of all that
you get all the fantastic benefits that Open Access should allow: far wider
dissemination, higher impact in terms of people reading and citing your
work, and reducing the barriers to research. These barriers and publisher
restrictions are a real impediment to science and the way that science needs
to be done. The reports certainly got a lot of media attention. They brought
the issue right into the broadsheets and the financial newspapers. So, I
think that they helped to get people seriously engaged in the debate and
thinking about viable alternative models."
Terry dismisses many of the myths being voiced by the opponents of Open
Access. "Some argue that if the system isn't broken don't fix it: we would
argue that the system is broken," says Terry. "Another way to look at it is
that it's an engine running on two cylinders as opposed to six - it still
gets you along the road, but is it really working efficiently or taking you
to the all places that you want to go. You have to ask yourself the question
- what sort of money is leaving the system to support that inefficiency."
Terry suggests that learned societies have to think harder about their
goals. "Is making a surplus from the dissemination of research still a
justified activity when it might actually be an impediment to research
itself? I think that some of the learned societies have to start thinking
about what their purpose is and who they serve."
----------------
"Another way to look at it is that it's an engine running on two cylinders
as opposed to six: it still gets you along the road, but is it really
working efficiently or taking you to the all places that you want to go?"
Robert Terry
---------------
"There's a lot of talk about initiatives such as HINARI, but researchers in
developing countries are still paying higher subscription fees than their
American counterparts," says Terry. (HINARI is an initiative to provide
free, or low-cost, access to major biomedical journals to public
institutions in developing countries; see Open Access Now 19 January 2004
http://www.biomedcentral.com/openaccess/www/?issue=12.) "While Open Access
won't immediately make life any easier, because of the digital divide, I
think that in time it will help the system because true Open Access puts no
restrictions on reproduction. Someone can download various papers, or even a
whole journal if they want to, print it up and distribute if for no charge
or for a small distribution charge. There are all sorts of different models
that could be used. Open Access systems offer a true market that will allow
all sorts of different experiments to come and go, and fail or succeed, and
hopefully lead to greater efficiency in the system."
"Stimulating the debate was one of the first things we wanted to do and I
think we can confidently say that we have done that," remarks Terry. The
Trust is eagerly awaiting the report of the UK House of Commons Committee
Inquiry http://www.biomedcentral.com/openaccess/inquiry/. "I would like to
think that the weight of arguments is so conclusive - certainly they have
been to us - that the Committee will make certain recommendations to the
government about Open Access being better for public money. Over 90% of the
research that goes on in the universities in this country is funded either
from government or from the charity sector. But if you are just an ordinary
member of the public you cannot read it, unless you pay for it. I think that
the government will find it difficult to come down in favor of one business
model or another. But they could certainly be looking at how best to use
what's available to disseminate publicly funded research."
Terry says that the Trust is unlikely to insist that its fundees publish
exclusively in Open Access journals - at least at this stage. "Whist I can
see the strong arguments for that, one of the things that we are reluctant
to do is to force researchers down a path too early and create unnecessary
antagonism. If Open Access delivers as many benefits as we think it should,
then researchers should be choosing it willingly. I think we need more
advocacy work with our own stakeholders. We are looking at how to
communicate to the people who take our grants about the benefits of Open
Access. Ultimately that's where the argument has to be won. Researchers
themselves must be convinced that this is in their best interests."
Terry feels that repositories are also an effective way to disseminate
science. While the Trust might consider building its own repository, Terry
is hoping that the House of Commons Committee may recommend the creation of
a national repository for all UK research. "That could be done in all sorts
of ways. It could be something that was immediate, that anyone who had
received public money would have to place their papers there, or it could be
after three months or after six months or whatever. There are all sorts of
steps that could be taken. That would be a positive step forward and we
would be supportive of such a national open archive."
The Wellcome Trust has provided a leading example for other funding bodies
to follow. The Trust is motivated by its role in funding top quality
research and is committed to making sure that the results of that research
can be read by everyone. The Trust has emphasized that it considers the
costs of research dissemination to be part of the costs of research. "Our
analysis suggests that we are really only looking at 1-2% of standard
research costs," says Terry. "I think that's a small price to pay for the
increase in impact, citations, and so on. It might mean that we fund less
research. But a 1-2% decrease in volume may not be a bad thing. What we are
interested in is high quality research that has a real impact, not the
numbers of papers. If one of our �5 million grants produces only one paper
but that paper is really hugely significant then I think that we would be
happy. And we would want it to be completely open and freely accessible."
http://www.wellcome.ac.uk/publications
