Date: Wed, 21 Jul 2004 14:54:27 +0530 From: Subbiah Arunachalam <arun@mssrf.res.in> 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 ------------------ 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>