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Wellcome Trust to Require Open-Access Publishing

Posted by timothy on Mon Mar 21, 2005 03:22 AM
from the wellcome-idea dept.
The Media Science
Lars Arvestad writes "The Wellcome Trust, one of the worlds largest research funding agencies, will require results from research funded by the Trust to be available in public repositories six months after publication. The Trust's policy advisor Robert Terry writes in an article in PLoS Biology that the Trust plans to start its own public access repository where authors are expected to deposit their published works. The repository is modeled after NLM's PubMed Central and is called UKPMC. Terry's article also mentions that a recent Wellcome report found that an author-pays business model has the opportunity for a saving of 30 % on publishing costs alone compared to reader-pays. This contrasts the recent IEEE report (Slashdot story last week) where it was claimed that some universities will face higher costs using author-pays."
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  • I am not sure what is the best answer.

    Maybe differtent strokes for different folksis the way to go.

    What is undeniably good is that people are trying to do something about access to the information and the cost of accessing it.

    • Re:Author pays or user pays? (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Zork the Almighty (599344) on Monday March 21 2005, @03:34AM (#11996813) Journal
      I think that author pays will be the dominant model in the future. In addition to the economic benefits, I think this model has the potential to produce higher quality science, or at least stem the tide of mediocre papers which are submitted over and over again to different places. Of course, this model places a lot more importance on the integrity of the participants, but this is not a new problem for scientists. We have disreputable scientists and disreputable journals now.

      • I think that author pays will be the dominant model in the future. In addition to the economic benefits, I think this model has the potential to produce higher quality science, or at least stem the tide of mediocre papers which are submitted over and over again to different places.

        That sounds a lot like the description of an infomercial. We have too many of those already.

        The economic benefits you point out are also a conflict of interest, pressuring the journals into publication of mediocre, question

      • or at least stem the tide of mediocre papers which are submitted over and over again to different places

        I wish something would happen about that. I saw a paper a while back which took some previous work and changed *one* equation by replacing an equals with a "greater than". Somehow that was considered worth 10 pages in an important journal - it can only have taken the author an afternoon to write.

        The number of times I get deja-vu reading journals these days is huge.

    • The way it workd is that the author pay at the moment too. There are page charges and even more for color figures. We are used to paying to publish. Idealy it would not so. I would much rather have an article that everyone could read for free.

      • "The only way to achieve this is that research is registered before it is carried out, and only allowed to proceed if the results will be published, regardless of the 'success' or 'failure' of the research."

        I don't think this will work quite the way you want it to.

        I can see what you are trying to achieve and broadly agree. But registered with who? For what? If I find and interesting side alley not directly related to what the project was registered as can I still publish it? Ever?

        If universities weren'

  • Good for them! (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Raul654 (453029) on Monday March 21 2005, @03:27AM (#11996778) Homepage
    In the last year, I've had several incidents where I needed to access old articles from the Nature, the ACM, and IEEE. (old = 2, 4, and 33 years old respectively). Let me tell you, there is NOTHING more infuriating than not being able to access these when you need them. Bugmenot helps some, but not always.

    • Re:Good for them! (Score:5, Interesting)

      by fbartho (840012) on Monday March 21 2005, @03:34AM (#11996816) Homepage
      I've had that problem... Randomly recently, I googled my father, and found some articles he had authored in post-doc work, with his mentor/professor and someone else who's name I did not know... I tried to access the article unfortunately the publication had only the listing of the articles of its back volumes online, and even that seemed partially incomplete... Its sad... unless I can find that article some day in the future in our things... I may never get to read the paper... its the kindof thing that can get too easily lost among one's personal things after 20 years... moving from state to state and country to country...
      • If you'd like, I'd be more than happy to try looking at Caltech's online archives to see if the articles are there. If it isn't already online I can also try getting a scan of them, although that might take a little longer.

        If you don't want to post the article info here, feel free to email it to neuronexmachina, at gmail dot com.
      • Why not try an interlibrary loan at your local library? There are more ways to obtain articles than simply searching online.

      • I don't know if you have any academic connections, but you'll usually find that university libraries stock lots of journals in dead tree format. I'm often amazed at some of the obscure books and journals I've wanted that've turned out to been shelved in my local university.

        Complete online journal and proceeding archives are a relatively new invention that requires a certain amount of technical expertise, and it's no surprise that a lot of publishers simply haven't caught up.

        If you're near an acad

    • Re:Good for them! (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Zork the Almighty (599344) on Monday March 21 2005, @03:43AM (#11996865) Journal
      It really is irritating, and more and more people are becoming aware of the problem. In stark contrast to "the rest" of the world's information, much of 20th century science is locked up. People are only going to tolerate this for so long. If the copyright holders won't make it accessible, maybe we should give the rights to someone who will. That could be a type of trust (which would compensate the original rightsholders), or it could be everyone (put it in the public domain). People are willing to pay for this information. They won't pay $40 per article or whatever BS some of these publishing houses are demanding. Make it available or face a revolt.

      • Re:Good for them! (Score:4, Insightful)

        by sabot99 (828715) on Monday March 21 2005, @05:42AM (#11997301)
        The world's information is not "locked up" - they're called "books." Most human knowledge is still in this form, believe it or not. I'm noticing more of this Google-myopia nowadays: if it can't be found in a search engine, then it either doesn't exist or isn't worth knowing.
        • Did you say this in your best crotchety old man voice?

          The people you're calling myopic are the ones who want the books to go *into* the search engines. Until then, the information in those books is locked behind a wall of time. You can dig through it, but your expected return for time invested is often not nearly worth it.

          Besides, isn't myopia something you get from spending too much time reading... books?
        • There are plenty of papers from the 1970's and 80's whose material I would like to read. Some of this stuff is in books, but quite a bit of it is not. Sometimes the books are crappy, and you want to check the original source because they might offer additional insight. Also, anyone wanting to understand the development of their field is going to need to read these papers. Someone elses' summary in the form of a book is what we might expect for information from 2000 years ago. Not 20 years ago.

  • Author pays? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by lachlan76 (770870) <lachlan.gunn@in t e r n o d e .on.net> on Monday March 21 2005, @03:34AM (#11996814)
    Depending on what the cost is, this could lock out the less well-funded scientific research.

    • Re:Author pays? (Score:5, Informative)

      by rsidd (6328) on Monday March 21 2005, @03:43AM (#11996863)
      BMC [biomedcentral.com] has waivers [biomedcentral.com] for those who cannot pay (and also, authors whose institutions are members needn't pay, and institutional membership is inexpensive -- far cheaper than journal subscriptions). Meanwhile, PLoS [plos.org] says that fees are waived for those who say they can't pay, no questions asked [plos.org]. These are the two biggest and most high-profile open-access publishers; I think others will have similar answers.
    • This is one of the main concerns, but I think it will be mitigated as the publishing model starts to take off. If a paper is important, then it will always get reviewed. Hopefully there will be less of an emphasis on the volume of papers published, with a greater emphasis on quality. The current model is terrible for this. An author may incur few costs when publishing a paper, so there is no disincentive to publish. People start publishing lots of papers to pad their CV, and then it becomes the norm.
      • On further reflection, I think that the only way to ensure the integrity of the process is to have a third model: "everyone pay".

        Under the author-pays model, libraries get a free ride. Before we give them all that money back, we should ask them to do something small to help the process. Libraries should cover the distribution costs. A few terabytes here and there isn't going to cost a lot of money, probably the amount that they spend on a single journal now. And putting a copy of all this information i
    • Not really. Others have pointed out that waivers exist from most of the publishing organisations anyway. And the less well funded researchers would massively benefit from access to the research of others.

      Besides which, for even poorly funded research the cost of publication (say $1500 for a paper) is relatively small in comparision to the cost of doing research in the first place. Research is expensive, period. It costs about 100-150,000 dollars a year to keep me on the road and I am relatively cheap! In a
  • Hopefully the author pays thing isn't run like the crooked 'we will publish you' sci fi ripoffs out there.

    I can see the 'published research' model being misused by the drug companies in that all they have to do is spam the repository with studies saying the cigarettes and cellphones aren't that bad for you, drowning out the studies which say otherwise.

    • Hopefully the author pays thing isn't run like the crooked 'we will publish you' sci fi ripoffs out there.

      The big question to ask is, "Who is the customer?" If the customer is the author, rather than the reader, the publisher bends over backward to make sure the author is happy. Want happy authors? Publish any drivel they spew.

      • Re:Hopefully the author pays thing isn't like sci (Score:4, Insightful)

        by Illserve (56215) on Monday March 21 2005, @06:47AM (#11997507)
        The scientific publishing industry isn't bending over backwards to make anyone happy (except their accountants of course).

        Your idea is cute and all, but they stick it to both authors and readers.

        Readers have to pay exhorbitant fees, as much as $40 for 5 days of access to a single article (that's just my discipline). The only way to get affordable access to these discplines is for libraries to band together and get big group package deals.

        And authors have to pay to publish their own papers, which are already prepared according to strict formatting guidelines. Their reviewers aren't paid either.

        So publishing houses are getting cash from both ends and in this era of paper-less publication have fewer and fewer BrickNMortar costs per issue sold.

  • Astronomy (Score:5, Interesting)

    by mbrother (739193) <mbrother.uwyo@edu> on Monday March 21 2005, @03:40AM (#11996844) Homepage
    In Astronomy, all the major US journals are author pays. We also have a preprint server that is free that most astronomers post their articles to (except for Nature articles because Nature won't let them). The one problem I have with author pays is that you have to come up with the grant funding, and a lot of the grant funding is project specific, so if you do a side project that isn't funded (something real common when working with students), you've got to get creative and beg, borrow, or steal the funding to pay for it. For instance, I had a 29 page paper as a grad student that didn't fall under my advisor's grants, and had to beg from department sources (finally getting the $4000 I needed from our observatory budget).
    • 4000 to publish a paper? Hopefully they put it on nice paper.

    • Re:Astronomy (Score:5, Informative)

      by Lars Arvestad (5049) on Monday March 21 2005, @05:35AM (#11997281) Homepage Journal
      We also have a preprint server that is free that most astronomers post their articles to (except for Nature articles because Nature won't let them).
      The Nature policy you claim is apparently not true. In the most recent issue of Nature, an editor writes [nature.com]:

      So please let's put a myth about this journal to rest. As first stated in an editorial in 1997, and since then in our Guide to Authors, if scientists wish to display drafts of their research papers on an established preprint server before or during submission to Nature or any Nature journal, that's fine by us.

      • Uh, no. He's talking about the final published draft -- Nature does most certainly ban that. They don't mind if you post your text while they're reviewing it, but they will not allow you to post your text once they have published it.
      • Well, as a US astronomer I feel like I should publish in US journals where most of my work has appeared. MNRAS also can be deadly slow, and A&A doesn't have the best reputation for papers in my subfield. If I'd been turned down for page charges from my local sources, then, yes, I'd probably have gone to A&A or MNRAS (and I've refereed for both of these, too).

  • Separate peer review from publishing (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Dachannien (617929) on Monday March 21 2005, @03:43AM (#11996866)
    Ultimately, the best thing that could happen to research publications is to separate the peer review process from the publishing process. This would facilitate "just-in-time" publishing while maintaining the credentials for a peer-accepted work. Then, other interested parties can download the paper and read it from their computers, or print it out to a hardcopy (as school libraries might do).

    Yes, it takes the whole aspect of "profit" out of the equation, but this is science, not entertainment.

    • We'll probably move to something closer to this in the future. With the preprint servers we're essentially there in some fields where this is the acceptable practice (I understand string theory is like this).

      I actually came up with an idea back 5-6 years ago for something like slashdot forums for scientists to comment on individual papers in a big archive. People could easily update results, discuss findings, etc., faster and efficiently in a forum rather than the slower process of publication. Referees don't always do a great job. I try to, and I've gotten many thorough reports on my papers, but also some shoddy ones.
      • I actually came up with an idea back 5-6 years ago for something like slashdot forums for scientists to comment on individual papers in a big archive.

        That sounds like a great idea to me. For niche fields, a person could pretty much set something like that up themselves, examining recent conference submissions or journal articles. For the larger fields (especially anything in medicine), it would be a rather tremendous undertaking, though.

    • I agree, but a lot of people want to keep anonymous refereeing, and its hard to do that well whilst keeping an effective separation of editors and referees from particular journals.

  • The New "Freedom of Information Act" (Score:5, Interesting)

    by rump_carrot (644292) on Monday March 21 2005, @04:07AM (#11996982)
    Things like this are the best way to force open access for scientific publications.

    Why is this such an important thing?

    Imagine the follwing business plan:

    1) Make people PAY to incorporate their computer programs into your project.

    2) Make people give you their copyrights to accept their program into your project.

    3) Make people contributing code to your project also debug other peoples code. For free.

    4) Profit!

    Who would put up with such a kwaaazy system? We scientists. Why do we put up with this exploitation? Because we have no other choice if we want to remain competitive.

    However, if there is enough external pressure for the system to change, it will.

    You think I'm a Krazy Krackpot? I present you with the following:

    1) My lab publishes ~ 2-3 papers a year, in journals like Biochemistry and J. Biol. Chem. It costs us ~ $2,000/publication.

    2) Although we PAY the pulishers money, we still give them full copyright. (Recall: we formatted, created graphics and edited the documents).

    In case you are worrying about the poor publishers, remember the following:

    1) Few people read printed journals these days, most download the articles in PDF format. How much can that cost?

    2) The process of editing and reviewing papers is done by other scientists, such as myself - for FREE.

    Let's hope the trend is towards liberating the information that is paid for by taxpayers.
    • So instead you:
      1. Format the paper into PDF
      2. Send it to about 200 peers for review
      3. Get responses back from some of them
      4. Ignore the responses from the ones that found something wrong
      5. Put the paper on your website with notes that it was peer reviewed by the folks that found no problems with it

      That way it costs nothing, takes a lot of your time, and gives you the incentive to corrupt the peer review process. What could be wrong with that?

      --
      Currency conversion calculator [ostermiller.org]

  • Maybe it's time for the Slashdot editors to learn english! The wellcome trust!? I think it's ti...oh...what? That's how you really spell it? Oops...

    (Laugh, because you know it went through your mind too.)

  • Enormously good news (Score:5, Informative)

    by Chalst (57653) on Monday March 21 2005, @04:19AM (#11997020) Homepage Journal
    There's been a lot of discussion at Lambda the Ultimate about the relationship of publishing and scientific organsiations like the ACM to the interests of the theoretically switched-on hacker community. See, eg. this thread on Journals and Papers [lambda-the-ultimate.org].
    • Does by any chance a Mr G Freeman work there? Has he published any interesting papers on say planetary scale wormholes or interdimensional travel. I think I know the security guard as well, so say hi to Barney for me please.
  • = internet?

    A shame it's not as organised as a library and so of course this is a good idea.
  • One of the things I really like about PLoS (Public Library of Science) is that they don't just make their articles free to access, they actually release them all under the Creative Commons license [plos.org]. You can do pretty much anything you want with released content, including derivative works and commercial use, so long as you give the original author credit.

    Hopefully the new repository that the Wellcome Trust is setting up will use something similar.

  • Inevitable (Score:4, Insightful)

    by DrJAKing (94556) on Monday March 21 2005, @06:07AM (#11997372)
    Something along these lines is inevitable. Historically, journals provided certain services to academics that made their lives easier - professional document preparation, distribution, and quality control. To do this they relied on an equal relationship with the community - peer review involves a hell of a lot of work on the part of academics, which is "unpaid" (though certainly part of the job). Technology has completely changed this balance - we can prepare and publish our own documents; we can distribute them amongst our peers for review. The position of journals now is merely brokers of reputation, but we can figure that out for ourselves too. They are basically parasites these days, and while they are fighting all the way, the power does not lie with them. Still, they're being a little more graceful than the entertainment industry, I'm yet to see a scientist sued for distributing pdf's of their work.

  • Business model (Score:4, Interesting)

    by kocsonya (141716) on Monday March 21 2005, @06:13AM (#11997387)
    "Terry's article also mentions that a recent Wellcome report found that an author-pays business model has the opportunity for a saving of 30 % on publishing costs alone compared to reader-pays."

    Some papers take it to the ultimate level. The IOVS (and ophthalmology research paper, huge readership) figured out how to mix all models.
    - The reader pays, subscription is compulsory if you are a member of the international society of ophthalmic research.
    - The paper is full of advertisements
    - It's peer revieved, revievers get nothing
    - Authors pay for publication (and the paper puts a footnote for each article, indicating that since the author paid, the article legally is paid advertisement), colour pictures are extra.
    - Authors also assign copyright to the paper (don't know the exact terms).

    So, the best of all worlds: author, reader, advertiser - they all pay!
    3: Profit!!!

  • Arcane system from the 1970s (Score:4, Informative)

    by climb_no_fear (572210) on Monday March 21 2005, @07:31AM (#11997659)
    For biology, this arcane system is a leftover from the early 70's when this was the only way to make money on biological research (Genentech, the first biotech was founded in '76). Only journals (and a few suppliers) used to earn money on biology research.

    It is interesting to note that taxpayers pay for (most) research which is then published in journals. The journals then retain the copyrights to the research. As someone else pointed out, publishing in JBC costs $2000 (I can verify this personally). The best part is, the NIH paid me to do research, and then paid again for someone else to take the copyright to this taxpayer-funded research. Amazing!

    There has already been an initiative from the NIH that NIH-supported research be freely accessible after 6 months.

    For a directory of Open Access journals go to: http://www.doaj.org/ [doaj.org]

  • Big Threat to Professional Scientific Societies (Score:3, Insightful)

    by bill_911 (39606) on Monday March 21 2005, @08:34AM (#11997994)
    The inevitable change in scientific peer-reviewed publishing will have a major impact on professional scientific organizations such as The American Chemical Society, American Association of Immunology, Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology - just to name a few.

    These non-profit organizations enjoy significant cash flow and influence in their field from the current system.

    Many of these organizations are mired in bureaucracy and petty internal politics. I predict history will repeat itself and they will act like the RIAA, the movie industry and other large organizations, and attempt (and fail) to avoid fundamental change when it stares them in the face.

    This is sad because if one of the major professional scientific societies led the way, eventually everyone would eventually benefit.
  • The issue with Author pays type systems are that when you start a lab, you have a small startup budget, from which you pay for equipment, consumables, staff, etc. You are then expected to bootstrap your research programme, go out, and get grants to continue its existance.

    So far, so good, except that you need publications to get the grants, and it's possible that publishing those papers is going to prevent you from having the resources to actually do the research. A couple $4K papers on a theorist start
    • The costs associated with publication, even for author pays, are still not zero. You need to write and maintain the software. You need to get editors. You need to get peer reviewers. You need secretaries to organise the reviews.

      This costs are not insignificant.

      Besides which, in many areas, which are conference paper based rather than journal based, you already have this problem. I work on a budget of around $2000 per publication (for costs, not for the research which is obviously much greater).

      Phil
  • The way to solve this whole problem is that whoever's name is on the copyright notice is the one that pays the cost of publication. If the magazine wants to own the copyright, it cannot charge the author; it can only charge if the author retains all rights. This will solve the problem nicely.
  • Why shouldn't these publishers charge universities, research institutions and corporations for subscriptions? Even if the general public gets free access? Those orgs use the research to make billions of dollars in profits, subsidized by the rest of the system. What's a few thousand bucks a year, atop the millions spent consuming the research? Even the free access for the rest of us comes back to them, in general consciousness raising (which fertilizes the scene for more results) and educating people who tho
    • >Why shouldn't these publishers charge universities, research institutions and corporations for subscriptions?

      Why shouldn't the publishers pay for the research that they are currently getting for free. I give my time and energy to reviewing articles. I get back nothing. I give my time and energy to doing the work.

      More over the publishers control the way in which I can use the papers. 10 dollars to read a paper is cheap, if I am reading the paper. But what if I want to do a stastical analysis over 10,00
    • I really can't believe all these spelling mistakes that make it thru!! Wellcome?!?!

      Nice Troll... I'll bite.
      From their "About Us" page [wellcome.ac.uk]:

      The Wellcome Trust is an independent charity funding research to improve human and animal health.

      Established in 1936 and with an endowment of around £10 billion, it is the UK's largest non-governmental source of funds for biomedical research.

      As a privately endowed charity, we are independent from governments, from industry and from donors.

      The governing do

      • There's a great description about the Wellcome Trust in The Backroom Boys [amazon.com]. They helped ensure that the human genome was sequenced properly and that the information remained in the public domain.

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