Science works because its data and ideas are made freely available to anyone who wishes to use them or test their validity. The global computerization now gives us the means to carry this principle to its logical end: scientific information can be made freely and instantly available, no matter where you are. The bloodstream of scientific information may thus flow unimpeded, and science, the most successful venture of mankind, will grow and prosper. Right? Maybe – or maybe not.
It all depends on what we do with the information we create. At present, we have the peculiar habit of giving it away to commercial publishers and then buying it back from them at a high cost. Whether it is distributed on paper or via the web makes no difference; we still pay dearly. The reason? "That’s how we’ve always done it."
Using the metaphor of the bloodstream, it is as if you would donate your blood, not to hospitals for emergency use, but to bottle manufacturers who will bottle it, store it for a year or so, and then sell it back to you at a handsome profit. The price will be so high that you cannot afford to buy back all of your blood, and even so you will have to cut down on eating and clothing to afford the blood you need to survive. Yet you keep donating your blood and pay to get it back, because the bottles indeed have beautiful labels and your doctor tells you that blood that hasn’t been in one of these expensive bottles isn’t worth having.
But here’s a possible scenario: One day it dawns on you that the place for your blood is in your body, and that its value and quality have nothing to do with what, if any, bottle it has been in. The blood indeed belongs to you, and you have been giving it away out of habit and ignorance. So you pull out the syringe and walk out, free of the bloodsuckers. They try to call you back, telling you that you’re sure to get sick and possibly die without their help. You tell them you'll be fine, and that they are the ones who will perish if the other blood donors follow suite.
OK, I’m not quite fair. Until recently, the bloodstream of scientific information really hasn’t been able to flow freely. We have been dependent on competent publishers to organize the printing and distribution of scientific works. The publishers have been properly, though at times excessively, paid for this work by selling the books and journals to the users. It is as if you would have suffered from a strange disease by which your bloodstream hadn’t been flowing properly, so that doctors would have had to remove blood from your aorta and distribute it to the various parts of your body. A deadly disease, to wit, but a wonderful cure has now been invented, called the Internet. Through its arteries and veins, your blood can now flow unimpeded, and you don’t need to pay the old bottle manufacturers any longer to store it outside your body.
It’s time for science to reclaim its property.
Information, like high-grade energy, has a cost; only noise, low-grade heat, is for free. We may think that the thousand dollars or so that we pay for a yearly subscription to a single journal issued by a commercial publishing house is expensive. In fact, it’s cheap, and by no means do the collected subscription fees cover the costs of producing it. It’s just that we don’t pay for the information, but for the expensive package. The information itself was produced by working scientists, financed by their institutions and funding bodies. Its value was enhanced by the purgatory of peer-review and scientific editing. Very little or none of this is paid for through the subscription fees – most scientific editors and almost all reviewers are unpaid, so this cost is in reality borne by them and their institutions. All this value is given to the publishers for free – but we pay to get access to it.
More and more commonly, authors of scientific articles are requested to donate to the would-be publisher the copyright of the work they have produced. The signover may seem harmless enough – after all, the publisher needs to protect the investment in the published work, and the copyright contract usually stipulates that the author will be allowed to make subsequent use of the material, with or without asking specifically for permission. Nonetheless, by signing away the copyright, authors restrict the use of scientific results that legally may not even belong to them and in any case should be freely available to the global scientific community.
Science is Darwinian. I don’t mean this in a biological sense, but epistemologically. A multitude of data and ideas are conceived every day. Many are aborted by the pre-natal selection forces of self-criticism and peer-review, but quite a few of them eventually see the light of day and are exposed to the harsh reality of natural selection. By weeding out flawed results, and by identifying the viable ones and building upon them, science progresses. The more easily available the results are to the global scientific community, the better the selection process will function.
I work at a large natural history museum which has comprehensive departmental libraries. We share a campus with a major university, and within five minutes’ walk from my office are the geosciences library, the biosciences library, and the main university library, all with extensive subscriptions and holdings. The catalogues are on the web and instantly accessible. I should be in the middle of information heaven.
But I’m not. Unless it’s been published in one of the major journals, chances are very slim that an article will actually be present in any of the libraries. Even if it is in a major journal, subscription may have been discontinued for reasons of cost. There remains the possibility of interlibrary loan, meaning hassles, delays and costs.
The picture is changing, although slowly and not always in the right direction. I can now reach many journals directly on the web from my own computer or from the library terminals. Few of these are free journals, however. They still cost the library-equivalent of an arm and a leg to get access to, and unless "my" library (or I myself) has paid a generous subscription fee, they are not available to me. And as for the leg that’s being paid, the university library recently announced that it was discontinuing the subscription to the service I found useful above all others, Biological Abstracts online, in order to be able to pay for online access to a bunch of journals provided by one of the more well-known high-profit publishers. Although I value the easy access to a few of these journals now available to me on the web (most of them I’m quite indifferent to), the net effect is a considerable loss.
General free access to scientific results is for the first time within reach, thanks to the development of a global computer network. Yet we will not get there automatically, and if we’re not wary, we may wake up to find that most of the crucial scientific information has remained in the ownership of mighty commercial publishers who will spoon it back to us for a fee.
Fortunately, there is help at hand, and we, the scientists, may make all the difference in the world by voting with our feet and supporting the good initiatives.
Figure 1 shows data concerning some of our favourite palaeontological journals. The dark blue bars represent the approximate institutional subscription costs for each journal, averaged as per 10,000 characters ("letters and spaces") published in 1999. A group of journals run by professional societies (peach-coloured area of diagram) keep a price well below US$ 0.50 (green line). A middle group of journals (purple field), mostly run by university-based publishing houses, cost about three times more than the first group, up to about one dollar (red line). The third group of journals (grey field) are run by commercial publishing houses, and cost between US$ 1.50 and 2.50 per 10,000 characters, or an average of seven times as much as the society-run journals.
A fourth, hopefully growing, group (yellow field) is the one represented by this journal, i.e. web-based journals distributed free of charge, US$ 0.00.
Note that the price has nothing to do with technical quality – somewhat surprising, as this is the value that the publishers are supposed to have added. The "peach group" generally is of high quality. The least expensive paper-based journal in the survey is Journal of Paleontology (Paleontological Society). It offers among the best printing quality in palaeontological publishing, better than the 22(!) times more expensive Marine Micropaleontology (Elsevier). Nor does the price seem to have to do with scientific quality: all of the journals are peer-reviewed, and although I may have my subjective opinions about the quality of articles published in the various journals from time to time, I’m not aware of any price-related difference between them with regard to scientific quality.
For those who worry about a journal’s Impact Factor (IF, a measure of the average number of citations that an article in the journal receives in the core journals of the Science Citation Index; the IFs are published yearly in the Journal Citation Reports) as a proxy for scientific quality and status, there’s also good news. The light blue bars in Figure 1 show the most recent (for 1998) IFs for all the journals in the survey (except for Palaeontologia Electronica, which is too young to be included in the JCR; but see site statistics). There seems to be no correlation between price and IF. In fact, the two journals with the highest IFs are both in the "peach group".
Thus there is an immediate measure that each individual scientist can take, which will change the map more thoroughly and permanently than any other initiative: Vote with your feet! Refuse to publish in or review manuscripts for the high-priced journals!
All this should be great news, spelling the doom for companies that currently cut gold by holding scientific results at ransom. But it would be unfair not to stress that dissemination of information, whether on paper or on the web, involves costs, and someone has to pay. The society-run journals wouldn’t be able to sell as cheaply if it weren’t for the fact that much of their costs are hidden: unpaid labour by dedicated individuals, support from professional institutions, etc. They also thrive on the fact that membership in professional societies is seen as an expression of vocational identity; we join the societies whether or not we need personal copies of the publications. And free electronic journals like Palaeontologia Electronica would be unthinkable without support from sponsors, institutions, and individuals.
But even the most expensive journals from commercial publishers live on subsidies from the scientific community – the scientific work behind the articles never enters into the expense accounts. This is exactly the point: We have accepted that basic science is best run as a not-for-profit enterprise, to everyone’s benefit. To make the published results free of charge for the user is nothing if not consequential. If we want our results as widely and easily available as possible, then this is a proper price to pay. Science loses from a system that restricts access to published results to those affiliated with large universities that can afford to pay the increasing costs of an increasing number of publications.
There is no free lunch. Science itself is an expensive endeavour. Society supports it, because in the long run it has proven to be of decisive influence to our cultural and material wealth. Basic science, however, is not expected to bring its own direct returns. That’s why most of it is publicly rather than privately funded. It’s only with regard to publishing the results of the work that this principle has been allowed to founder. Fortunately, there are strong movements at foot to rescue the situation.
The SPARC (Scholarly Publishing & Academic Resources Coalition) initiative has been launched to support low-cost alternatives for the publication of scientific material. When this is written (March, 2000) HighWire Press, a not-for-profit organization, hosts 48 life-science journals yielding free access to back issues following a period of two months to five years after publication, and the number is growing. The PubMed Central initiative aims to provide free web access to life-science journals. These and similar initiatives are highly welcome and worthy of support.
World-wide Academia, with its numerous institutions and devoted individuals, should have the power and incentive to build up the necessary infrastructure to bring about the desired goal: free global access to all scientific information. Attitudes need to be changed for this to happen, but the foundation already exists. Let’s by all means co-operate with commercial enterprises that give us services we need at reasonable prices, but we should never again become dependent on unique products from single providers who without punishment can raise the price far beyond our pain level. Science is a global venture, and its results are mankind’s property. Let’s reclaim it.