More on the science/academic-politics issue of the moment, I’m afraid; if you’re a scientist reading this, you’ll have noticed that our little corner of the blogosphere is having a little bit of a moment over the efforts of certain publishers to suggest that increasing access to scientific information will cause the downfall of the Roman Empire somehow compromise the integrity of the scientific record, leading to great wailing and lamentation. It’s your typical Washington-focussed lobbying effort; most notably aimed at the US’s National Institute of Health, it’s been suggested.

But that’s not what’s interesting. This is: that we’re not taking it lying down. At least one of the American Association of Publishers’ members has broken ranks; Jonathan Eisen is calling for a boycott; BioMed Central say “come and have a go if you think you’re hard enough”; Alex Palazzo, who co-chaired a session with me at Scifoo on related issues, weighs in. And, as I wrote, some people are just PISD; even the veterinary epidemiologists are wading in, when they’re not worrying about the recent Foot and Mouth outbreak.

But all that wouldn’t amount to much if we were just talking to ourselves, but - crucially - we’re not: with a bit of a shove from us lot, it’s the mainstream A-list too. Condé Nast’s Wired weighs in, and Boing Boing pointed out the log in PRISM’s eye - ripping off images from Corbis.

Oops.

PRISM have got a mob on their hands - all of us with our little digital megaphones; but we’re faster, and funnier, and more human, and much angrier than they are, all of which which makes us a (disorganised and anarchic, but loud and very fast) lobby too: and, it turns out, one with - apparently - some powerful and voluble friends. That makes matters interesting, and complicated, for PRISM.

Anyway, here’s the page on PRISM’s site that made my blood boil. Go have a quick look; I’ll be waiting when you get back…

Myth 1: American consumers have a right to free access to articles their tax dollars fund.
Fact: American taxpayers do not fund peer reviewed research articles; they fund some of the research that is used in those articles. Institutions that fund research are encouraged to make research results available to the public. However, journals provide something else - a published journal article that has undergone a rigorous process of selection and peer review to ensure that research results are validated before they are disseminated and preserved for use by other scientists and the public. Subscription-based journals - not the taxpayer - fund the peer review process and the substantial costs associated with preparing, distributing, and preserving peer reviewed material.

Okay, let’s take this from the top. Firstly, I’m not an American, and nor are most scientists; but they’re lobbying Washington - so they’re going to elide scientists overseas, and the Wellcome Trust (who mandate open access), and the Gates Foundation, and indeed any organization who funds primary research - industrial, charitable, or foreign - who isn’t the US government.

So that’s their intent pretty clearly established; they’re after the US congress. But what I really don’t like is this bit:

Subscription-based journals - not the taxpayer - fund the peer review process and the substantial costs associated with preparing, distributing, and preserving peer reviewed material.

Well, we need peer-review, we need archiving, and we need distribution. No-one’s arguing that. But there are a few questions going begging here: firstly, who on earth is paying these subscriptions? Magic pixies? Leprechauns? Or, let us say, (substantially) contributions from the grants of the scientists who read the journals?

Just a hunch, you understand. It’s not that there are government-funded national bodies negotiating journal subscriptions or anything.

Secondly: who’s to say that the current business model for journals is the only one possible or, in the long term, economically sustainable at all? After all, PRISM’s approach - using a combination of bluster, lobbying, and the legal system - is working out great for the music industry, isn’t it?

But don’t believe me on that: here’s the British Medical Journal:

Making scientific research available for free on the internet rather than through subscription journals could reduce the cost of publishing research by up to 30%, a report published this week says.

The report, Costs and Business Models in Scientific Research Publishing (available at www.wellcome.ac.uk/publications) indicates that an open access model of scientific publishing—where authors of a research paper pay for their research to be peer reviewed and made available on the web free of charge to readers—is economically viable.

Funny - peer-review, selection and editing is included, too? But PRISM say:

Subscription-based journals - not the taxpayer - fund the peer review process

They do right now - which is okay as long as it’s economically sound. But they don’t have to. Next PRISM batter on deck:

Myth 2: Peer review costs publishers nothing - referees do not charge for their work.

No-one seriously believes this, do they?

Myth 3: Non-profit and commercial journals that are subscription-based hinder science and research.

In their own words:

90% of researchers say they have sufficient access to the STM journals that they need. Access to journal content ranks very low on their list of concerns.

So 10% of scientists are prevented from doing their work by the current system. And that’s OK? 90% fat-free, y’know.

And:

More than 70% of researchers say that access to global journals is better than it was just five years ago.

Course it is; they’re on the Internet, we can search for them, we’ve got new services like Google Scholar, and we don’t need to wade into a library to find that the journal we wanted is in the other library on the other side of town. So how much of that can be genuinely ascribed to the publishers behind PRISM, and how much to pervasive Internet access? That’s distinctly unclear to me. So let’s look at a concrete example. Some journals are doing fantastic things online, undoubtedly; Nature’s raft of services, obviously, is one example (and how Precedings fits with PRISM’s worldview isn’t that clear to me), but the best journal archive online, if you ask me, is from the American Physical Society. They have very liberal self-archiving policies, have the pre-eminent journal in physics , and aren’t members of the American Association of Publishers - for whom PRISM is a front. How very curious! Next:

Myth 4: Journal publishers are opposed to technological progress in the publishing industry.

How’d we get that impression? They’d never do anything like attempting to prevent technical innovation by suing Google.

Myth 5: Publishers charge exorbitant subscription fees for their journals.

Nature reports in 2003:

A top US research university is set to cancel its subscriptions to several hundred scientific journals published by Elsevier in January, in response to spiralling subscription costs… Cornell’s deal with Elsevier, now priced at $1.7 million, consumes a fifth of the university’s total periodical budget. When the library tried to cancel individual Elsevier titles, university officials say, the prices of the remaining titles increased significantly, offsetting any savings.

Fascinating. Stanford, 2006:

There is a big discrepancy between the prices charged by for-profit and nonprofit journals, reported Ted Bergstrom, professor of economics at the University of California-Santa Barbara, in a talk titled “The Changing Economics of Scholarly Journals.” Bergstrom presented data comparing journal costs in 2004 that showed that the price-per-page of for-profit journals was about three times the average price-per-page of nonprofit journals.
Prices should be decreasing rather than increasing, since the ability of scholars to publish papers on their own websites has reduced the value of journal subscriptions, Bergstrom said…
[...]
Publishers keep the prices high by using variable prices, charging more to large libraries with the ability to pay more, and by grouping leading titles together with less valuable ones and offering all-or-nothing deals for a large journal “bundle,” said Bergstrom, who maintains on his website a “P. T. Barnum’s List” of university libraries that subscribe to the most expensive and least cited journals.

As a physicist/materials scientist by background, I’ll leave the sixth myth to a medic, and the seventh to someone who has a vote in Congress.

Now, after that torrent of invective, I’ve got to say that the scientific journals I’ve dealt with, particularly their editorial staff, do a really good and immensely valuable job, and I certainly don’t want them to go away; it just really winds me up when any lobbying group argues disingenuously in an effort to drag politics into my life and work. If PRISM weren’t setting up straw-men, I might even agree with them some of the time: I’ve definitely got sympathy for the difficult situation some publishers are likely to find themselves in - wearing another of my hats, the indie record labels I love are being squeezed to death by filesharing’s splatter-job on copyright - and I don’t think there are any easy answers.

Obfuscating and avoiding the issues helps nobody, though. That’s what gets to me.

On a lighter note, we’re not the only people getting angry right now. I read a fair few of the London (new-)media/web/design blogs too, of whom one of the very best is Tom Coates’. He’s - justifiably - a bit down on marketers, and after being named on a PR blog’s list of the most influential 100 UK bloggers - now edited - he started getting a lot of unsolicited mail (spam, more or less) from PRs trying to promote their latest charges.

Last week he - rather explosively, and with a fair bit of strong language - hit breaking point, and the ensuing storm’s driven UK web-based PR into full scale retreat. From the last of those three links, Ged Carroll writes:

In fact, the last time I felt like this, was in April 2000 when I had just done a meeting with an incubator fund and had been confronted with the realisation my pension had gone up in smoke as the inmates were running the tech sector asylum.

Basically it boils down to this: PRs have ****** up: as an industry we’ve managed to alienate one of the UK’s most prominent bloggers.

In short, the public relations guys need the bloggers more than the bloggers need the public relations guys, and over the course of little more than a week, continued provocation by PR’s led to an almighty backlash.

Not that anything like that could ever happen in science…

This entry was posted on Friday, August 31st, 2007 at 3:59 am and is filed under academicpolitics, blogosphere, musings, openaccess, prism. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.