University of Tromsø
Paper inDocumentation Studies,Intermediate Course Supplement

Spring 2003

Open Access
– for better or for worse?

Candidate 28159

Tromsø, 15th May 2003

© Candidate 28159 2003

This document may freely be copied and distributed
for non-commercial purposes

Typeset with Garamond 11/15
Headings typeset with Arial in various sizes

Table of Contents

1Introduction

2Publishing in Science – the Whys and Wherefores

2.1The Purpose of Scientific Publishing

2.2Scientific Publishing and the Public Sphere

3The Traditional Scientific Journal

4Open Access

4.1Background

4.2The Model

4.3Differences and Their Effects

5Remediating the Document Complex

5.1The Structure of a Scientific Paper

5.2Remediating the Paper

5.3Extra Material

5.4The Journal

5.5Abstracts and Citations

5.6Peer Review

6The Social Life of Scientific Papers and Journals

6.1Who Will Publish and What Will Be Published?

6.2What Will Be Used

6.3Who Will Have Access?

7New Roles for Producers

7.1Publishers

7.2Printers

7.3Distributors

7.4Libraries and Librarians

7.5The Author

7.6The Editors

8Conclusion

References

1

Paper in Documentation Studies, Intermediate CourseSupplement Spring 2003

1Introduction

The first scientific journals were started in the last half of the 17th century (Philosophical Transactions, Le Journal des Sçavans).The advent of Gutenberg’s printing technology, papermaking and an organized postal system, together with the growth of science itself, were the circumstances that made such journals both desirable and possible.

The organization of the journal publishing activities has gradually changed from being controlled by science to being controlled by professional, for-profit publishing houses.

Until the advent of the internet, this has been the best form of organization, though it clearly has its disadvantages.

Open Access is a way of organizing scientific journal publishing in order to exploit the advantages of the internet. In this paper, I will try to compare the traditional publishing organization with that of Open Access in order to find the differences; both with regards to internal differences and with regards to the effects of these differences on the workings of science. When these differences and effects are discussed, their impact on dissemination and openness will be the criteria for finding them beneficial to science or not.

I will in the following only look at the publishing of scientific papers in journals. Many of the arguments could no doubt be equally valid for the publishing of series of papers, less so for monographs. Such an analysis could possibly be the theme of another paper; I will here limit myself to the scientific paper.

The scientific papergenerally has a number of traits[1] that makes it possible and interesting to study it on its own:

  • It is not published in order to give the author income. The income-generating potential of a scientific paperis, for all practical purposes, non-existent. Other scientific publications, like the textbook, the popular science paper or the monograph have, in varying degrees, an income potential and to some extent an economic motivation for the scientist.
  • It is of a length that does not lend itself to publishing separately.
  • The major cost of apaper does not lie in its publishing, but in the research leading to the paper.
  • It is not published in order to be read, but to be archived so that it can be read if the need should arise. Moreover, spending time reading papers are not a goal to be achieved, but a necessary but costly part of scientific activities.

Many of these traits, which set scientific journal publishing apart from general journal publishing, will be important in the following discussion.

2Publishing in Science – the Whys and Wherefores

2.1The Purpose of Scientific Publishing[2]

Publishing is an integral part of scientific work, and has been an important part since the early history of science.

Publishing has a number of functions. Science rarely goes forward in leaps; usually a scientist builds upon the work of earlier scientists, adding a small part of new knowledge to a vast repository of knowledge.[3] This repository can only exist and be explored through publishing. Publishing thus prepares a foundation to build upon, and furnishes information on paths that has been trodden before, with or without success. If successful, there is no need to spend resources on going it again; if unsuccessful one should have a very good reason for going it again before resources be spent upon such an exercise.

Scientific results also should be disseminated wider than only to the scientific community. Results should be made available for industry, commerce and government to exploit to the best for society. In large, science is funded by society. By making results public, science can contribute to the welfare of society.

Furthermore, publication makes research widely available for criticism and judgement by scientific peers. This is important in order to ensure that scientific results are original, re-creatable and truly scientific.

For the scientist, publication is also a part of the career process. By publishing, she demonstrates her insight and her competence. Publishing is the major aspect being evaluated when it comes to tenure, promotion, salary upgrades and so forth.

2.2Scientific Publishing and the Public Sphere

Habermas (1989) is concentrated upon the political and literary public sphere. He mentions science only in passing, and then mostly as a part of the literary public sphere.

One should note, however, that the development of modern scientific publishing follows, at least in the 17th and 18th centuries, the path of the literary public sphere. Scientific journals emerge in the second half of the 17th century, and science gradually frees itself from the power and censorship of the church and the court. At the outset, one could see science as a part of the literary public sphere; matters of science and technology were discussed by the same public in the same arenas. In the spirit of the age of enlightenment, scientists wrote for the general public, to spread knowledge as widely as possible. Gradually science became more professional and less a matter of personal interests of the rich. Science evolved its increasingly specialized vocabulary and formed specialized sub-disciplines. Meaningful participation in scientific debate increasingly demanded familiarity with the vocabulary and the knowledge base already built up. Without this competence, one would not be listened to, nor be invited to voice one’s opinion.

Today’s scientific journals direct themselves to the scientific community. This means that meaningful access to their contents is restricted to those who have studied the subjects for a long time. In this sense, one could say that science has withdrawn from the public sphere and instead created a number of scientific spheres, where only the select few have access. It is easy to see this as a de-democratization of science. On the other hand, the system of higher education in the western world has expanded the number of students by a number of magnitudes so that there are more citizens competent to access these scientific spheres.Capitalism demands a well-educated labour force in order to exploit the economies of division of labour, so the educational systems of the capitalist economies expanded through the 19th and 20th centuries, transforming even higher education from an arena for the select few to a common public good. This led to a great expansion of science and a continuing division of sciences into sub-disciplines. Scientific publishing grew with science, both as a result of and a pre-requisite for the growth in science itself.

In order to fulfil science’s responsibility for disseminating results to a wider public, a number of journals of popular science have been created. These are not the subject of this paper. Museums and public libraries are other arenas where science is disseminated to the wider public, as a continuation of the ideas of enlightenment.

3The Traditional Scientific Journal

The first scientific journals were published in 1665. The scientific journal has of course developed in the more than 300 years since then, but the basic model has been remarkably unchanged.

The journal gives space and audience to scientists informing other scientists of their work and the results of their work, in the form of papers collected and published together, at a regular interval under a common heading – the name of the journal. Most journals limit themselves as to subject, more or less narrowly.

The journal receives papers from scientists and lets them undergo a more or less rigid examination by fellow scientists in order to ascertain whether the paper is of an acceptable quality for publication. Often, an editor will suggest minor changes or major revisions of a paper, before it is accepted for publication. This review and editorial work is performed by scientists.

After acceptance starts the tedious work of publishing – typesetting, proofreading, layout, printing and distribution. These parts of the job, and that of marketing and managing subscriptions, are – more often than not – left to a professional publisher. Digitalisation has to some extent led science to perform more of the menial chores, leaving only the professional publishing tasks to the publishers.[4]The publisher finances his part of the production of the journal, through subscription fees. In order to do that, the copyright to the paper has been transferred from the author to the publisher, so that the publisher has the right to bar non-subscribers from having access to the publication in order to maintain the income needed for the publishing.

The model described above is not the only model practised – e.g. some scientific institutions do all the work themselves, other journals are wholly operated by a publisher – but it could be said to be the “general” model. I will base the discussion in this paper on this model. Some of the argument will be equally valid for other models, but extending the discussion to alternative models I will leave for possible later papers.

It should be noted that the advent of electronic publishing has not yet made any substantial impact on the organisation of scientific publishing. Some journals have found other models for their publishing, but generally, the players and their acts are the same. Of course, electronic editions of journals have been made available, as add-ons to or as substitutes for the paper editions, but this is not a major structural change. These electronic editions impose, through technology, access barriers parallel to the practical access restrictions of the paper editions. And they also denyyou access to volumes you have had access to, if you choose not to renew your subscription. With a paper edition, nobody can take away the volumes you have received while a subscriber.

4Open Access

4.1Background

Science has always had an interest in as wide a dissemination of scientific writings as possible. Technologies to support such a wide dissemination have been lacking until text became digital. Two main strategies have been followed in order to give free access to digital scientific literature:

–Self-archiving, i.e. publishing electronically (on the internet) copies of manuscripts sent to a journal for publishing, either before publishing (preprint) or after publishing (postprint). The earliest really successful self-archiving project is Paul Ginsparg’s pre- and postprint archive arXiv, established at Los Alamos National Laboratory in 1991, now moved to Cornell University (Feder 2001). The monthly submission rate lies at about 3000 papers (arXiv.org 2003), mainly in physics, mathematics and computer science.

–Publishing digital journals, i.e. establishing (or transferring existing journals to) wholly electronic journals that have no paper parallel.

Both strategies have their drawbacks. Self-archiving could be a breach of contract in that scientists have to sign over their copyright to the publisher when submitting an paper to a journal. As not all authors self-archive their paper, self-archiving cannot become a substitute for the complete journal for e.g. a scientific library. Digital journals have no subscription income to offset publishing costs.

A number of initiatives have been going on with the goal of creating free access to scientific literature. Still, only a minor part of what is published is freely accessible. In 2001, the Open Society Institute arranged a meeting in Budapest, trying to accelerate progress in the direction of free access. This resulted in The Budapest Open Access Initiative or BOAI (Budapest Open Access Initiativen.d). This initiative is supported by a number of institutions and individuals.

4.2The Model

Open Access, as described by the Open Access Initiative (Budapest Open Access Initiative 2002), points at the major problem with the traditional model described in part 3The Traditional Scientific Journal. That model depends upon publishers to restrict access to publications in order to finance the publishing. Such a restriction on access is wholly contrary to the interests of science, which is, or at least should be, dedicated to the widest possible dissemination of results.

A restriction on access, in the form of a price per copy of a journal, is a necessary device for a paper-based journal. Distributing an extra copy has significant costs that have to be covered. A free paper-based journal willnecessarily be restricted to distribution in a given number of copies. Who gets these copies will not be decided by any rational means like the recipient’s use for the information, but by arbitrary means. A price will both be an efficient means of assessing usefulness[5] and of securing financing of the costs incurred in the distribution. In a capitalist economy, a publisher in a competitive market[6] will sell journals at a price equal to or higher than his marginal cost of production and distribution (Ferguson and Gould 1975, 230–231).

Electronic distribution has insignificant marginal costs. According to economic theory this means that in an efficient market, price should be quite near 0 (Ferguson and Gould 1975, 248).

Open Access means access unhampered by pecuniary, technological or administrative restrictions, for all purposes which does not infringe upon the authors’ ideal rights of control over the integrity of their work and the right to be properly acknowledged. This is achieved by financing publishing by other means than by selling copies or subscriptions. This means that distribution can only be electronic, as paper-based distribution will incur costs that cannot be covered.

4.3Differences and Their Effects

The fundamental difference between Open Access and traditional publishing lies in the difference in financing. This difference, moving the responsibility for financing from the reader side to the author side, has major consequences. A major consequence already mentioned is that it necessitates a transition to electronic publishing only. That means that the scientific journal itself will be open to major changes.

Open Access also means that publishers no longer have ownership to the contents of published papers; this will change their role in the production complex. Authors may get new roles; readers will be different and may have new roles. The printers will have no place in Open Access. In all, the total production complex will be redesigned.

5Remediating the Document Complex[7]

Moving from paper to digital journals has in itself consequences. Paper and digital media are different, and other forms of publishing, e.g. newspapers, have been markedly changed in form and function with the transition to a digital life.

This need not be so. A digital journal need not be more than a paper journal archived and distributed in electronic form, in a format suitable for printing, e.g. PDF. Today’s electronic versions of journals published on paper are like that. The goal of such a remediation is ease of access and distribution.

The paper is not published alone; it is published as a part of a journal. The journal publishes a number of papers together with book reviews, discussions, letters to the editor, editorial comments etcetera. This is a part of an even larger document complex, where other documents like preliminary versions of the paper, reviewer comments, and background material like data, interim reports, work reports, correspondence and so forth, could be included.

In the following, I will look at both the paper itself and at the larger document complex surrounding the paper. I will demonstrate that the paper is remediated differently from the document complex itself; the document complex outside the paper will through remediation both change more and increase its visibility and accessibility.

5.1The Structure of a Scientific Paper

Aristotle (1996) describes (or, rather, prescribes) the structure of the classic Greek drama. In order to be a well-constructed drama, it has to have certain elements and a certain structure.

Similarly, the scientific paper has certain elements and certain structures. Day (1998, 11–13) describes a structure often used in natural sciences (IMRAD). Other branches of science have developed other structures that meet their needs, though the structure or reasoning of IMRAD seems to gain importance also outside the natural sciences. This may be the result of the status and image of exactness of sciences, where the basic natural sciences traditionally has the highest status and the human and social sciences often are seen as inferior, inexact sciences.

The overwhelming mass of published material a scientist has to read in order to explore or keep up with a field makes it necessary that what is published is easy to read and understand (Day 1998, 13). A well-defined structure can be seen as representing redundancy (Eco 1989, 51). Redundancy increases the chances of transmitting the intended message. Structure could also be seen as part of a scientific code minimizing the need for verbal transmission of the message.

These structures have evolved over almost 350 years; this implies that the present structures should be well suited to the needs of science. These structures have however not developed in a vacuum. They are the result of the workings of different forces, e.g. the interests and needs of science; typesetting, printing and binding technologies; distribution systems and the economics of science and publishing.

5.2Remediating the Paper

In principle, electronic publishing opens the same set of possibilities for the scientific paper as for other kinds of literature, primarily hypertext, interactivity and integration with other media.

While the traditional paper has a linear structure, it also contains hypertextual elements like the citation and the footnote or endnote. The first is referring to text(s) outside the paper itself; the otherarereferring to text in another place in the same paper. In an electronic paper, such hypertext elements may become active hypertext links, giving access to the text or work referred to.