Scholarly Publishing

What is Scholarly Publishing ?

“Scholarly publishing” is the result of research from which scholarly writings are created to: 1) describe the research; 2) evaluate its reliability and reproducibility; 3) disseminate it through multiple channels; 4) preserve what has been done for future use. From this system, further inquiry and subsequent knowledge and understanding are created, which in turn result in additional communication among scholars.

Is there a difference between scholarly publishing and “scholarly communication”?

The term “scholarly communication” is a broader term and has evolved in recent years to refer to communication methods employed by scholars to bypass the increasingly prevalent difficulties with the traditional publishing model. It includes informal communication among scholars as they create new knowledge and evaluate its usefulness, getting input from other scholars. It has also come to include various non-traditional methods currently being investigated to avoid some of the issues arising from the traditional publishing model.

Traditional Scholarly Publishing Model

In the traditional scholarly publication model, the researcher conducts his research and then submits his writing about his project to a journal publisher for publication. The journal publisher reviews it and the submitted article is further edited through the peer review process. The article is then published in the journal with dissemination of the journal to the larger scholarly community. Journals are also widely disseminated to scholars in societies and to a larger community of readers through purchase of a subscription to the title by libraries, who further preserve the title for availability in the future. A cost is involved in some of the steps of peer review and publication, and this cost is passed along as subscription cost to those who will receive the results of the research. A profit is usually made by the publisher.

What are the current issues with Scholarly Publishing?

The costs of print and electronic journals have accelerated above the rate of inflation for over a decade, and as a result, libraries often can no longer afford the same journals to which they subscribed in the past. The amount of research being done has also grown. With the advent of electronic journals, whose licenses cost more than the print materials did, library budgets can no longer absorb all the increased costs. University faculty members are not always aware of this impact to library budgets, nor the fact that materials cost far more to the institution than to the individual. Often, since the researcher must sign away his copyright to the publishing company, the researcher ends up indirectly paying for his own creativity. The number of mergers that are occurring in the publishing field also mean that the control of the publishing resides in the hands of just a few publishers, thus affecting costs charged.

New Models in Scholarly Communication

As a result, other models for new types of scholarly communication are being proposed by many groups to try to counteract both the increasing publisher costs and inequity of researchers paying again for their own ideas. Some of these are highlighted below.

Open Access

Open Access (OA) literature is available at no cost on the Internet and is usually free of most copyright and licensing restrictions. The Open Access movement is a result of the issues of the traditional publishing model, and has as its most durable assumptions that access to journal articles will be free on the Internet and not subject to traditional copyright restrictions. There are several different models which fall under the “Open Access” umbrella.

Some of the titles available through OA may be journal titles from the more traditional publishing model, but for which the publisher has decided to make the electronic copy of the journal articles available through the open access method. Some of these titles may also have an “embargo” period, a designated period of time during which the publisher will not make the journal’s articles available on the Web. Once the embargo period has passed (varies for up to 1 year), the articles from a traditional journal may then be freely accessed.

Some recent initiatives in the Open Access movement are highlighted below, and assist in better understanding the OA movement.

Budapest Open Access Initiative

The Budapest Open Access Initiative resulted from a meeting in Budapest in December of 2001, designed to highlight issues and effect progress internationally to make research in all academic fields freely available on the Internet. Representatives of many nations and academic disciplines met to try to work together to explore how many smaller separate open access initiatives within individual countries might work together to achieve broader and faster success. The result is the Budapest Open Access Initiative (BOAI), a statement of principle, strategy and commitment, signed by the Budapest participants and a growing number of individuals and organizations worldwide to support various Open Access initiatives. Further specific information regarding the BOAI and the full initiative may be found at: http://www.soros.org/openaccess/index.shtml

The Bethesda Statement on Open Access Publishing

Participants at a one-day meeting at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute in Chevy Chase, MD met in 2003 to discuss ways to proceed with the open access movement. Two conditions resulted from their discussions as conditions for Open Access materials:

The authors and copyright holders grant all users a free right of access to the publication and to copy for a responsible purpose with attribution of authorship
The deposit of a complete version of the work in electronic format with at least one online repository supported by an organization enabling open access and long term archiving.

To read more fully about the Bethesda Principles, follow the link: http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/bethesda.htm

Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge in the Sciences and Humanities

Another conference held later in 2003 in Berlin, and composed of participants from Germany, created an OA definition that reiterated the Bethesda Principles. It provided its definition of OA, listing the types of works covered, and noted two conditions for terming the item Open Access:

Free and irrevocable worldwide access to copy, use, distribute, transmit and display the work publicly with proper author attribution.
To deposit the work digitally in at least one online repository using suitable technical standards.

Various criteria regarding further promotion of the OA paradigm were also listed. More detail on the Berlin Declaration may be obtained at: http://www.zim.mpg.de/openaccess-berlin/berlindeclaration.html

DC Principles

In 2004, a number of scientific societies’ publishers became concerned over the OA movement and how it might affect their economic well-being. The “DC Principles” evolved from a meeting of these societies in Washington. This set of principles was slightly different from the above two. While not supporting the immediate access stated by the Bethesda and Berlin principles, there was some support of open access. For more details, consult the link: http://www.dcprinciples.org/

The NIH Initiative

In 2004, the U.S. House Appropriations Committee recommended that the National Institutes of Health (NIH) develop a policy that would require free Internet access of any articles from NIH-funded research within six months of publication in a journal. The “requirement” was subsequently changed to a “request”. After much discussion and numerous drafts, the final recommendation was released in February of 2005. It changes the original “within six months” request to “as soon as possible” (and within twelve months) after publication. While it is somewhat “watered down” from the initial intent, it nevertheless allows increased access to federally funded research. The papers are available through PubMed Central and publishers may impose an embargo period for the article. Most articles will still be under copyright. A recent newspaper article notes that in a recent study conducted at NIH, less than 4% of authors are actually depositing their works and recommends more stringent regulations. The article may be viewed at: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn /content/article/2006/03/09/AR2006030901960.html.

Full information on the policy may be obtained at: http://www.nih.gov/about/publicaccess/index.htm

Different Open Access Models

There are a number of evolving models within the Open Access movement, many of them with slight differences. Some OA publishers use the “author pays” model, where the author of an article pays the costs for its editing and distribution. A variation of this is an “institutional membership”, where the author’s institution or in some cases institutional library, pays a membership fee annually and all authors from the institution get their fees for accepted articles either waived or reduced. Peer review is used for manuscripts submitted, in the same way as in traditional publishing. Grant-funding institutions such as the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation include these costs automatically in grants they fund. Examples of this model of funding scientific communication are BioMed Central and Public Library of Science.

Biomed Central produces over 130 OA journals in biology and medicine. It uses the “author pays” model, but also has an Institutional Membership category, which many libraries have ended up funding. Traditional subscription journals are also produced by Biomed Central and while some titles are free, others are available only through subscription. Many BioMed Central journals are citation-tracked and already have journal “impact factors”. (http://biomedcentral.com)

Public Library of Science (PLoS) is a non-profit organization of scientists and physicians. They concentrate their efforts on a few highly selective journals, with the intent to compete more directly against prominent well-know for profit journals. They use the “author pays” model as well as offer an institutional subscription.
(http://www.plos.org)

Pub Med Central (PMC) is the National Institutes of Health’s free digital archive of biomedical and life science journal literature. It is managed by the National Library of Medicine and the National Center for Biotechnology Information. Publishers voluntarily participate in PMC by depositing their electronic content in the database. While some publishers choose to make their content available immediately, others have set an embargo period, or delay, to their journal content.

The Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resource Coalition (SPARC), developed by the Association of Research Libraries (ARL), is an alliance of academic and research libraries and other organizations dedicated to principles of “broad and cost-effective access to peer reviewed scholarship” (http://www.arl.org/sparc/about/index.html).

The Directory of Open Access Journals is a comprehensive list of all Open Access scientific and scholarly journals which are peer reviewed or use some sort of editorial quality control. The definition used for journals covered in this list are all journals which do not charge readers or institutions for access; users can read, download, copy, print, distribute, print or link to full text. http://www.doaj.org/

Journal Impact Factor

The journal “Impact Factor” assigned by Thompson Scientific (Institute for Scientific Information or ISI) has come to assume an important role in decisions by authors of where to publish the results of their work. Open Access journals have worked to ensure citation tracking of their journals. In a study by Thompson’s Institute for Scientific Information (ISI), there was no real difference in how open access journals perform in terms of citation impact factor. The full report is available at: http://scientific.thomson.com/media/presentrep/acropdf/impact-oa-journals.pdf

Other publications also demonstrate the effectiveness of publishing in OA journals. In a 2001 publication in Nature by Steve Lawrence, the author found that free online availability substantially increases a paper's impact (http://www.nature.com/nature/debates/e-access/Articles/lawrence.html). Another article in 2004 in College and Research Libraries, also found that freely available articles do have a greater research impact (http://eprints.rclis.org/archive/00002309/ ) A good bibliography to consult regarding this question is entitled “The effect of open access and download (‘hits’) on citation impact: a bibliography of studies” (http://opcit.eprints.org/oacitation-biblio.html#lawrence01). Databases such as Scopus and Google Scholar track citations to specific articles, making it possible for authors to see how many times their research has been cited.

Institutional Repositories

There are various initiatives to archive pre- or post-prints of articles locally. These rely largely on voluntary contributions of papers at individual institutions. DSpace at MIT is one example of such an effort, although it is having some difficulty getting faculty to contribute Recently, BioMed Central has set up Open Repository (http://www.openrepository.com), a fee-based hosting service, to make it easier to create local repositories. Other open-source software exists to create local repositories. The policies of journals regarding local archiving vary, and there are other issues still to be resolved which will affect the success of local repositories.

Key Initiatives

What are other institutions doing?

Bibliographies and Links

Anderson, R. Open access in the real world. Coll Res Libr News 2004 Apr:65(4):206-8.

Branin, JJ and Case, M. Reforming scholarly publishing in the sciences: a librarian perspective. Notices of the AMS 1998 Apr:45(4):475-86.

Crawford, BD. Open-access publishing: where is the value? The Lancet 2003 Nov 8;362(9395):1578-80.

Greenbaum, D, Lim J, and Gerstein, M. An Analysis of the present system of scientific publishing: what's wrong and where to go from here. Interdisciplinary science reviews 2003 Dec;28(4):293-01.

Guterman, L. The promise and peril of 'Open Access'. Chronicle of higher education 2004 Jan 30;50(21):A10-4.

Harnad, S. For whom the gate tolls? How and why to free the refereed research literature online through author/institution self-archiving, now. 2003. http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/-harnad/Tp/resolution.htm

Heath, FM and Duffy, J. Collections of record and scholarly communications. Journal of Library Administration 42(2):p5-21.

Johnson, Richard K. (2005) Open access: unlocking the value of scientific research. Journal of Library Administration 42 (2): pp 107-124.

Linton, Anne M; Pellegrino, Leah; Abate, Laura; Obrig, Kathe. Solutions for the Crisis in Scholarly Publishing in the Sciences. Presented at George Washington University Reasearch Day, April 25, 2003.

Orsdel, LF and Born, K. Closing in on open access. Libr J 2004 Apr 15;129(7):45-50.

Plutchak, TS. Embracing open access. J Med Libr Assoc 2004 Jan;92(1):1-3.

Prosser, D. The view from Europe: creating international change. Coll Res Libr News 2004 May:65(5).

Tamber, PS. Open access to peer-reviewed research: making it happen. The Lancet 2003 Nov 8:(362(9395):1575-7.

Weber, D. Online journal access: How much will you pay? Medicine on the Net 2003 Oct:9(10):1-9.