Is Openness "ethically flawed"?

This is the first substantive post in this blog. To help you navigate I have categorised them – this one is “Open Issues”. Other categories are “XML”, “programming for scientists” and “virtual communities. This may help you select just the topics you want.
I have been interested in Openness for many years, and believe that knowledge and science can now only flourish in an Open environment. I believe that close commercial interests (publishers, aggegrators, software developers and industrial customers such as the pharmaceutical industry) stifle innovation in information-driven science. IMO that is why biosciences, with an Open ethic are about 10 years ahead of the chemical sciences in their use of information.
I hope these posts will not be unbalanced rants. I have campaigned for many years for Openness so it is sometimes possible to have misty vision. My aim is not to create divisions but to show positive ways forward. I work closely with many of those organisations on whom I comment, such as the Royal Society of Chemistry and the American Chemical Society (who have invited me to talk next week at their annual meeting). I was particularly encouraged by a meeting of the STM publishers last year in Frankfurt where I presnted the problem of Open Data – I was prepared for a tepid or critical reaction – in fact I had many positive comments and offers of future collaboration.
As an example we have two separate visits from the Royal Society of Chemistry staff this week aimed at developing new publishing technology. Chemists may know of their sponsorship of the Experimental Data Checker, colloquially “OSCAR” (http://www.rsc.org/Publishing/ReSourCe/AuthorGuidelines/AuthoringTools/ExperimentalDataChecker/index.asp). OSCAR can read a complete chemical paper in a few seconds and analyse the data for errors. It picks up those that have been missed by the author, reviewer and technical editor and there are almost always some in every paper! FWIW OSCAR (Open Source Chemical Analysis and Retrieval) was written by 4 undergraduates and if you are interested (and have access to chemistry article – which are almost all closed) it’s well worth trying out. And the RSC are funding 2 students this summer to develop the next generation of OSCAR based on XML.
But as I am pushing for radically new ways of doing things, my stance will sometimes be strong, as in the current post where I take issue with Peter Gregory’s comments on Open Access publishing in chemistry. There are very few Open Access journals in chemistry and PeterG was commenting on the launch of Chemistry Central from the BMC stable (reviewed in Peter Suber’s excellent OA blog:
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2006_08_20_fosblogarchive.html
“More on OA Central and Chemistry Central”.
PeterS extracts PeterG’s comments in the same issue:
“Royal Society of Chemistry lashes out”

But the Royal Society of Chemistry’s director of publishing, Peter Gregory, disagrees. ‘We have absolutely no interest shown from our editorial board members, or our authors, for open access publishing,’ he said.

Gregory believes that the open access author-pays model is ‘ethically flawed’, because it raises the risk that substandard science could be widely circulated without being subjected to more rigorous peer review. This could be particularly problematic in chemistry, where rapid, open access publication could be used to establish priority ahead of more
time-consuming patent applications from rival groups, he added.

PeterS then continues in his incisive style to show the flaws in PeterG’s argument.
My campaign is for Openness in:

• Access. I am least vocal on this, leaving it to esteablished champions such as PeterS, SPARC, Stefan Harnad, Steve Heller and many others. However I support the formation of Open Access in chemistry and would endeavour to publish there is appropriate journals exist. (Before Chemistry Central there were no Open journals that supported chemoinformatics).
• Source. Without openness of code it is difficult for academic groups to distribute and anhance. Some groups manage some innovation in some areas (e.g. quantum mechanics codes) but in informatics the lack of Openness is a serious problem.
• Data. I believe that scientific data belongs to the commons, not to publishers or secondary aggregators which is why I supported the continuation of PubChem last year in its struggle against Chemica Abstracts.
• Standards. Science is bedevilled by lack of interoperability, often promoted by software companies and instrument manufacturers to create lock-in and closed markets. That is why Henry Rzepa and I have developed Chemical Markup Language as a core technology for interoperability and why we are members of the Blue Obelisk movement.

It is a major challenge to get these ideas accepted in any community (especially chemistry) and I’m happy to take this on. I’m prepared to be called foolish, unrealistic, and encounter prophesies of failure; to be ignored by the mainstream of the discipline. But I don’t like being called unethical.
I strive hard to be ethical. I try to honour publishers’ copyright even when I fundamentally disagree. I do not post my own papers on the web as I am forbidden to do so by almost all publishers in chemistry (this is why I applaud Open Access chemistry journals and will submit papers). I have issues with primary publishers (such as the ACS) and secondary aggregators (such as the CCDC) who add copyright statements to primary scientific data. I regard this as counter to copyright practice and law as I believe that author’s moral rights and the freedom of factual information cannot be overridden by publshers. This is not an oversight by the publisher – as far as we know Henry Rzepa and I are the only authors to have published supplemental (factual) data in an ACS journal without surrendering copyright – and we understand this was not a right, but a one-off privilege.
I have also been publicly criticised on two occasions as being immoral in publishing Open Source programs in chemistry. The argument of the critics is that Open-ness undercuts responsible developers and destroys their market leading to loss of support for science and poor quality code. This may or may not be true, but I do not see it as immoral. Similarly PeterG argues that only pay-to-read publishers can create and protect a high quality scientific record. Neither of my descriptions of Openness is, in my view, unethical.
In any cases the facts do not bear this out. Open source code is gaining ground in science – for example Nature Publishing Group has selected the open Jmol (a Blue Obelisk member) as its tool for displaying protein structures. And I contend that conventional publishing is not effective in preserving the scientific record.

• There is an increasing trend for publishers to lease electronic copies of the record, rather than sell them. This means that the average scientist – who may move institutions frequently – cannot carry around their copies of the journal. As an instance of ephemerality the publisher can switch off access to a journal at a moment’s notice. This happened to us yesterday – one of our students was reading a number of papers in an ACS journal and had bookmarked them. His browser then tried to open them all at once. The publishers’ software immediately (within 2-3 seconds and with no dialogue) interpreted this as an attempt to steal content and cut off the whole of the University of Cambridge web cache until further notice. We gather this is not an isolated occurrence. It is difficult for me, therefore, to regard pay-to-read electronic publishers as impartial creators and guardians of the archive of science.
• Apart from the “full-text” the act of scientific publishing is extremely destructive of the scientific record. We have much anecdotal evidence that most scientific data (80+%) supporting primary publications are lost for ever. Many publishers do not support supplemental (factual) data and those that do, do not support its capture in semantic form (PDFs destroy information very effectively). True, we are exploring with several publishers how to tackle this, but they can currently make no strong ethical claims for current practice.

So I contend that Open Access, Data, Source and Standards are not unethical. There will have to be new – and untested – business models for scientific information. Some won’t work. But the whole impetus of the current web with mashups and REST will inevitably change the face of science, so we should start preparing. There is nothing intrinsically laudable in publishing scientific material that looks visually the same as it did 120 years ago.
This blog is intended to promote constructive discussion so we welcome your comments. I shall attempt to be fair and – unlike one well-known Open Access forum – not routinely criticise any posting with which I disagree. I have even been known to change my point of view in response to careful argument supported by facts.
P.