In a recent post Why Open Access metrics are necessary – July 16th, 2007 I quoted Paul Wilks (Is Publisher-lead “open access” a swindle?) where he detailed how the the obscurity of language and procedures in closed access publishing could lead to authors paying high charges for services that added little to their current rights (i.e. to post preprints or postprints without charge). [Note that not all publishers allow these rights.] He puts it very clearly:
Anyway. The current state of affairs seems to be this: publishers are worried about OA and have cobbled together business models that support generating revenue in other ways that the typical subscriber model. However, they don’t appear to have put much thought in to the publishing model.
In reply Jennifer Rohn said:
- The two dedicated open-access publishers (BioMed Central and Public Library of Science) don’t have these problems. People who want to ensure their articles are truly going to be open access, published by companies who have put real thought into the publishing as well as business model, might want to look there.
to which Maxine Clarke (Publishing Executive Editor of Nature) replied:
Hello, I declare conflict of interest as I am an editor at Nature, not in itself open access but our publisher has many open access projects and products.
In response to Jennifer’s point: I agree that BMC has got an OA publishing/business model and indeed business, but the PLOS model is dependent on a large grant from a charitable foundation, so the jury is still out (in my opinion). As an editor I am concerned about the archiving and the preservation of the scientific record, for example.
and to which I replied (Open Access publishing at Nature) asking for details of these “open access products” and Maxine has replied:
Nature Precedings, several database publications, Nature Reports publications (3), Nature Network, Scintilla, online daily news service, gateways, blogs, many individual articles and collections of articles are freely available (”projects and products” as I mentioned in my comment to your earlier post. MSB is to my knowledge NPG’s only formal open access journal.)
Before commenting I recap that my posts on this blog over the last two weeks have been to find out what publishers mean by “open access”, whether this is clearly defined in their public pages, and whether it is (in my opinion) consistent with “Open Access” as defined by BBB. Beyond that I made no comment on publishers’ business models, the rightness or wrongness of closed access. Simply whether the position was clear
– i.e. whether there was a clear publishing model. My concern with almost all the closed access publishers in chemistry was that their publishing models are awful. It is almost impossible to know what is going on. By contrast some (but not all) Open Access publishers have very clear publishing models and Jennifer quite rightly lauds BMC and PLoS for their publishing models.
Nature has, of course, an excellent reputation as a publisher of science – i.e. the scholarly process of review and publication. It also has a good reputation in science journalism – i.e. reporting on science, but not as part of the peer-reviewed process. For example I was grateful to Emma Marris at Nature for reporting my concern on the ACS’s attempt to have PubChem (sic) restricted from publishing chemical structures.
I am desperately trying to get clarity in assessing the current practice of “open access”. I had also hoped to move on the Open Data. I had assumed that I would find it easy to get reliable information from the publishers, from their sites, their practices and their comments. It has been awful. I omitted Nature from my studies (which I and the Blue Obelisk some day hope to publish in a peer-reviewed journal) beacuse they publish no “open access” chemistry, even though a hybrid scheme.
Maxine’s comments are fuzzy and do Nature’s reputation no credit. She cricizes PLoS’s business model which is irrelevant to their publishing model. Her remarks could be read as implying that PLoS are incompetent in preserving the scientific record. I do not understand this – I assume that all PLoS papers are archivable by institutions, individuals or abstracters such as Pubmed. But in any case this argument is motivated not by scholarship or journalism, but by marketing.
She then goes on to list “open access products” above. (I omit MSB from my studies as it is not chemistry, but I am prepared to accept the assertion of Jonathan Eisen that it is CC-BY-NC-ND. At least there is a licence which is clear and we can debate whether this is “Open Access”, “open access” or “free access”.
But the rest of the list completely muddies the “open access” debate. If Nature believe that “open access” applies to any freely visible information on their site, most not peer-reviewed, many without licences and many with the publisher’s copyright, then they are making my life much harder.
I had hoped for objectivity and possibly even help from a major publisher which has, in the past, commented responsibily on “Open Access”. Now I get what in the UK is called “spin”.
Well, my comments may have muddied the debate as you have defined it, Peter, but I don’t feel muddled!
In my comment I said that I am an editor, NOT a publisher: if you want to know what NPG publishers think about your definitions you will have to ask them, not me.
I understand from your post above that you feel my response listing open publications and products is too fuzzy and does not match with what you have been writing in the past few weeks, but frankly I was not responding to anything you have written in the past few weeks, I was responding to your request to give examples of NPG’s “open access” or “free” material. I think you are blowing my response out of proportion because it did not happen to fit into however you have been defining the terms of the discussion. It is your perogative to define terms however you like, but not your perogative to enforce other people to use the same definitions – I know what I mean by “open” or “free” content and I don’t need to be told off by you for having a different definition to whatever your definition is — similarly, you are welcome to your own views and I shall not castigate you for them in a blog posting 😉
For the record, I did not “criticise” PLOS’s business model, as you write above, I merely pointed out that the organisation depends on large charity funding so it is not a “business” model in the sense of BMC’s, which does not depend on charitable grants. That’s a fact, not a criticism.
As a professional journal editor, when I offer to publish an article in the journal for which I work, part of that offer involves a commitment by my journal to maintain an archive of that article, irrespective of who else might be archiving that same material. Just to be sure I have explained myself properly, the previous sentence is a clarification, not a criticism.
I agree with Maxine on PLoS. They can only operate with the aid of a large donation. In addition PLoS has been charging the authors more and more to cover the cost of publication (I think that it’s $2500 per paper right now). Is this viable in the long term? I’m all in favor of OA, but it has to be financially viable.