Category:	Science and Technology
Domain:	Structure of Science
Keywords:	Knowledge, communication & learning - intellectual property, publishing, open access
Outlook:	Open access promises to replace the current scientific publishing establishment.
Summary Analysis:	Open-access scientific publishing has been gaining ground in recent years. At the same time, there have been steep increases in the cost of scientific journals (for one journal subscription, scientists could pay nearly six figures per year) and a growing perception among scientists that business interests are impeding scientific discovery. In the next decade, the open-access model, whereby the producers of journal content pay, rather than the consumers, is likely to be increasingly adopted. While this could simply result in traditional publishers adopting different business models, access to research papers will open, if slowly, as these papers will be free for all to read, distribute, reference, and copy as they see fit. The public will therefore have the same access to the scientific and clinical literature as the ‘experts’, potentially raising issues about ‘patient power’. This change in model reflects new power dynamics in the scientific publishing market: with the low cost of publishing, power has shifted back toward scientists and university libraries, many of whom have a strong interest in free and open access to science. These groups, along with certain scientific societies, have been aligning recently to start new journals and standardise archival methods. The US National Institutes of Health encourages its grantees to deposit their papers in PubMed Central, an online database for open-access papers, along with submitting them to commercial publishers. Starting in September 2005, the US National Institutes of Health will grant additional funds to researchers who plan to publish in pay-for-publication, open-access journals such as PLoS Biology. RCUK is considering similar measures under its full economic costing program. In the end, funding for open access will be provided by traditional money sources, including the government, universities, and even industry groups - those who would have ultimately paid for subscriptions to non-open journals in the past. In the ‘big’ science areas in life sciences and physics, the publishing costs are unlikely to be significant compared to the overall research budget and many open access journals offer preferential rates for papers from scientists working in developing countries. This shift in cost however is likely to affect ‘low overhead’ research areas in developed countries, such as ecology and theoretical physics, where a few thousand pounds to publish a research paper will represent a significant proportion of the research budget. Commercial journals will be likely to be forced to change their business models to survive the shift to open access, but to survive as profitable businesses, these firms will probably need to offer additional value beyond that of their nonprofit competitors. Rather than charge for basic articles, they could differentiate themselves based on value-added services to scientists and readers with higher-quality presentation, editorials, and research synthesis. This is also likely to have a significant affect on learned societies in the UK, many of whom generate their income through their publishing arms and are already considering alternative models of income generation. Open access still faces questions relating to its own appropriate business model. Critics charge that pay-to-publish open-access journals could compromise quality by accepting too many papers due to economic incentive. The Public Library of Science (PLoS) has sufficient momentum and funding to maintain its journals’ quality, but this leaves open the question of whether other, more mid-level scientific journals will be able to survive with open-access business models. Further in the future, these concerns could be mitigated by 'bubble-up' forms of publishing driven by a radical rethinking of the current system of peer and editorial review.

	Implications:	Less time wasted on duplicate, repetitive, or outmoded experiments and inquiries Lower educational barriers for scientists everywhere Increased reading across disciplines, leading to new ideas for experiments, research mash-ups, and the interdisciplinary mixing of science
	Early Indicators:	Free archiving, since 1991, of work by physicists online at arxive.org Dropping in 2004 by the International Society for Computational Biology of its affiliation with a non-open press in favor of PLoS Computational Biology, an open-access journal Vote by the faculties of Stanford and the University of California in early 2004 to boycott Elsevier journals, even though more than 100 University of California faculty serve as senior editors and more than 1000 serve on editorial boards of Elsevier journals En masse resignation of several of Elsevier’s editorial boards to form new open-access journals, many of which are directly supported by the learned societies in their respective fields Role played by telescope logs published on the Internet in discovery of the 10th planet
	What to Watch:	Downloading of articles from the Public Library of Science's and BMC's online journals increases exponentially.
	Parallels/Precedents:	Creative Commons’ efforts with the cultural commons, enabling music, the written word, and film to be remixed and reused in new and surprising ways Decision in the early 1980s that published DNA sequences should be deposited in a central repository, in a common format, where they could be freely accessed and used by anyone
	Enablers/drivers:	Development of low marginal cost publishing technologies: the Internet, PDF, peer-to-peer file sharing Technological and social innovations in paper publishing New methodologies of peer review based upon ratings systems and 'bubble-up' technologies
	Leaders:	Regions: US, UK Institutions: BioMed Central, UK NIH’s PubMed Central, US Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC) Public Library of Science (PLoS) Science Commons (a division of Creative Commons) Stanford University HighWire Press Google Scholar [link] citeUlike ('a free service to help academics to share, store, and organise the academic papers they are reading') [link] M. S. Swaminathan Research Foundation, India [link] Reference Center on Environmental Information, Brazil [link] Open Society Institute Open Access Initiative, Budapest [link] Global Information Commons for Science Initiative [link] WHO Health Internetwork Access to Research Initiative [link] Wellcome Trust, UK [link] Joint Information Systems Committee, UK [link]
	Figures:
	Sources:	Delgado, Ray. "Faculty Senate approves resolution regarding pricey journals." Stanford Report 25 Feb. 2004. [link]. Foster, Andrea. "Scientists at U. of California at San Francisco Push for Boycott Against 6 Biology Journals." Chronicle of Higher Education. 21 Oct. 2003 [link]. Interview with Vivian Siegel, 5 May 2005. Wysocki, Bernard. "Scholarly journals' premier status diluted by Web." The Wall Street Journal 23 May 2005. [link]. "The World Wide Web of Science: Emerging Global Sources of Expertise." Ralph Schroeder, Oxford Internet Institute. [link] "Astronomers find another planet in the solar system", K Chang and D Overbye. New York Times, July 29, 2005 "Why PLoS Became a Publisher." Patrick O Brown, Michael B Eisen, and Harold E Varmus [link] Eysenbach G. "Citation Advantage of Open-Access Articles." Public Library of Science Biology. Vol 4. No. 5. May 2006 [link] "Study on the Economic and Technical Evolution of the Scientific Publication Markets in Europe." European Commission Directorate General for Research. January 2006 [link] House of Commons Science and Technology Committee Tenth Report. July 2004 [link] "Open Access Deemed `Dangerous' by the Royal Society." SciDev.Net. November 24 2005 [link]

	At A Glance:	When:	3–10 years
		Where:	Global
		How Fast:	Years
		Likelihood:	Medium
		Impact:	Medium
		Controversy:	High

Related Outlooks: