You may have noticed a couple of months back that ‘scientists’ (whoever they are) discovered an extraordinary ‘missing link’ fossil, a strut in the bridge between primates like us and the rest of the mammals. Go on, read about it, it’s brilliant—there’s even a surreptitious deal in a vodka bar to inject a bit of spy-thriller intrigue if finding a spectacular piece of our evolutionary jigsaw isn’t enough for you.
However, rather than further add to comprehensive and generally competent coverage of Ida’s lovely bones, (even my favourite newspaper doesn’t humiliate itself too much), I’d like to talk about the journal in which discoverer Jørn Hurum chose to publish his findings.
Dr Hurum released the study in open-access journal PLoS ONE, which means that you can go and read the paper right now, even if you’re not on a university Internet connection. You may be surprised to learn that this isn’t the norm. Most scientific research—which we all pay for through our taxes—cannot be read unless you have a pricey subscription to the journal it’s been published in, which basically means you have to belong to a rich educational institution in a developed country.
You don’t have to be particularly woolly and liberal to experience the knee-jerk response that this is transparently inequitable. Indeed, my initial reaction upon learning about the open-access publishing movement was to be thoroughly captivated by the struggle to throw off the shackles of the scientific oligarchy and make the sum of human knowledge available to all. Why should Nature and Science get to set the agenda for the rest of the scientific world, and profit handsomely from doing so?
It’s also stupid. Science is an immense part of the sum total of human knowledge, and giving greater access to this knowledge allows it to be built upon, rather than forcing scientists to reinvent the wheel because ‘Cylindrical apparatus to facilitate horizontal motion’ is published in some weird journal the library doesn’t have the subscription to at the moment. What about scientists in developing countries, whose libraries can’t afford any subscriptions at all? Moreover, shouldn’t science journalists have access to the papers they’re writing about, and doctors have access to the latest medical research? The open-access movement makes a compelling case.
However, there’s no such thing as a free lunch—if journals don’t make money from subscriptions, you have to pay for journal administration and publication some other way. ‘Open-access’ is therefore a possibly-glamorised term for a change in business model—what it really signals is a change from ‘pay-to-read’, where the revenues roll in from subscriptions, to ‘pay-to-write’, where authors of papers foot the bill instead.
This alteration does come with some attendant disadvantages: what if the authors can’t afford the fees? It would seem to bias publications towards large collaborations: individual researchers in theoretical fields on personal grants which basically cover a computer and some stationery might be left in the shade. It may also hit those same scientists in developing countries we were worrying about, though some journals will waive their fees if you come from a poor nation. (Pay-to-read journals too could waive their charges in developing countries—though they seem not to.)
Pay-to-write journals may also emphasise the already-pervasive phenomenon of ‘publication bias’—where scientists are less willing to publish negative findings due to a perceived lack of impact—by adding a further financial disincentive to writing up your tedious null result. Further, publishers are no longer compelled to publish good works and maximise their profits by compelling institutions to subscribe to their must-have collection, but merely to publish lots, since they’re paid per paper published.
On the beautifully-symmetric contrary, making writers pay might dissuade them from adding to the already-intractable volume of science being produced: scientists might be encouraged to bundle a few, smaller results together into longer, ‘review’-style articles which may be easier to digest.
If you, like me, are already experiencing crippling cognitive dissonance because the ‘right’ answer seems light on pros, we should probably ask the big question: what benefits will universal access to research afford? Sadly, I’m sceptical. If you did try to read Dr Hurum’s paper, you may have found it a bit, er, intractably dry. Scientific articles are often littered with jargon which, if it doesn’t make a paper unintelligible to the non-nerd, certainly makes it boring. Doctors wouldn’t really find access to cutting-edge studies that helpful, because much new research turns out to be wrong, and there’s simply too much of it to read—what medics really need is a flowchart-like prescription of what to prescribe, based on the best meta-analyses available. Science journalism is probably too jaundiced for access to original papers to help much. Even where research is open-access, there’s little evidence that time-pressured, non-specialist journos do much more than re-word press releases, let alone read or link to the original articles. The key unknown quantity, it seems to me, is how many practising academics cannot access the long tail of less-prestigious journals, either from the developing world or the worse-funded institutions in the west. This number, which I can’t find anywhere (probably because it would be hard to estimate), could be the deal-breaker.
The other key unknown which could come down in favour of open-access is whether the financial incentives in the currently-dominant pay-to-read paradigm do indeed encourage journal editors to pick the best articles any more than they would otherwise. Why would they ever publish anything but the best?
Clearly there are reams of pros and cons—the point is that it’s difficult to know what a shift from reader-pays to writer-pays would do. Worse, it’s very hard to know what is actually desirable—what distribution of paper lengths, publication frequencies and article types allows the fastest, most thorough assimilation by scientists and thus the most rapid progress of their own work? Is that even a precise enough statement of the objectives of scientific publishing? Like many aspects of public policy, you don’t know what a given option’s effects will be and, worse, you don’t know what effects you’d actually want anyway.
The only obvious thing in this whole debate is that it’s clearly wrong for science publishers to effectively siphon public funds—be it via institutions paying to read or individual scientists paying to write—into their own profit. Cutting out the middle-man and making the whole industry public seems not to be on the table—but would an appropriately-incentivised, state-funded, open-access portfolio of journals be the ultimate in Creative Commons free-for-all science goodness?
The beautiful irony of Dr Hurum’s case is that, in spite of his noble choice of journal, his research involved two years’ hush-hush huddling in a bunker with his fossil and a hand-picked team of elite researchers. Maybe science isn’t ready to be thrown wide open just yet.
