In the wake of declarations supporting open access to research literature from
international bodies including the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development
(OECD) and the United Nations' World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS), advocates
and critics of the movement appear to have agreed that the issue warrants a robust, ongoing
dialogue—a development undoubtedly in the interest of the scientific community, regardless
of its ultimate outcome.
To the extent that listserv messages, editorials, and conference presentations are
representative of more widespread reactions to the debate, there appear to be a number of
common misconceptions about what open access is and what problems it can or cannot solve.
Over the next few months in
PLoS Biology , we plan to explore the more pervasive of these
misunderstandings, in an effort to expose the real challenges that need to be overcome and
to identify some possible solutions. Here we address the first of these—the perception that
the publication-charge model puts an unfair burden on authors. Subsequently, we will
address concerns about the long-term economic viability of the open-access model, the
integrity and quality of work published in open-access journals, and the effect that open
access will have on scholarly societies.
Publication Charges—Nothing New
By charging authors a fee to have their work published in lieu of charging readers to
access articles, open-access publishers such as the Public Library of Science (PLoS) and
BioMed Central (BMC) have transformed the traditional publishing system. This reliance on a
seemingly untested revenue stream has generated skepticism that authors will be both
willing and able to pay publication charges.
Publication fees are not a phenomenon born of the open-access movement. Many authors
regularly pay several thousands of dollars in page charges, color charges, correction
costs, reprint costs, and other fees to their publisher, even when such costs are entirely
voluntary. In the
EMBO Journal , for example, authors are allowed six pages of text free,
but are then charged $200 per page beyond that. A review of recent issues shows that almost
all authors exceed six pages, voluntarily paying on average over $800 to publish their
articles.
Furthermore, in addition to paying other publication charges, authors may be willing to
pay extra for their articles to be made open access, as several publishers have recently
recognized. A recent survey of authors in the
Proceedings of National Academy of Science (
PNAS ) found that although
PNAS already makes its content freely available after six months, nearly
50% of
PNAS authors expressed a willingness to pay an “open-access surcharge” of
$500 or more to make their papers available for free online immediately upon
publication—this above and beyond the $1,700 in page charges that the average
PNAS author already pays (Cozzarelli et al. 2004).
Although we recognize that authors who submit to
PLoS Biology may well be a self-selected group of enthusiastic
open-access supporters, we have found that nearly 90% of those who submit manuscripts do
not request a fee waiver, and the few who do still offer to pay some portion of the
fee.
The concern about authors' ability to pay publication charges will become less pressing
as governments, funding organizations, and institutions increasingly support open-access
publication on their researchers' behalf. More funding agencies are joining the Howard
Hughes Medical Institute, the Wellcome Trust, and others who have already designated funds
for open-access publication. (For more information about these funders' announcements and
other international policy statements relevant to open access, see
http://www.plos.org/openaccess.)
Universities, too, are supporting open access directly by setting aside funds for
open-access publication through institutional memberships with BMC and PLoS or through
discretionary funds that faculty can tap into to pay publication charges. Such approaches
reduce authors' reliance on individual grants to support charges directly and ensure equal
access to publishing options that require such payments.
The Disenfranchised
Even with the steady increase in sources to pay publication fees, detractors claim that
open-access publishing may lead to a situation in which some authors are simply unable to
publish their work due to lack of funds. The response to this concern is that the ability
of authors to pay publication charges must never be a consideration in the decision to
publish their papers. To ensure that this happens, PLoS has a firewall in place such that
neither the editors nor the reviewers know which authors have indicated whether or not they
can pay. Because all work judged worthy of publication by peer review should be published,
any open-access business model should be designed to account for fee waivers, just as
publishers have always absorbed some authors' inability to pay page and color charges. PLoS
grants full or partial publication-charge waivers to any author who requests them, no
questions asked.
In part, the savings to institutions, hospitals, nongovernmental organizations, and
universities provided by open-access publications could help to establish funds for
researchers who are less well supported. In the developing world, as free online access to
scientific literature is increasingly seen as a political imperative, organizations such as
the World Health Organization, the Oxford-based International Network for the Availability
of Scientific Publications, and Brazil's SciELO are likely to become more willing to pay
open-access publication charges for authors who cannot afford them. The Open Society
Institute (OSI) already pays such costs for universities and other organizations in a
number of countries in which the foundation is active by way of a PLoS Institutional
Membership that grants waived publication charges to authors while providing compensatory
revenue for PLoS.
Perhaps the real misconception about the unfair burden that open access places on
authors resides in the terminology—the term “author charge” is itself misleading.
Publication fees are not borne purely by authors, but are shared by the many organizations
whose missions depend on the broadest possible dissemination and communication of
scientific discoveries. Some of those may provide funding for open-access publication as
intermediaries between authors and journals, as OSI does. Others—including many
government-financed funding agencies—do so directly through their research grants to
scientists. In both cases, funding open access is an effective way to fulfill mandates for
public access to and accountability over scientific research and to ensure that all worthy
research is published.
