Open Access, Publishing,
and the Peer-Review Process:
an Overview.
LIBR 287: The Open Movement and Libraries
11/29/09
Abstract
This paper will focus on academic
publishing in the open source era. The use of Open Source Software (OSS) by
journal editors is changing the type of knowledge produced. This may create a
new community of content producers and publishers. Many article writers are
prevented from participating in traditional print publications for a number of
reasons. Some publishers do not have the capital to sustain their journal in
print, or even in a "traditional" digital format. The availability of
OSS will make it possible to cater to a range of academic goals and produce
adequate electronic journals. This paper will discuss the development of
academic publishing and examine the necessary specifications for developing and
maintaining peer-reviewed electronic journals.
Introduction
Academic
publishing is undergoing major changes as society transitions from print to
electronic formats. An emergent trend for many academic journals is open access
via the Internet. There are two main forms of open access: open access
publishing where the articles or journal are freely available from the time of
publication, and self-archiving where authors submit a copy of their work to be
made freely available on the web. This paper will discuss modern, open academic
publishing systems and the changes these systems represent.
In order to
begin an understanding of how academic publishing functions today, a definition
of scholarly papers and academic publishing should be presented. In academic
writing, a paper is an academic work that is published in a peer-reviewed
journal (Angell, Strunk, and White 2000). It contains original research, data,
or reviews existing material. Also called articles, such works may undergo a
series of reviews, edits and re-submissions before finally being accepted or
rejected for publication. The process often takes several months or, in some
subjects, over a year before publication. Many journals are now published in
electronic form only. Major journals are now generally made available in
electronic form as well as print to both individual subscribers and to
libraries. Electronic versions can be made available to subscribers immediately
upon publication or even before. Delayed
availability of electronic journals, allowing paid subscribers early access, is
another new trend in journal publishing.
What
is academic publishing?
Academic
publishing is a branch of publishing which distributes academic research (Spier
2002). Academic publishing describes a necessary system for academic scholars
to review work and make it available to a broad audience. Academic data is
published in journal article, book or thesis form. The non-published data is
referred to as grey literature (Merriam-Webster 2009). For example, thousands
of scientific conferences and symposia, large and small, take place every year.
Some of them publish proceedings,
collections of papers presented at the meeting. Proceedings can be published as
books or in special journal issues. Some conferences publish abstracts or preprints of papers to be given at an
upcoming conference. Most conferences publish nothing at all. Presentations at
conferences may be cited in later literature even if nothing was published. As
a result, this literature can be very difficult to access. Such obfuscated
sources have presented problems to research and data construction.
Most
well-established academic disciplines publish their own academic journals,
often published by the discipline's association or major society (i.e. American
Anthropologist: The official Journal of the American Anthropological
Association). Publications such as conference proceedings, which are not
normally printed, can also facilitate the dissemination of new data. Many
academic journals are interdisciplinary and publish works from several distinct
fields or subfields. The types of publications accepted as data or research
vary between disciplines, as do the way each one reviews and publishes.
What
is peer review?
Due to the
volume of academic publishing, most depends on some form of peer review or
editorial refereeing to qualify texts for publication (Spier 2002). Peer review, sometimes known as refereeing,
is a way to submit an academics scholarly work, research, or ideas to the
scrutiny of others who are experts in the field. To function properly, peer
review requires a community of experts in a narrowly defined field who are
somehow qualified (generally academically) and are able to perform an impartial
review. Impartial reviews can often be difficult, especially in less
well-defined or inter-disciplinary fields. As a result, the contribution of an
idea may never be widely appreciated among its contemporaries due to the
selective nature of the system. While essential to academic quality, peer and
impartial review have been widely criticized as somewhat ineffective, often
slow, and misunderstood by the general public. The overall process encourages
authors to meet the current standards of their discipline and prevents the
dissemination of incurred data, unsupported hypothesis, poor interpretations,
and personal bias. Publications that are not peer reviewed are often frowned
upon by scholars and professionals.
The basic system
for scholarly communication has remained unchanged for over three hundred
years, with the academic journal central (Prosser 2003). However, by the early
1960s a growing concern among academics about the peer review process to
continue its role as a means of communicating new research emerged. The
development of a "serials crisis" and a general reduction in
scholarly journal subscriptions by libraries and non-libraries alike resulted.
During this time, the cost of scholarly journals increased much quicker than
the rate of inflation. Many libraries were soon forced to cancel subscriptions
(something similar is happening today in relation to databases). A combination
of the peer-review crisis, the serials crisis, and emergent technological
changes (such as open script software and online publishing tools) have allowed
a new publishing model to emerge. Sometimes referred to as open access publishing,
this model was not aligned to the corporate or profit driven systems that
direct traditional publishing.
What
is Open Access publishing?
An open access
publication is one where the author(s) and copyright holder(s) grant(s) all
users a free, irrevocable, worldwide, perpetual right of access (Budapest Open
Access Initiative 2002). A license to copy, use, distribute, transmit and
display the work publicly is also allowed. Finally, the copyright holder has
the authority to make and distribute derivative works, in any digital medium
for any responsible purpose, subject to proper attribution of authorship, as
well as the right to make printed copies for personal use. A complete version
of the work and all supplemental materials, including a copy of the permission
granted, in a standardized electronic format is deposited upon initial
publication in at least one online repository. That repository should be supported
by either an academic institution, scholarly society, government agency, or
other well-established institution that seeks to enable free and open access,
unrestricted distribution, interoperability, and long-term archiving.
Open access
journals would give free and unrestricted digital access to all primary
literature published by the journal (Suber 2009a). Publishable material is
given by scholars without expectation of payment with the hope it is
distributed as widely as possible. Making it available on the open internet
distributes it to millions of people worldwide who have access. Giving
interested people access accelerates research, enriches education, shares
learning among rich and poor nations, and enhances return on investment in
research. The ability for researchers to access all of the relevant information
they need will increase the ability of research to be effective.
As an example of
the current trend toward Open Access, the Association of Research Libraries
(ARL) has recommended open access to quality information in support of learning
and scholarship (ARL 2009). Members of the research and academic communities
must be educated about open access and its potential. The ARL encourages
library staff, campus administrators, university counsels, faculty, and
policymakers to discuss and criticize open access and how its application in
research institutions will affect the dissemination and use of information.
History
of academic publishing, peer review, and open access.
Perhaps the earliest example of
academic publishing in the western world is the Proceedings of meetings of the
Royal Society, which were first published in the 1600s (Spier 2002). The act of
publishing academic inquiry was controversial for a number of reasons. The
Church, the politics of the academy, and governments all influenced academic
publishing. New discoveries were often obfuscated, giving authorship to the
discoverer, but remaining indecipherable for anyone not schooled in the
disciplines jargon. The method did not facilitate much collaboration. Ninty-two
percent of instances of simultaneous discovery in the 17th century ended in dispute
(Merton and Sztompka 1996). The number of disputes dropped to 72% in the 18th
century, by the late 19th century 59%, and by the first half of the 20th
century 33% (ibid). Arguing over who
owned the research, or who was given credit, contributed to poorly constructed
theory and slowed the scientific process.
Perhaps
because of the early problems of research dissemination and crediting, and
certainly reflective of the academic process, publishing in major academic
journals began to be reviewed by academics in the publishing
societies/associations. One of the first documented descriptions of a
peer-review process was written by Ishap bin Ali Al Rahwi (CE 854931) of Al
Raha,
After Guttenberg
invented the printing press, what was published could now be mass distributed.
Authorities began to regulate what was set before the public. Copernicus
(1473-1543) was allowed his heliocentric revolutionary ideas because he was a
Canon of the Frombork Cathedral in
A general method
for assessment of new research was developed by Francis Bacon (15611626) in Novum Organum. This work, published in
1620, inspired some to engage in an informal pattern of meetings to discuss and
debate their opinions on science. In 1645, a group of English scholars formed a
semi-official society of science. By 1662, they had a Royal Charter of
Incorporation and, on the issuance of a second Royal Charter, this body became
the Royal Society of London for improving Natural Knowledge. By 1665, the
Society had it own journal, Philosophical Transactions, edited by Henry Oldenburg.
In the beginning, what was published in the journal was decided by the editor
and his immediate staff. Materials sent to the Society for publication were
subject to inspection by a select group of members who were knowledgeable in
such mattersand whose recommendation to the editor was influential in the
future progress of that manuscript. For the next hundred years this patriarchal
method of review continued. It was not until 1731 and Medical Essays and Observations, a publication of the Royal Society
of Edinburgh, where the process used by the Royal Society of Edinburgh has a
greater resemblance to the commonly understood standards of peer review. In
1752, the Society took over the editorial responsibility for the production of
the journal Philosophical Transactions.
Peer review gradually become a standard feature of medical sciences but did not
penetrate widely into other sciences and academics until the 20th Century. By
the middle of the 1900s, it became a regular institution across most university
campuses. In essence, the publication of scholarly materials was maintained and
reviewed by the academy (Spier 2002).
This model
remained unchanged for over three hundred years, with the journal playing a
central role (Prosser
2003).
Since the educational and theoretical revolts of the 1950s and 1960s, there has
been growing concern as journal prices have increased and access to the
journals has decreased. Public funding for academic research has been shrinking
for decades. Universities and other research organizations have partnered with
industry to generate income from the knowledge their students and faculty
create. The result was a commercialization of the research process overall.
Profit driven systems collide with the idea that freely shared information -- made
available in the public domain instead of privatized by industry -- in turn
creates new knowledge that spurs new research and discovery. This system
threatens science and peer-review of knowledge. Science not only produces data
and research, but is dependent on both to survive and evolve.
The spread of
the internet in the 1990s resulted in some improvements in the cost of, and
access to, academic publications, with readers being able to view digital
reproductions virtually. As noted above, for-profit site licenses and consortia
deals allowed the fundamental problem to remain. The rate of increase in cost
for electronic access continues to be greater than the increase in university
budgets. The open internet has changed this economic and political power
structure. Authors can now publish their work in an online format without
restriction. A key to this development is the ability to copy and distribute
electronic data at very little cost. Such authorship has allowed a new
dissemination model to emerge. The modern open access movement traces its
history to the 1960s (Suber 2009b). The first online-only, free-access journals
began appearing in the late 1980s. A few early journals were Bryn Mawr Classical Review, Postmodern Culture and Psycoloquy. An early book publisher to
provide open access was the National Academies Press, publisher for the
National Academy of Sciences,
The first free
scientific online archive was arXiv.org (ibid).
Started in 1991, it was initially a "prepublished" service for
physicists. Self-archiving has since become the norm in physics, with some
sub-areas of physics having a 100% self-archiving rate. arXiv now includes
papers from related disciplines, such as computer science and mathematics, but
computer scientists mostly self-archive on their own websites. The two major
physics publishers (American Physical Society and
In 1997, the
U.S. National Library of Medicine (NLM) made Medline, a comprehensive index to
medical literature freely available in the form of PubMed (Suber 2009b). Usage
increased over a hundredfold when it became available free, suggesting that
usage was impacted by lack of access. While indexes such as these are not the
main focus of the open access movement, Medline and services modeled after it
have opened up research to the general public on a grand level.
In 1998, the
American Scientist Open Access Forum was launched (ibid). The Journal of Medical
Internet Research (JMIR), one of the first Open Access journals in
medicine, was developed in 1998 and first published in 1999. In 2001, 34,000
scholars around the world signed "An Open Letter to Scientific
Publishers". This letter argued for "the establishment of an online
public library that would provide the full contents of the published record of
research and scholarly discourse in medicine and the life sciences in a freely
accessible, fully searchable, interlinked form" (Public Library of Science
2001). Signers also pledged not to publish in non-open access journals. This
contributed to the establishment of the Public Library of Science (PLoS), an
advocacy organization pushing for open access publishing across science (Suber
2009b). PLoS competes with commercial publishers and other open access
journals.
The first major
international statement on open access was the Budapest Open Access Initiative
(Budapest Open Access Initiative 2003). Launched by the Open Society Institute
in 2002, this helped developed open access. Two further statements followed:
the Bethesda Statement on Open Access Publishing in June 2003 and the Berlin
Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge in the Sciences and Humanities in
October 2003. In 2003, the Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge in
the Sciences and Humanities was drafted and the World Summit on the Information
Society included open access in its Declaration of Principles and Plan of
Action. In 2006, a Federal Research Public Access Act was introduced in US
Congress. Since 2003, efforts have been focused on open access mandating by the
funders of research such as governments, research funding agencies, and
universities (Suber 2009a). Such efforts have been challenged by the
established publishing industry. Many countries, funders, universities and
other organizations have now made commitments to open access and are in the
process of reviewing their policies and procedures.
It is now
possible to publish a scholarly article and also make it instantly accessible
anywhere in the world where there are computers and Internet connections. The
fixed cost of producing the article and the minimal cost of online distribution
have coupled with the spread of the Internet and the ability to copy and
distribute electronic data at almost no cost to promote arguments for open
access. Open access can develop new publishing mediums, new data aggregates,
new communication patterns, and promote efficiency in the delivery of
research.
Pros
of Open Access
Many scientists
have argued that all scientific research should be freely and immediately
available online (Tamber et al. 2003). In todays information environment, the
four-centuries-old publishing model based on user fees now hinders
communication. Clinicians and researchers having limited access to
peer-reviewed research articles makes it difficult to know of and build on
research that has already been conducted and reported. This is central to rapid
and efficient progress in science.
There are
several problems inherent in charging users. Up to 30% of publishers' revenue
today is used to employ staff and systems to assess current and future
subscribers (ibid). Those costs are
passed onto the scientific community as part of subscription charges.
For-profit publishers have a monopoly on academic publishing which has enabled
publishers to increase subscription costs exponentially.
Arguments for
open access to peer-reviewed research are especially strong in clinical medicine,
in part due to the emergence of evidence based research. It should be noted
that clinical research is often conducted on members of the public, performed
by clinicians trained with public money, hosted in public institutions, and
often funded by public money. Yet, the
results are often not publicly available.
Alternative
models whereby authors retain copyright and are charged for publication have
developed. BioMed Central provides biomedical research online at no charge to
subscribers, but charges the author $500 per article (Tamber et al. 2003). The
Public Library of Science Biology (PLoS Biology) charges authors $1,500 per
article to cover costs. In 2006, most of the worldwide research output,
totaling about 2,500,000 articles per year, were published in 24,000
peer-reviewed research journals (Tamber et al 2003). Of those, less than 5% are
currently open-access journals. As I have noted before, anything that blocks
access to research findings goes against the interests of research,
researchers, their employers, their funders, and public taxes that often fund
the research.
Cons
of Open Access
The open-access
model is not without its critics. Brian D. Crawford, PhD, vice president and
publishing director of John Wiley and Sons Ltd. notes in the November 2003
issue of The Lancet that many
important questions must be answered before the existing scientific and medical
journal publishing system is thrown out (Crawford 2003). The primary weakness
in open-access models is that they are based on authors paying for publication.
This means authors must either pay directly or through sponsorship from
institutions or interested third parties. As a result, science will either have
a less effective filter or will require the introduction of new
post-publication review systems. Business models put forward to support authors
are experimental and have not shown to be sustainable.
Some critics,
such as Michael J. Held, executive director of the Rockefeller University
Press, argue open access is an attempt to take away freedom to choose
publishers, forcing all authors and publishers into their open access
publishing model (Held 2003). As the model is unproven and may well be
unsustainable, Held and others postulate this is an irresponsible act because
the open access model shifts the supplier of capital from the reader to the
author. This could result in barriers to publishing because of prohibitively
high author fees. Many also point out the current author fees (at BioMed
Central and PLoS) are based on what authors might be willing to pay than on
what is needed to sustain an ongoing business. Howard Garrison, PhD, director
of the Office of Public Affairs for the Federation of American Societies for
Experimental Biology (FASEB) notes "It is very dangerous to have all scientific
publication controlled by a single editorial view or funding source"
(Horton 2003).
Conclusion
Scientific
research should be freely accessible to all. Free access can be a public good.
Much research is publicly funded and involves members of the public as
participants. Authors and peer reviewers are willing to provide their work free
of charge. The cost of peer review and dissemination can, and should be,
covered in ways that do not limit access to information and so do not hinder
scientific communication. Funding agencies, academic institutions, promotion
and tenure committees, and authors can all work to promote open access. Funding
agencies and institutions can encourage their researchers to publish in
open-access journals. They can also explore a range of ways of shifting budgets
away from journal subscriptions, including allowing processing and subscription
charges to be payable from grants. Academic committees can encourage their
members to self-review and can give credit for open-access publication.
Society as a
whole can benefit from an expanded and accelerated research cycle. Research can
advance more effectively because researchers have immediate access to all the
findings they need. The visibility, usage and impact of researchers' own
findings increases with open access. The ability to find, access and use the
findings of others will always improve science. Universities benefit from their
researchers' conclusions, and increased returns to the funders promotes more
funding. For instructors, open access means no restrictions on providing
articles for teaching purposes. Publishers benefit from the wider
dissemination, greater visibility and higher journal citation impact factor of
their articles. Open access will promote collaboration, transparency, and will
generate better scientific research.
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