Publicly funded research for a price
Publicly funded research doesn't seem so public when the public has to pay to read the results in a journal. A proposed law would help publishing companies preserve their business models, but it would limit public access to the research. Janet Babin reports.
The Journal of the American Medical Association (The Journal of the American Medical Association)
TEXT OF STORY
Kai Ryssdal: A lot of the scientific research that goes on in this country is really expensive. And, as it happens, a lot of it is publicly funded. But when taxpayers want to read a particular study that has been paid for with their money, they have to pay again to read about it in, say, The New England Journal of Medicine.
Congress is about to take up a bill that would help companies that publish those kinds of journals protect their business models. But it would also limit general access to publicly funded research. Janet Babin reports now from the Marketplace Innovations Desk at North Carolina Public Radio.
JANET BABIN: People who grew up with the Internet expect information to be free. That's what 21-year-old Josh Sommer thought.
In 2006 he was a typical college freshman. Studying environmental engineering, hanging out, making new friends. Suddenly, he started to get severe headaches. He had a series of routine tests.
Josh Sommer: End up having an MRI and being told that I have a mass right in the very center of my head, entwined with critical arteries, in one of the most difficult locations to operate on.
The cancer Josh has is called Chordoma. It's a rare disease with a low survival rate. Even doctors don't know much about it. So Josh threw himself into Chordoma research. He Googled the disease to find out all he could about it, but kept hitting roadblocks.
Sommer: I'd find an abstract, and I'd click on it. And oh, you have to pay $60 to read this article. Oh, you have to pay $40 to read this article. I mean, I have this disease, I want to know about it.
Journal subscriptions -- like the Journal of the American Medical Association -- can cost thousands of dollars each year. With universities and libraries trimming budgets, they can't afford all of them either.
What Josh needed was free access to the research online.
Last year, the National Institutes of Health unlocked the gates on a lot of research. Through its Web portal called PubMed Central, you can now search research papers for any disease scientists are studying with public funds. It's an estimated 80,000 articles a year.
Duke University law professor James Boyle says open access is only fair.
James Boyle: Why would you possibly say that when the taxpayers funded something, then the public can't get to read it afterwards without paying again?
Well, you might say it if you were a publisher. Martin Frank is executive director of the American Physiological Society. The nonprofit group publishes more than a dozen medical journals.
Martin Frank: The question is whether or not the NIH policy compromises the ability for a publisher to recover the inherent costs of producing a product.
The publishing industry argues the NIH policy strains their budgets. Frank says subscription sales are slipping, and the cost to edit and peer review each article is rising. He and other publishers support a proposed law that would reverse the NIH open-access policy. It's called the Fair Copyright in Research Works Act.
Professor Boyle, at Duke, says the law would not only lock out patients, but also researchers.
Boyle: The Web works great for porn or for shoes, or for flirting on social networks. But it doesn't work really well for science. We haven't done for science what we did on the rest of the Web, which is basically to have this open Web with everything linked together.
Increasingly, open access to research is demanded, even by the academics creating the content. Laura Janneck is a med student at Case Western, and studies public health at Harvard. She says journal publishers need to change their business model.
Laura Janneck: I mean this is how capitalism works, right? The strong companies are the ones who can adapt to the changing environment, and you can't prevent information technology from progressing as it is.
Publishers might change their business model by making authors pay to have their own articles published. But some researchers might try to cover those fees with public funds. So an author-pays model could end up costing taxpayers more in the long run, than if they just paid to see the articles they're interested in.
In Durham, N.C., I'm Janet Babin for Marketplace.
Comments
Comment | Refresh
From Salt Lake City, UT, 05/04/2009
I have been publishing since 1980s in biomedical field. One thing that bothers me is increasing cost of publication in scientific journals, while the cost of printing in general has come down substantially in the market due to advanced and cheaper technology. Similarly, the cost of subscription to scientific journals is also increasing to such an extent that many libraries in developing countries cannot afford them. Again the cost of subscription to non-scientific journals or magazines has been decreasing substantially. This disparity is not due to the advertisements inserted into the non-scientific publications, as many scientific journals also carry a lot of advertisements to generate extra revenue. These two factors - increasing cost of publication and cost of subscription - are responsible for the creation of "segment zero" in the publication market - the so called open access and free journals. The scientific publication market is not yet matured completely as compared to market for other publications. With increasing competition from the web-based open access journals, which are also recruiting highly qualified editorial board members and following stringent review process, and attaining increasingly higher impact factors, the market may mature and reach a new Nash equilibrium. The sign of any matured market is low prices due to healthy competition. That is bound to happen soon in publication market as well.
From Augusta, GA, 04/30/2009
I am a biomedical researcher who publishes frequently in a wide range of scientific journals and am supported by NIH grants. I am also an active member of the American Physiological Society and the American Heart Association, two major non-profit publishers in my area of cardiovascular research. First of all, I strongly believe that the presumed damage due to lack of open access is grossly over-stated.
This is a very complicated issue and it is so easy for those who have not studied the issue in depth to side with the open access movement. While I fully understand that communicating results in a timely fashion is critical, moving to immediate open access would result in publishers immediately losing subscription revenue and put many out of business. This would be particularly difficult for the many non-profit publishers.
While one could then argue that we need a new business model, moving the cost from the libraries (subscriptions) onto the author would still result in the taxpayer paying, but the majority of the financing required for publishing would then have to come from research dollars and would severely thwart the ability of researchers to publish, not to mention how negatively this would affect researchers in poorer countries. The fact is, the actual cost of publishing is far more than the current page charges that authors already pay. Furthermore, a large amount of scientific publishing is being done by non-profit organizations such as the American Physiological Society, American Chemical Society, etc. which depend on publishing revenue to sponsor educational programs, scientific conferences, etc. This would all go away without subscription revenue.
The implication here is that taxpayer dollars should not go to organizations that depend on making money. This is not realistic. Billions (now trillions) of taxpayer dollars go to private institutions that would not survive without a profit margin. If we are going to argue that all scientific publishers are just being greedy, then there is a clear lack of understanding of how scientific publishing works. The open access movement threatens the integrity of scientific peer review. Without this, science will suffer.
Finally, there is nothing stopping any law abiding citizen from walking into our library and access all the scientific literature that I have. The only limitation is that you cannot do it at home in the comfort of your pajamas.
From Alameda, CA, 04/30/2009
I am a chemist and computer scientist who, for the first 15 years of post-Ph.D. employment, has had the benefit of working for major multinational chemical and scientific instrument companies where I had access to almost any journal I needed for my research.
Since 1997, I have owned a very small company that produces state-of-the-art software for scientific data analysis. To remain competent and relevant in this field, I need access to the technical literature. Unfortunately, as a small company, I can't afford to subscribe to most of the journals I need, and must restrict my selection to just a handful of the less expensive ones.
The PLoS, the BMC, and other open-source publications have been great for me, and the number and quality of articles published through such venues continues to increase. However, there is still too much of the literature that is only available through for-profit publishers.
The NIH policy has been great for individuals and small companies like mine. For the minor inconvenience of a six-month delay, I have access to all that I can't otherwise afford. Taking that away would send me back to begging authors for reprints.
To those who think that the solution is to make all journals electronic-only: I have digital subscriptions to two "must-have" journals in my field. I have to pay nearly as much for these as I would for the print version. The "gotcha" is this: if I let my subscription expire, that's it, I'm totally cut off, even from articles published in those years when I -did- subscribe. If I had a print subscription, I could just pull the volume off the shelf and look up the article; with digital only, I'm stuck.
And with digital-only subscriptions, there's no journal that I know of that will let you download and save an entire issue; you have to do it article by article by article.
My Congressional representatives will soon find out that I consider a vote for this bill to be a vote to put me out of a job, and if they vote in favor, I'll more than happy to return the favor at the next election.
From Macomb, IL, 04/30/2009
I would like to congratulate Marketplace for reporting on an issue that has, until now, received very little press. I believe that publicly funded research should be openly accessible. This means that all technical reports, journal articles and Congressional Research Service reports should be openly accessible. Journal publishers, especially the non-profits should have exclusive rights only for a short period of time (6 months to a year) after which all of the research should be openly accessible. An interesting article on a related topic, bundling of journals by major publishers, titled A challenge to Goliath, is available in the Journal of Experimental Medicine at: http://jem.rupress.org/cgi/content/full/jem.20090836v1. Keep up the good work!
From CA, 04/29/2009
I was very surprised that this story made NO mention of the Public Library of Science, also known as PLoS (http://www.plos.org/) There is a time and place for big money making, but health care shouldn't be one of them.
From Rockaway, NJ, 04/29/2009
Yes, PLEASE use your local public or community college library! That way everyone has access and everyone gets paid. Ms Babin, this should have been mentioned in your article!
From Eugene, OR, 04/29/2009
The scholarly journal publishing industry went through a startling transformation over the past 20 years, moving from a large number of publishers to an oligopoly dominated by 3 or 4 megapublishers. As any student of economics would expect, the result was much higher prices, very high profitablility for those publishers, and low rates of technological innovation. Innovation in scholarly publishing today is mostly in the non-profit sector, particularly in open access journals and in university efforts to make their own research widely and freely available through institutional and disciplinary repositories (e.g. arXiv or my own university's Scholars' Bank). The Conyers bill would go a long way towards killing that innovation.
From Eugene, OR, 04/29/2009
Kudos to NPR and Marketplace for getting this issue out in front of the public. As Joanne Schneider points out, the real cost of production is borne by the funding agencies and especially the universities. Richard Flagan's analogy about the labels on a wine bottle helps bring this home. At this point in time, research and scholarship in almost every field is "born digital," institutions can easily host repositories of their own (here's a place to start: http://www.oaister.org/), so researchers no longer need publishers to get their content out to the world. So here's a blunt question -- in the current system of scholarly communications, what is the *real* added value of an expensive journal beyond branding for purposes of peer review, tenure, and promotion? Until the academic community develops more sustainable ways to organize the peer review process, every faculty member and the universities themselves will remain victims of this captive market.
From new york, NY, 04/29/2009
I'd like to take Todd Puccio's argument above a step further--the problem may not be where one can gain access to scientific journals, because access alone does not guarantee comprehension. I think the real problem of access is due to the sad state of science journalism, that is, not just access to the words in an article, but access to understanding that content. If Josh Sommers instead had access to coverage of these particular articles by a doctor or a well trained journalist, his understanding of the studies would increase as his time invested in reading incomprehensible medical jargon decreased (and it's not true that a well written and concise article about any rare disease wouldn't get any coverage... this is the reason House is so popular.)
There are so few outlets for science journalism--when newspapers go through tough times, science and tech sections are at the top of the cut list. Outlets are decreasing, but the public is still demanding scientific information, and now it has to go directly to the source.
I'd suggest that the publishers themselves could become the "science journalists" we need to help us understand their complex material. This type of reporting would be value-added content (which subscription-based publishers love to brag that they already provide), providing actual incentive to pay for subscriptions, and the value-added journalistic/editorial content would remain free, of course.
The biggest issue with this scheme is trust. To build trust with a publisher's journalism/reporting (no hyperbole, jargon, etc), public interaction with this content becomes imperative: the public could review and grade pieces en masse, providing something akin to voting up or down articles on Digg or Reddit.
From Los Angeles, CA, 04/29/2009
Government funds research as a matter of principle in the general interest of society. The use of that research is a separate concern that should not be discharged by a wildly baseless assumption of liberty. Despite the popular notions referred to in the piece, there is in fact no broad precedent for unlimited public access to the fruits of research funded in part by taxpayer dollars, and for good reason.
For the sake of illustration, imagine we were talking about The National Endowment for the Arts. Would anyone assume that an artist who learns a technique while working on a grant project would then forfeit all rights to future works based on that technique? Would we require museums to forgo admission fees while this work was presenting their galleries? We assume that a society of better artists and better museums contributes to the common good. The same general assumption gives cause to the public funding of science. There is however, no general assumption as to the use of the findings. Just as we acknowledge that the conduct of research leads to standards for and the regulation of that work, so too should thoughtful considerations be applied to its outcomes. In both the conduct of the research and separately in its dissemination, qualifications, regulations, and standards of precedent must be exercised.
The N.I.H. should be applauded for their effort to reflect democratic principles in an age when those principles were in jeopardy. However, the illusory moral imperative for unfettered access to all information in all cases is easily dissected. Yes, corporate interests have used undue influence and become all too adept at laying off costs that should be borne by them as a function of their business. But, this concern can be addressed by regulation. And, as pointed out by previous comments, for the young man in the story we have a measured solution as well, the library.
From Pasadena, CA, 04/28/2009
I am a scientist and engineer who has published many papers in scientific journals, a former editor-in-chief of a professional society journal, a frequent reviewer of scientific papers, and a former chair and continuing member of the library committee of a major research university, the California Institute of Technology. I have not been paid for any of my activities in support of scientific journals, and have frequently paid high "page charges" for the privilege of having my intellectual property appropriated by publishers whose only objective is to extract as much revenue as they can from the scholarly community. The publication of scholarly research journals is totally different from the publication of fiction or books in that publishers demand that authors give them ownership of the manuscripts that provide the only value in scholarly journals, and they do that without any fiscal compensation for authors. Authors of scientific papers do not ask to be paid. The contribute their writings freely, seeking only to document their contributions to their research fields and to inform their research communities of their discoveries. My research, and most of that of my colleagues around the world, has been financed by taxpayers. It should be freely available.
Publishers do package the manuscripts nicely and incur some costs in distributing them. This is like putting a label on a bottle of fine wine. The publishers deserve a fair profit, but their contributions are relatively minor, like that of the printer of the label on the wine bottle. A fair profit can be ensured by allowing them to constrain access to a paper for a limited period of time as the NIH policy allows. The American Physiological Society, mercenary professional societies, and many commercial publishers want much more than that. They want Congress to ensure that the agencies that fund research cannot limit their ability to limit access to publicly funded research for the entire period of copyright, presently many years after the death of the author (the duration of this protection varies from country to country). This does not provide any benefit to those who funded the research, or to those authors whose labors are presented in the published papers. It only benefits the publisher whose contribution to the value of the publication is the least of all of the contributors.
The NIH has established a policy that allows the publishers a reasonable monopoly period (6 months) and then opens access to the broad scientific community and to the general public. The proposed law would prohibit federal agencies from placing any obligations on the publishers or authors to provide access to publicly funded research. Instead of endorsing the appropriation of publicly funded research, Congress should require all federal agencies to adopt similar policies. Whether research deals with health issues, the environment, the safety of engineered structures, or the most fundamental and abstract chemistry, biology, physics, or mathematics, the research should be available to all after a reasonable period of time.
The final suggestion in the Market Place report that taxpayers could end up paying more for the author-pays model for covering the costs of publication is nonsense designed to mislead the public about the mercenary interests of the proponents of this legislation. The highest costs imposed upon authors are far lower than the cumulative costs of present-day subscription rates. If publishers attempt to increase the costs further, authors will vote with their feet -- or more precisely, with their choices of journals. Do not allow mercenary publishers to restrict public access to the results from publicly funded research. Oppose the measure described in the Market Place report. Instead, serve the public interest by requiring all federal agencies to ensure open access to the research papers that they have funded.
From Ft. Lauderdale, FL, 04/28/2009
Josh Sommers problem wasn't that he had to pay for the article, his problem was that he didn't know where to go to get it. I am a University Librarian that is constantly trying to quash the myth that everything is free on the internet. It isn't and it shouldn't be. The students and researchers at Universities are often ill informed about the resources their libraries can provide. Print subscriptions, Electronic subscriptions and Inter-Library Loan services are available and included with the cost of tuition or a perk of faculty status. While folks un associated with a university may need to jump some hoops at their local public library, access to most medical journals is available. Researchers in private companies should rightly pay fees for access. Publication of research has never been easier or cheaper than is is now. It is only now in the world of free TV and free Web entertainment that this unreasonable expectation has arisen. In short, the problems here could have been easily solved by asking a Librarian.
From Austin, TX, 04/28/2009
For the record, reviewers for scientific journals are NOT paid. All scientists are expected to review research manuscripts for journals without pay as a service to the profession. I strongly believe ALL federally funded research articles should be freely accessible. As an academic, I find the skyrocketing costs of individual research articles disturbing. Students and faculty can no longer afford access to relevant research (and we have university library resources). Health literacy levels in the US are pathetically low. Without free public access, Americans will become increasingly ignorant at a time when lifestyle choices account for the majority of health problems, and options for many medical treatments aren't provided to patients.
From Fair Lawn, NJ, 04/28/2009
Journals suggest that peer review costs money. Well, most reviewers are not paid and the process itself has not been shown to improve papers. A much better way of doing the publishing is what is done in physics with a paper drop and then if anybody has any opinions they can add them to the database. Costs very little.
From Science Editor 4, p. 139 (2002)
The scientific publishing process of today is inappropriate, inefficient and lacks the checks and balances required for a good scientific record.
The power of editors to determine what goes into the scientific record and what does not is inappropriate. Editors, typically covering a multitude of sub fields, are by far not as knowledgeable as the best scientists in each sub field.
The usual reliance on peer review after an initial step of editorial review, significantly slows down the communication of scientific findings and sometimes prevents it completely. According to Ray and Berkwitz (2000) it takes 273 days from submission to publication of a manuscript in Annals of Internal Medicine, 168 of which is spent in the referee process. Once manuscripts are rejected, two thirds are published elsewhere after an additional 1.5-2.5 years after the date of rejection. The publishing process prevents a third of the rejected manuscripts from ever reaching the eyes of other scientists.
Not only is peer review slow, but it seems to not be accomplishing what editors need – the quality enhancement from peer review is truly minimal as reported by Goodman, Berlin, Fletcher and Fletcher (1994). Out of 36 methodological and presentational dimensions only four showed statistically significant improvements: discussion of limitations, acknowledgment and justification of generalizations, appropriateness of the strength or tone of the conclusions and use of confidence intervals – all but the last having little to do with making sure the reported results were robust.
There are no checks on slow, dumb or politically motivated scientist referees. But beyond that, I, and I presume many other scientists, trust very few scientist colleagues to censor our reading. The intersection of trusted referees and the specialty of a particular manuscript they may be asked to review makes for a very small number. And even the best scientists are not necessarily good enough to determine what should be in the scientific record (remember that Einstein never got the Nobel for the theory of relativity?).
Thanks to the recent advances in making available large amounts of data over the internet we need to undertake an important change in publishing: editors should move away from their role as the guardians of the scientific record towards being the selective marketers of articles they believe are of interest to their readers.
This is how I see an acceptable process:
A scientific manuscript should be deposited into a unique internet based Scientific Record Keeper (SRK), which accepts anything it gets and adds a time stamp to it. The SRK should allow for anybody to search and read it, should they choose to, and should also allow for anybody to add their named or anonymous comments. The SRK is instantaneous – as soon as a manuscript is deposited, its information can be used by anybody in the world. Researchers should be able to enter a set criteria for when they would like to be notified about new deposits.
(Today’s preprint servers are not Scientific Record Keepers in two important respects: they are not unique and almost nobody uses them.)
The bulky SRK should be continuously monitored by scientific journal editors and their staff who would select what they deem is the most valuable information for their readers. One or more Testers, paid and supervised by the journal, whose only interest is to enhance the stature of the
journal, review the selected manuscripts. After their approval the editors put out bids to the article authors who can then choose which journal to publish the manuscript in. Once there is an agreement, the editor markets the manuscript to her or his readers as well as possible. This includes presenting the manuscript in a good light as possible (easy to read, nice graphics, etc.), putting out press releases and other marketing tactics. An electronic version of the journal that allows for anybody to add their named or anonymous comments would serve as a check on the creativity of the editor’s marketing tactics.
What do you think?
From Hamilton, NY, 04/28/2009
This is a great topic and well presented. As the university librarian at a highly selective liberal arts institution, I would like your listeners to know that the high cost of commercial scholarly journals could be dramatically reduced if they curtailed their quest for exorbitant executive pay and stopped publishing in paper by relying wholly on digital access which is the preferred format of researchers. When the head of one prominent scientific society makes over a million dollars and that society convinces institutions that they need its "accreditation services" for discipline-specific academic programs which then requires library subscriptions to its journals, expects that executive salary will be tied to the performance of its publishing division, and announces that the cost of its journals will increase 7.5% for 2010, something is horribly askew. No longer the gatekeepers of scholarly communication, they have become the gatekeepers of profit. Production costs would be reduced by going paperless, while many of the costs that they used to bear have been shifted to universities and colleges. These institutions pay faculty researcher salaries, provide paid sabbaticals and travel funds for them to do research, purchase computers and software for them to produce camera ready articles, and reward them for volunteering their services to serve on publisher boards and make decisions about which articles to publish at no or lower-than-market value pay. Publishers then also expect researchers to pay page costs for their highly subsidized research to be published and charge exorbitant institutional rates to libraries to purchase back the research of their faculty based on sources in their collections. Commercial publishers seem to be more the gatekeepers of profit rather than of the timely sharing of scholarly information. In the current economy, scholarly publishers would do well to observe the conditions ignored by paper newspapers that have gone out of business. They should focus on their primary mission, the timely sharing of scholarly information, not on taking advantage of academic institutions. It is also why academic institutions should provide incentives for their faculty to publish in open access journals that seek to enhance scholarly communication and to cover their costs without high executive compensation.
From OH, 04/28/2009
One thing that should be mentioned is that these articles are available to read for free at an appropriate college library. Every graduate student knows this, even many undergraduates. There's no reason to make them free on the web if they are already free!
What we need is better access to those libraries. Maybe we should support our local libraries more so that they can subscribe to scientific journals. Or, maybe local colleges should be pressured to issue library cards to the public...... Scientific journals generally don't circulate so people would actually have to leave their PCs and interact with humans....yikes!
From NE, 04/28/2009
As a scientist working in biomedical research, I feel especially irritated by the high cost of subscriptions and downloads of single articles. After all in the majority of research publications right now, the scientists pay the publisher for publishing the articles so that we can get credit for our work and have our articles peer reviewed, and then we have to pay to access the articles of our colleagues. It's not just vanity publication because without a publication history, we can't get research funding. Minimizing the cost of publications (no print as in the PLOS publications) and making free access work helps us as well as the general public.
Post a Comment: Please be civil, brief and relevant.
Email addresses are never displayed, but they are required to confirm your comments. All comments are moderated. Marketplace reserves the right to edit any comments on this site and to read them on the air if they are extra-interesting. Please read the Comment Guidelines before posting.
You must be 13 or over to submit information to American Public Media. The information entered into this form will not be used to send unsolicited email and will not be sold to a third party. For more information see Terms and Conditions and Privacy Policy.