The main points of the workshop seem to me to be these:
We do not know a great deal about scholarly publishing, even at basic quantitative levels, nor about researchers behaviour. Specifically, the true cost of publishing a paper remains unknown
I wonder if anyone could manage to hold a discussion on open access without using the word model? It smacks of the argot of prostitution to me.
For the report itself see: http://www.rin.ac.uk/data-scholarly-journals; for comment on it try this Technorati search
Technorati Tags: openaccess
Richard Charkin chaired the workshop and described the report as a welcome addition to the literature, establishing, to use a Rumsfeldianism, what we know and what we know we don't know. The future is elusive, but we can be sure that there will be more science, that research from countries such as India and China will grow considerably, and that there will be a range of publishing models. He said that his colleagues at Nature had tried to collect data, rather than prejudices, assumptions or anecdote. Scientific publishing is at an all-time high, driven by the digital revolution, with more people than ever accessing information and linking to it. Commercial publishers make profits, some more than others, but the true cost of publishing a scientific paper remains a vague number. The adoption of publication fees paid by authors or their institutions raises problems and issues for publishers. The old model required publishers to collect subscription payments, from thousands of institutions, but the publication fee model requires them to collect from millions of authors, part of a global population of scientists. The problem of plagiarism needs attention, as do the needs of the developing world.
Michael Jubb, director of RIN, then introduced the report. RIN's aim was to look at scholarly communication as a whole, and how it supports successful British science. Measured in citations, we are second only to the USA, produce 8.5% of the world's publications, and our researchers are highly productive, measured as the ratio between funding and new findings. But how efficient is the system? If the Australian work on quantifying efficiency is applicable, then a small increase in efficiency could have a dramatic effect, a 1% increase providing a benefit of$171m, while a 3% increase would gain $3.6 billion.
The study was commissioned by RIN, RCUK and the Department of Trade and Industry and carried out by EPS and Loughborough University with an expert group, chaired by Jeff Aronson, Reader in Clinical Pharmacology at Oxford, which brought together research funders, librarians and publishers.
They accepted the RCUK principles on open access, that publicly funded research should be accessible, that it should be quality-controlled through peer review, that it should be efficient and cost-effective and that preservation should ensure long-term access.
The scholarly communication system is complex, said Michael. There is the research itself, its quality assurance, its registration, recognition, and reward, its presentation and dissemination, to say nothing of finding research results, measuring their use and impact and long-term preservation.
New technology has caused key players to change the part they play. So, for example, researchers can be their own publishers, publishers can host content, and provide search and navigation tools while librarians are no longer custodians but service-providers
As far as public policy is concerned, the goals are to provide effective policy support for British research and innovation, to provide speedy access to research results with as few restrictions as possible and to provide for fair competition within the market. However we still lack systematic evidence on how the system operates.
So far the report has been downloaded 1250 times [that seem a rather low figure to me, and even fewer downloaders will have read it-TR]. It has attracted a critique by Stevan Harnad, as well as articles in the THES (subscription only) and Information World Review.
The chief finding is how little we know; specifically we understand very little about the market for scholarly communication outside universities, about the costs involved in the communication process, about usage (pace the CIBER work), about what influences impact factors and citation and about the viability of new publishing models.
Michael said the purpose of the workshop was to test whether the RIN has achieved its aim of setting an authoritative base-line, to identify the key lessons, the implications for public policy, the gaps in the evidence and how to fill them. It should not be seen as yet another partisan intervention in the debate.
