Open Access News

The Royal Society, the UK's national academy of science, today hit back at critics of its "negative" attitude to making research freely available on the internet, claiming it was under attack from commercial interests. A letter signed by 46 society fellows, including two Nobel laureates, criticised the academy for opposing open access agreements, under which scientists agree to make their findings freely available on the internet as well as publishing them in academic journals. The letter had been coordinated by BioMed Central, a commercial publisher of open access journals, which stood to gain from open access publishing, said a spokesman for the society. BioMed Central admitted it had helped coordinate the letter, along with another open access publisher, the Public Library of Science, but said the initiative came from fellows angered by the Royal Society's position. The letter accuses the society of putting its own interests as the publisher of a learned journal before the interests of science. The increasingly heated debate has been sparked by proposals from the UK research councils to require scientists to make their findings freely available online as a condition of receiving grants. The Royal Society issued a statement denying it was taking a negative stance on open access and calling for a study of various forms of open access publishing. "We are simply concerned that open access is achieved without the risk of unintended damage to peer-review, quality control and long-term accessibility of the scientific literature." A spokesman added: "The Royal Society is absolutely supportive of the principle of open access and is committed to the widest possible dissemination of research outputs. The society is itself a delayed open access publisher, providing free access after 12 months, and provides immediate access to researchers in developing countries and also to scientific papers that are of major public interest - for example the results of the farm scale evaluation of genetically modified crops. "However, there is understandable concern that if researchers can access large numbers of final versions of journal papers from repositories, then they will not be prepared to subscribe to these journals. The society is not in favour of policies that might reduce scholarly communication by undermining the established subscription model of publishing before the alternatives (such as author-pays journals) have been fully explored and have been shown to be viable in the long-term." A BioMed spokeswoman said: "We have not made any attempt to conceal the fact we were involved, but nor did we brand it as a BioMed initiative because it isn't - it's very much fellows of the Royal Society writing to the Royal Society." She added: "It is in the commercial interests of BioMed that open access is successful, but it is also in the commercial interests of publishers and learned societies that the subscription model prevails."

Comment. The Royal Society is not "under attack from commercial interests." It's under attack from its own members. Four quick replies: (1) BMC has a financial interest in OA journals but not in OA archiving (apart from its small Open Repository service). I know that the RS is confused about this issue, but in fact the RCUK policy does not mandate submission to OA journals, only deposit in OA archives. (2) The RS has a financial interest in maintaining subscriptions. I believe that its subscriptions are not threatened by the RCUK policy. But if it wants to argue that its fears are justified, then it has to start by admitting its financial interest, which is much stronger than BMC's. (3) The Fellows of the Royal Society who have publicly criticized the RS position have no financial interest in the outcome and it's comical to suggest that they are acting in the interest of BMC rather than the interest of science. (4) If the role of the BMC in this affair means that the RS is under attack from commercial interests, then the OA movement is on much more solid ground to argue that it is under attack from commercial interests.