Open Access News

Dr. Jurgen Renn (Max Planck Gesellschaft, MPG) gave his opening address on behalf of the MPG President Peter Gruss. He reflected on the current scientific journal, the MPG’s role and attitudes towards the current academic publishing process. Costs for the dissemination of scientific information have become research costs. He saw “open access” as a paradigm shift (of the order of Internet and the Web) and contrasted it with “toll access” currently practised by publishers. New media haven’t been optimally used by academic publishers, and examples of systems developed and run by scientists themselves were suggested as alternatives. He stressed that people need to look for new models. If we keep mapping existing structures to a new medium, we will create and not cross boundaries. Dr. Renn stressed that “open access” is not directed against publishers but is rather a transformation process towards a better infrastructure which publishers can also exploit. The development of “open access” should focus on long-term preservation and quality control....

Vitek Tracz (Chairman of the Science Navigation Group) had his address read by Dr. Matthew Cockerill: it started out by stressing the necessity of academic publishers to reinvent themselves. Offering added value has to become the focal point. In order to do this, standardisation will be necessary. The new generation of Internet companies like Skype, eBay, etc. illustrate that information can float freely while you can exploit higher level services. It has to become recognised that paper-based and the emulation of paper-based publications are not the future. Knowledge structuring, tools for knowledge evaluation, collective knowledge of communities, semantic enrichment, mining tools, were all seen as fair game for the future publisher....

Dr. Johannes Fournier (Deutsches Forschungs Gemeinschaft -DFG, representing Dr. Gudrun Gersmann, Library Committee of DFG) explained, that this Committee has increased its mandate to include research information and the building of digital research resources. It is part of the mission of DFG to supply the necessary German and international information to German scientists, and during the past years an amount of 27M Euro has been spent on national licences. Open access was seen as a way to reduce the costs for information. Scientists will determine the future developments of academic publishing: electronic publishing is only a part of the general changes in the research area. DFG will assist in the establishment of new publishing organisations, but can only supply initial funding and not maintenance. The speaker saw collaboration with publishers necessary and desirable. Freely available information could form a basis to be used by publishers, and sold at their own risk to a broader public.

Dr. Matthew Cockerill (Publisher, BioMedCentral Ltd., London) presented his company’s route to become a profitable enterprise. This would be based on open access to its publications – whereby the authors or their employers/funding-agencies are required to pay a fee per article published. A fee of around 1000 Euro is seen as adequate at this time, and some 400 institutes, paying for 69% of the currently published articles, are currently supporting the company. 65 funding agencies were recently contacted for a survey, to which 23 so far have responded – mostly favourably. The speaker also mentioned other companies employing the “authors-pay” principle, with comparative prices, and suggested that at a level of 1-2000 Euro per article such efforts could become sustainable....

The general debate in the closing panel was largely driven by the issue of Open Access. The pros and cons in the lively discussion showed a wide spectrum of opinions. The base for the discussion was Dr. Renn’s demand to publishers to allow an open access model. Renn explained that open access is the wish of the customers, the scientists, and that it is the enabler for new form of science. The discussion was continued by Jan Velterop (Springer) who pointed out that it is very easy to make information freely available. Therefore, Velterop claimed, there are no good arguments against open access. In this context, Renn emphasised that not only information is closed up currently, but that publishers invest to close up information. Mathew Cockerill (BioMed Central), supporting Renn’s initial argument, explained that open access is “the only way to allow the full resources of academia to throw that creativity at finding the best ways to discover content and put that content in context”.