Open Access News

From Jonathan Eisen:

I generally think that the Nature piece misrepresents many of the issues relating to Open Access publishing and of the costs of publishing. To say that PLoS faces a "looming financial crisis" simply because it has not broken even in the time line that the Nature reporter thinks they should have is disingenuous. My reading of the data presented in the article is that PLoS is a start up organization that has not figured out exactly what its costs of doing business are. That is a far cry from a looming crisis.

In addition, I personally think that the "break even" issue is not the critical issue here. The real issue to me is that scientific and medical research should be freely available for it to most benefit humankind. That the system for Open Access publishing is still being worked out is a minor detail in a bigger picture.

I view this issue much like I view the National Parks here in the US. The National Park Servive is still exploring ways to get parks to come as close to breaking even as possible. This is done through entrance and camping fees and various other revenue generating systems. But few would argue that Yellowstone and the Grand Canyon and Yosemite should be turned over to developers simply because it costs a bit more to manage them that is brought in by fees. That is not to say the managers of the parks should not continue to explore ways to recover their costs and reduce their expenses. But the parks benefit the entire country....[The money needed to pay PLoS' bills] could easily be provided if one took the funds being used to pay the high fees of many journals and redistributed them to Open Access journals. That way the literature would be available and no extra taxpayer money would be spent. In fact, most likely, taxpayer money would be saved by doing this.

From Stephen Ellner:

I have published in Nature and refereed for Nature, but I'm also on the PLoS Biology editorial board and an open-access supporter, so the artcle “Open-access journal hits rocky time” made me see red. Yes, PLoS needs external support still. But so does Nature, in the form of manuscript reviews that we do for free while the publisher profits from the papers that we have worked to improve. It would be interesting to compare the amount of support PLoS is getting against the value of all the anonymous "pro bono" work that the scientific community does for Nature Publishing Group.

From Musa Mayer:

As a patient advocate in the United States who closely follows the emerging scientific literature in breast cancer, and helps to educate women with advanced and metastatic breast cancer about their treatment options, the open access movement has been more than welcome. Many advocates like myself have watched with dismay over the last fifteen years as one valuable journal after another has adopted a subscription-only policy.

The PLoS journals, PubMed Central and the open access movement have been beacons in that gathering darkness. This is not a small matter for advocates like myself, who do not have institutional and academic access to the journals that we follow, nor personal resources to pay for multiple subscriptions. If we wish to read anything more than abstracts of uneven quality, we are reduced to paying exorbitant per-article prices, begging authors for reprints, visiting medical libraries open to the public, or arranging time-consuming and sometimes costly interlibrary loans. To me, it has always seemed unconscionable that research paid for in whole or in part with public funds, using patients who give so unselfishly for the advancement of medicine and science, should be unavailable to those very patients and to the public.

That a prestigious journal like Nature should all but gloat at the unremarkable start-up struggles of the Public Library of Science feels unseemly to me. I would think that even at a subscriber-supported journal, there would be those who believe in open access to the biomedical literature. And when did philanthropic support become a sign of weakness? Perhaps your editorial focus ought to be on ways to liberate scientific knowledge from the marketplace.