Research Councils UK: Open Access Policy (S&T Report)

Lord Rees of Ludlow Excerpts

Thursday 28th February 2013 Lords Chamber

[Lord Rees of Ludlow]

My Lords, in the early days of the Royal Society, its secretary, Henry Oldenburg, started Philosophical Transactions. This was the world's first scientific journal. It is still going and was the prototype for the tens of thousands of refereed journals that exist today.

Printed academic journals were a real advance in the 1660s and have served us for 300 years, but they are now surely anachronistic: the legacies of Gutenberg and Oldenburg are not optimal in the age of Zuckerberg. Online journals offer vastly greater ease in tracking down published research and accessing all research resources. It is only with the advent of the internet that open access has become feasible.

Among academics, the open access campaign is pushing at an open door. Researchers like their work to be freely available to everyone, including those with no institutional affiliation, but achieving this goal is a bigger challenge in some disciplines than in others. My own field, physics and astronomy, is more or less there already. That is because of a well organised web archive started in the 1990s by Paul Ginsparg in the US. I look at this archive every day and far less often at actual journals. However, we still value the peer review provided by “traditional” journals and want our papers to appear in one as well—for accreditation reasons rather than for increasing the number of readers. In our field, the journals survive. Theoretical physicists have, in effect, green open access with a zero embargo period. If the paper is published, the journal version appears and remains on the archive. However, I realise that other disciplines are less lucky, with a real gap between current practice and the eventual goal. It is rather sad that, thanks to Paul Ginsparg, the educated public can read everything on superstring theory, which will not enlighten them much, but cannot freely access all comprehensible writings in the humanities.

There is a global move towards open access. Indeed, just last Friday, a paper from Dr John Holdren, President Obama’s science adviser, enjoined all government agencies to come up with proposals to implement enhanced open access to the results of all the research that they fund. However, what is not clear is whether the so-called “gold” route will be widely followed globally. Let us remember that we publish less than 10% of the world’s research. Unless other countries follow the gold route, we will be paying twice: foreign scientists will benefit from our decision but we will not get a reciprocal benefit. That is why it is important that BIS should assess the value for money and that RCUK and HEFCE should keep the situation under review in an international context.

The open access issue is in any case being overtaken by new media developments. Traditional journals, even in electronic form, are no longer the sole mode of dissemination of scientific results. Blogs and wikis are playing a growing role. It is not obvious that the traditional scientific paper or monograph will, or should, continue as the prime vehicle for communicating science and codifying the consensus.

Even the accreditation role of journals may one day be trumped. Learned societies or groups of universities could organise a refereeing or quality control system which could be grafted on to a web archive and could do this more cheaply than traditional publishers—certainly, than commercial publishers.

What needs to be communicated and accessed is no longer just written texts. Huge data sets now exist in physics, genetics, climate science and other areas. Data mining and mashing will offer new routes to discoveries. One would hope that these data can be accessed and downloaded anywhere by anyone.

Despite the widespread support for open access in academia, academia displays undue rigidity in some respects which plays into the hands of commercial publishers. Surely it is far from optimal that the career prospects of young academics depend on a single monograph or on the bibliometric scores of a few papers. It is even worse if there is an “institutionalised” pecking order of journals, with a frustrating and morale-sapping delay while young authors struggle for acceptance in a top-ranked journal. One of the most deplorable remarks that I heard recently was from a professor responding to the question, “How do you decide whether a paper is good?”, with the reply, “By the journal it’s in”.

Even if our committee’s recommendations are taken into account, implementation of the Finch report will still surely lead to a lot of petty accounting and administration in universities, where the funds made available will cover the cost of gold access for only 10% of Russell Group publications, and petty administration within RCUK and HEFCE, where someone is going to have to monitor the embargo policies and APCs of thousands of journals and deal with the issues when there are foreign co-authors, or when the journal of choice is a foreign one that does not meet our access criteria.

The move is superfluous in subjects like mine. It may have unintended downsides in the very different context of the humanities, as the British Academy in particular has been concerned about. I personally doubt that these elaborate regulations will actually allow new ideas to percolate more freely than would have happened anyway, given the pressures from authors and the rapidly changing IT scene. However, as the noble Lord, Lord Krebs, has explained, our report took the Finch committee’s recommendations as its starting point, and we should therefore welcome the positive response that it has elicited from those charged with implementing its intricacies.