Tuesday, July 24, 2012

The cost of knowledge

The British Government announced on Tuesday 16 July 2012  that scientific research funded by British taxpayers' money will be free to access online by 2014, The Guardian reported. The announcement was made in response to the Finch Report that was commissioned by the Wellcome Trust in April 2012 to find a solution for open access to scientific research following the "academic spring" where thousands of researchers protested to boycot journals that publishers charged academic institutions high subscription fees for access.

The "academic spring" was sparked by a blog article posted in January this year by Tim Gowers, a distinguished mathematician at Cambridge University and winner of Fields Medal, unhappy with the high charges imposed by publishers on UK universities for access to research work produced by his peers and largely funded by taxpayers, therefore decided to decline to submit or review papers for any academic journals published by Elsevier.

Hundreds of supporting comments were posted to him, one of his readers set up a website for academics to register their protest against Elsevier. More than 12,000 signatories have now been collected of which more than 800 are medical researchers, committed to refuse to peer review , submit or undertake editorial work for Elsevier journals.  Elsevier publsihes more than 2000 journals, eg Science Direct journals.

In April this year, Harvard University informed its teaching and research staff that it could no longer afford the high prices imposed by many large journal publishers and encouraged its staff to submit their research to open access journals and resign from editorial boards that keep articles behind paywalls. The Univeristy said that the current system of journal pricing and access policies is unsustainable and universities will need to work together to take control of the scholarly publishing.

In the current publishing model, researchers submit articles to journal editors, the manuscript is sent for peer review, usually unpaid. If the work is accepted, it is published and then sold back to university libraries and other subscribers.

Advocates of open access argue that public-funded scientific research should be made freely available to the wider public and for economic benefits. However, one of  the barriers of adopting the open access model is that, apart from the publishers and prices,  research grants in the UK are distrbuted to universiities on their publication records, the more articles the academics get published in prestigious journals, the higher the chance of funding opportunities for their universities or departments, so some may be relunctant to move to open access publishing.

It is estimated that UK universities spend about £200m a year for purchasing access to the scientific journals, unfortunately many are restricted by the licence agreement with publishers to extend the journal access to their affiliated NHS organisations, NHS hospitals will have to pay for their journal access. In 2008, the British Government officially formed 5 academic health science centres (AHSC), these are partnerships between a university and NHS Trust with the aim to improve the quality of health services by bringing research, educaton and patient care closer together. The AHSCs should use the collective bargaining power with publishers to strike a deal to address the issue of HE/NHS inequality of access to electronic library resources.

If you are NHS doctors, authors and users of journal articles, would you consider following Harvard's action?

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