Talk at the Public Library of Science

This morning I gave a talk at a Public Library of Science (PLoS) staff meeting, to express my concern about some of the rhetorical strategies used to support open access publishing. [A link to the presentation is at the end of this post.] PLoS is one of the world's great open access publishers--all articles are available for free online, and are preserved for permanent use (or, at least, as permanently as we know how to preserve any digital content by this point.)

Health sciences librarians have been among the strongest supporters of open access publishing. Traditional, subscription based journals are increasingly unaffordable. Plus, in many cases public funds have supported the research that appears  in scholarly journals--to the extent that this is true, the research is a public good that should be available for everyone.

These arguments for open access still resonate with me, but over the years I've grown weary of rhetoric that tars all traditional publishers--even scholarly societies operating on tight budgets, for whom journal subscriptions are a key source of revenue--as being on the wrong side of scientific progress.  What seemed so simple and right when I was a PLoS booster in 2004 feels complicated in 2007.

But even so, I still support the mission of PLoS; I hope that people perceived my talk as a way to have an honest discussion among friends.

There were two central points, related to each other: 1. that the rhetoric on behalf of open access can be too simplistic; 2. and that this rhetorical battle with traditional publishers is unnecessary because we are moving into a future in which scholars will publish more than just papers. It  is possible that interactive publications which contain multimedia and 3D elements will become the norm.

As defined by the National Library of Medicine, an interactive publication is a  "self-contained multimedia document that enables reader control over media objects and reuse of media content for further analysis." Assuming that publishing an old-fashioned paper becomes passe, I argued for focusing instead  on shaping a future that contains maximum access to such publications.

PLoS staff members (both in person in San Francisco and over the phone from the UK) asked some tough questions.  Several people pointed out that if the rhetoric opposed to traditional publishing becomes too tame, we could set ourselves up for never achieving full open access.  At one point a staff member presented a fully fleshed out theory of rhetoric--that it's OK to praise tentative steps towards open access (such as a scholarly society publisher might take) in private, while pushing hard in public for full open access immediately. The logic is that a tough public line is one means of setting the terms of debate. My response was that pushing too hard could stimulate a well-organized (and funded) response from publishers, so that it's best to be cautious.

Regarding my future predictions about a "post-paper world," people were concerned that without aggressive action now other publishing interests would strive to develop a closed system analogous to what exists for subscription journals. Copyright law is the key here--if somebody besides an author controls access to an interactive publication, it may be less interactive than it could have been. I agreed with this clarification; I had not addressed the legal implications in my talk, so I am glad they came up during the discussion.

Other questions revolved around the role of what librarians and how PLoS could help us. I said that librarians should keep educating faculty members about the current limitations of copyright law and the benefits of open access; and start talking with faculty about the possibilities of interactive publications.  I  advocated a stealthy, grass roots approach about these issues...building a movement rather than storming whatever publishing citadels exists now. PLoS's staff members were more than willing to help with such grass roots efforts.

In the end this debate is about means and not ends; of course I didn't convince everyone, but I hope I provided something to think about. The questions I received made me aware that I have much more thinking to do myself. It's an exciting new era in the history of scholarly publishing, and nobody knows what the future holds.

Download plos_presentation_oct_29_2007.ppt

Comments

[MarkD]

Marcus, doesn't it strike you as, what is the word, absolutist, to aim for 'full open access.' Is that even desirable, and if so why? Open access, however you feel about it, is only a means to an end, it is not an end in itself. I have my doubts that society's interests would be served by making open access the only scholarly publishing model. Why would we even desire such a thing?

Do we really want authors to control all content? Thank about that for a minute. Then consider, what we recently learned about Wikipedia.? The two groups most active in amending articles on that site are the Catholic Church and the CIA. Is that desirable? Does this not present a problem in author control and open access, or at the very least, the Wiki publishing model? How do you address the risks of data manipulation in an open access environment?

I think the risks are especially acute in medical publishing. Medical research papers can have a huge impact on the financial well-being of the pharmaceutical industry. The publication of a single negative or positive paper will cause a pharmaceutical company's value to change by billions of dollars in a single day. With that kind of money at stake, there is a huge incentive to manipulate the data. In many instances publisher copyright has served society's interest by insuring that the data is not manipulated for private gain.

Let me provide an example. Most medical literature is written in English. Yet, only a small minority of the world's doctors speak English. Subsequently, there is a huge need for translated content. When I worked at the NEJM we had a whole team of people dedicated to policing translations of NEJM content. Their job was to insure that the translated versions of the content remained true in fact and spirit to the original text. The change of a mere word or small phrase could subtlety change the meaning of the text. The NEJM was able to police this process because it owned the content. Pharmaceutical companies could not just go out and translate an NEJM article, they needed NEJM's permission to do so. Because they did need the NEJM's permission, the system insured a more accurate and unbiased translation service. In a world where the author owns the copyright or in a world with open access, who insures accuracy of translated medical literature. I am noting saying it couldn't be done in open access. But if it could be done, how is it done? I would be interested to learn how PLoS handles the translation issues of their content. Does PLoS monitor secondary commercial use of their medical articles? Do they have any systems in place to insure that foreign language versions of their articles are factually and contextually accurate? And as their content is open access, what tools do they use to protect their content from commercial misuse and manipulation?

[Marcus]

Herewith, some quick jottings after a long day at work. If the finances supporting open access publishing proved to be sustainable--an enormous "if"--I do think that maximum open access is best for the biomedical literature. Not for newspapers, books, or magazines; just for peer reviewed scholarship.

But that openness must come with strong safeguards. As MarkD notes, otherwise fraud could become rampant (of course, people like Drummond Rennie argue that fraud is endemic in the system we have today--witness the South Korean cloning fraud case a few years ago.)

A partial solution, which would require a reworking of copyright law that is overdue in the digital age anyway:

Require that any publicly funded studies (with "publicly funded" defined as 50% or more of an article's total funding sources) meet two conditions: 1. Be open access no more than 6 months after publication; and 2. Provide a fully open review process at all stages, in which people openly declare conflicts of interest and substantial edits must be approved by neutral arbiters. In this system, anonymity would be foregone--people would know and accept this as a condition of receiving funds or reviewing papers. Copyright would not be a means of asserting absolute control over scholarly works, but rather of influencing how they are reused (a la Creative Commons).