Open access to journals — a noble movement

IN HIS book Animal Farm, George Orwell wrote, "All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others". The need for a level playing field is heard much today in the wake of WTO and farm subsidies. But it is also increasingly heard in the world of professional scientific publications.

Look at the situation in science libraries. The cost of journals has steadily gone up while the budget of science libraries has remained static or even gone down. The library budget of the top science institute in India today is about Rs. 30 million a year ($650,000).

With this, it is expected to buy books and subscribe to at least 300 scientific journals. A book typically costs about $100, while the annual subscription of journals ranges from $500 to, yes, $18000. As a result, when the library committee asks whether some titles can be discontinued, a battle royal rages among researchers (who actually want to add more journals).

Page charges

On top of this, many journals charge `page charges' from authors whose work they would find worthy of publication. (This practice of page charges is almost exclusively prevalent among science journals, not in those of liberal arts and humanities. When I approached the University of Hyderabad way back in 1977 to pay the page charges for a paper I was publishing, my colleague Prof. Shiv K. Kumar of English exclaimed: "What! I get paid when I publish a paper in my subject. You scientists pay to get your work in print?").

Irony of the situation

The irony of the situation is well captured by the Canadian science historian Jean-Claude Guedon who says, "The beauty of science is that it has been the first operational example of how humanity can create a system of distributed intelligence. Right now it's not working in the best possible way with regard to communication we haven't scaled up so well".

Things were not so bad two generations ago. The playing field was not that level for Indian science even then, but not that off-level as it has become today. There were not too many commercial instruments, and most equipment had to be home-built using "strings and candle wax". Hence the much-quoted example of the discovery of the Raman effect for less than a few hundred rupees. A good chemistry lab in India until the late 1950s had the same equipment and chemicals as those at Cambridge or California, though acquired at a higher price.

And science still operated on a non-commercial, non-IPR, fashion and results were freely exchanged across the world. One of the major spin-offs of the participation of scientists and engineers in the war efforts during 1939-44 was the technological advance leading to highly sophisticated scientific instruments. This gave birth to the scientific instruments industry, which has been raking profits since the 1950s. This led to the great divide in science between the rich nations and the poor.

Side by side, the world of science publications also underwent a change again with a profit motive. While a generation ago, there were hardly 1000 professional scientific journals, today there are 28,000. These are scored based on their `impact factor', i.e. how many people read a given journal and refer to it in their own publications.

Journals with greater impact factors naturally have a longer clientele and make more profit. Their subscription rates are also higher — plain market economics. (The firm Elsevier publishes 1700 scientific journals, and made a pre-tax profit of close to $2 billion last year). This too has produced an asymmetry in the practice and publication of science among nations.

Changed complexion

The advent of electronic communication and the Internet changed the complexion of science publications remarkably. (Interestingly enough, E-mail and the Internet were born out of the free electronic exchange of scientific information among nuclear physicists).

Science publishers began putting out electronic versions of their hard-copy journals; some journals were started purely as e-journals and not hard copies at all. The subscriber had to pay to access these e-versions. While this made the reach of the journals worldwide (and no postage expenses), the subscription costs are still a hindrance to scientists in the poorer nations.

Man-made asymmetry

It is clear that there is a man-made asymmetry here. People of no nation are smarter or brainier than those of any other nation. As Guedon remarked in this context, it is affordability that calls the tune: "only the wealthiest institutions from the wealthiest countries can afford these things (journal subscriptions). Brains are being wasted".

Happily, he is not the only one to think so. Several professional societies and academies (such as the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, the Royal Society London, or journals such as the Journal of Biological Chemistry) began making special concessions such as free web access to their journals (six months old issues, or even current ones).

A number of new initiatives aimed to provide everyone in the scientific community access to, at least, publicly funded research. These include BioMedCentral which publishes 90 Open Access (OA) journals (where those authors who can, pay up to $ 500 as publication fee while others do not, but all are treated fairly and equally), the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC), the Joint Information Systems Committee and the Open Society Institute, which gave rise to the Budapest Open Access Initiative 2001 that brought the OA movement to the forefront.

This in turn led to SciDevNet (which is focused to cater to the developing world), HINARI of WHO which allows free (or small fee) access to about 2000 journals in health-related areas to over 140 nations of the world, and Sciencedirect, which asks for institutional subscription and allows OA to over 1500 journals.

The free search engine Google lets you have some basic information, while the US National Library of Medicine's PubMed allows free queries on who published what where and also gives the abstract of the work, and hyperlinks to many of the journals where these are published.

The tide truly turned in our favour with the start of the non-profit Public Library of Science (PLoS) by the Nobelist Harold Varmus, Pat Brown of Stanford and Michael Eisen of Berkeley. Their OA journals PLoS Biology and PLoS Medicine (authors who can, pay publication fees), started in challenge to commercial journals, have become popular. Further, actions like this have led the U.S. and U.K. governments to mandate the authors of all government-funded research output to "self-archive" their work, so as to offer free and open access on the web. In addition, the U.K. has also decided to fund the author-institution the costs of publishing in OA journals and also to support further experimentation with OA journals.

The distinguished scientometrist of India, Dr. S. Arunachalam of the MS Swaminathan Foundation Chennai, has been leading the crusade for OA to and from India. He has been requesting all Indian science agencies to follow the U.K. and U.S., lead and to mandate Indian scientists to self-archive their work and allow OA.

Maximal knowledge base

He points out that this would benefit us to (a) maximize the visibility and impact of India's research output, and by symmetry (b) help create maximal knowledge base for us regarding the rest of the world's research output.

I am sure that our science agencies, the University Grants Commission and also the National Informatics Centre will support Dr. Arunachalam in his selfless public-spirited request.

D. Balasubramanian