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
