Sharing science
Page 4

...day,” says Melissa Hagemann, program officer for the Open Society Institute, which funds open-access projects.

Open-access journals benefit almost all parties involved in scientific publishing. Authors gain increased visibility and prestige when more people can use the internet to read their work. And BioMed Central and the PLoS journals have committed to waiving the publication fee for those authors who can’t afford it. Readers, primarily other researchers, benefit when they have access to more articles. Theoretically, everyone wins when scientists can communicate more efficiently – research is done at a faster pace, discoveries are accelerated, and mistakes are uncovered more quickly. Since the public finances the bulk of American research through taxes, the argument goes, shouldn’t they too have a right to see what they’re paying for? Nobody wins under the current system except the “extraordinarily greedy publishers...who charge up to 10 times as much as the non-profits for an equivalent product,” says Paul Ginsparg, professor of physics at Cornell University and developer of the first large-scale database of scientific articles.

The path from the current journal system to an open-access one, however, has not been smooth. Some researchers fear that open-access journals will not implement quality control, i.e. peer review, in the same way as traditional print journals. A journal using the pay-to-publish business model might be more inclined to accept papers of questionable quality to keep up their revenue. Researchers also worry that funding scandals might be much more likely to occur when authors finance the publication of their work. “One of the fears is that open-access journals are going to somehow dilute the seriousness of our research,” says David Wood, an assistant professor at Princeton University studying bioengineering. “With free online journals, people perceive that you get what you pay for.” Open-access journals will need to reconcile the peer-review process with their business models before authors, universities, and funding agencies recognize them as acceptable venues for publication and agree to bear the burden of their cost.

Most publishers seem to agree that these changes are indeed likely to occur within the next 10 to15 years. Siegal predicts that 95 percent of all articles will be available freely through searchable databases within a decade, and that open-access journals will eventually replace their traditional...