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Open Access—A Case for Intellectual Honesty

The Budapest Open Access Initiative (http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/boaifaq.htm) defined open access as "free availability on the public internet, permitting any users to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full texts of these articles, crawl them for indexing, pass them as data to software, or use them for any other lawful purpose, without financial, legal, or technical barriers other than those inseparable from gaining access to the internet itself. The only constraint on reproduction and distribution, and the only role for copyright in this domain, should be to give authors control over the integrity of their work and the right to be properly acknowledged and cited." This initiative stemmed from a meeting in Budapest by the Open Society Institute in 2001. It is claimed that open access serves the "interests of research, researchers, and the institutions and societies that support research" (http://www.soros.org/openaccess/). The movement for open access is viewed by some as a moral crusade, with research that was funded by public funds needing to be freely available to researchers and others. It is stated "The work has already been paid for by funding agencies so it should be freely available." The moral imperative argument is further strengthened for health and agricultural researchers, where the information could save lives by improving medical care or increasing agricultural production. This editorial will not attempt to refute the moral imperative arguments for open access. Rather, the practical implications of open access will be considered. It could be suggested, somewhat facetiously, that the same arguments for open access could be made for textbooks, software, or even college tuition.

University libraries have been at the fore in the push for open access. This is perhaps not surprising given that the costs of many journals have been increasing at a rate well ahead of inflation, while colleges and universities have failed to increase library budgets to cover the increased cost of journals. The consequence has been cancellation of some journal subscriptions and reduced book purchases by libraries. Reductions in journal and book purchases affect the economics of publishing, with costs having to be spread over fewer buyers and creating the potential for higher prices.

Open access is moving forward. In the past 12 months since a previous editorial (Scanes, 2007), the 2008 Omnibus Appropriation passed by the United States Congress and signed by the President required the National Institutes for Health (NIH) to implement open access. This has been interpreted as requiring papers published based on research funded by NIH to be placed on open access through PubMed within a year of publication. Journal publishers will be expected to relinquish copyright under these circumstances. It is not clear whether journal publishers will be willing to do this gratis or require payment of an open access fee. This fee would be the responsibility of the authors. Universities will be required to have auditable processes to ensure compliance with the open access requirement, which may have costs to universities. It is not clear if or when other federal granting agencies will be implementing analogous requirements for open access. Were the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) to implement a similar open access policy, it would likely apply to all publications from scientists in the Agricultural Research Service (ARS) and any collaborative projects with ARS scientists. For faculty and students in land-grant universities, it might be questioned whether such a policy would be restricted to competitive grants. Land-grant universities have state agricultural stations associated with them and these receive formula funding through the USDA including Hatch Act funds for agricultural research and McIntire-Stennis funding for extension. This funding together with state appropriations covers the costs of infrastructure such as animal facilities, genomics core facilities, and electron microscope facilities, as well as student assistantships, faculty start-up packages, and potentially, faculty salaries. The corollary is if USDA were to require open access, to what extent could any of the research in experiment stations escape such a mandate?

What are the long-term implications of open access? It is reasonable to suggest that libraries will accelerate the process of reducing the number of journals for which there is an institutional subscription. Once the majority of papers in a journal (or perhaps a majority of the best or most highly cited papers) are available via open access, there will be considerable temptation and financial incentive for libraries to cancel journal subscriptions. Can we anticipate the response of journal publishers? Journal publishers rely on library subscriptions and, in many cases, page charges to cover such costs as the peer review process (e.g., use of Manuscript Central), technical editing, typesetting, printing, and electronic archiving. Poultry Science relies on both page charges and subscriptions from libraries. Cancellation of library subscriptions is anticipated to have a number of effects:

• There will be an increase in the charges to authors such as page charges and open access fees. In some cases, these will be covered by federal grants.
  
• The loss of library subscriptions will put pressure on journal publishers to become more efficient by eliminating stages in the process and to use cost-cutting options such as outsourcing technical editing and printing, eliminating printing, or reducing the rigor of peer review. Parenthetically, it should be emphasized that I will vigorously oppose any weakening in peer review.
  
• There will be a reduction in the number of journals from publishers ceasing to publish a journal due to reduced income or mergers, particularly for those journals where the margins are already tight.
  
• For some professional societies, the journals provide needed revenue to operations or annual meetings; a loss of these funds potentially threatens professional societies.
  
• There may even be a shift to electronic journals without complete peer review. This will obviously be detrimental to science and to public trust.
  

But is the sky really falling? Changes are inevitable and we need to plan and do. Professional societies are continuing to work with legislators so that open access is implemented in such a way that is evolutionary, promotes exchange of information, and protects the infrastructure of peer-reviewed scientific publishing. Journal publishers are becoming much more efficient and responsive to authors. A case in point is the time to publication for Poultry Science, which has decreased from 318 days in 2001 to 205 days in 2007. The input, advice, and support of readers and authors are always greatly appreciated.

	REFERENCES

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Scanes, C. G. 2007. Open access: Impact of requirement for free electronic access. Poult. Sci. 86:433–434.[Free Full Text]

This article has been cited by other articles:

				C. G. Scanes Editorial: Toward more open access of data while increasing the value of the journal Poult. Sci., July 1, 2009; 88(7): 1345 - 1345. [Full Text] [PDF]

				C. G. Scanes Importance of peer-reviewed science in the debates on public policy Poult. Sci., January 1, 2009; 88(1): 1 - 1. [Full Text] [PDF]

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