Simple Country Physicist

I received an e-mail the morning announcing the inauguration of PLOSone (Public Library of Science).[Link] This site is a portal to open access, Creative Commons licensing/copyright, peer reviewed journals.  It is potentially the most impulsive interaction in science and technical research administrivia in decades, if not centuries.

What makes this so disruptive of the status quo? To see this we have to go back to the Public Access to Science Act [Link] that reestablished that  publication of research supported to whatever degree by Yankee government funds is outside copyright. This is not new but it does have an impact, the greater impact however is that this research has to be “freely available to, every person in the United States.”

Almost all research publication occurs in journals, conference proceedings, and/or reports. In common instance, except for some few of these published by agencies of the Yankee Government,  access to this publication information requires payment of a fee. Journals must either be subscribed to, conference proceedings must be purchased, and reports are usually only available, after initial distribution, for a reprint fee, when they are available at all. In addition, since much of this publication is performed by commercial organizations, a transfer of copyright is a prerequisite for publication.

Now, there is law changing this, both in terms of the copyright restrictions, and the fee for access. And, significantly, the first journals that provide free access. And apparently, a rare instance of the Yankee government taking action on behalf of the citizenry rather than the fake citizenry – the corporate interests, although on the scale of the GDP, the amounts of money are trifling.

This presents a quandary to both publishers and researchers. The publisher has a choice between refusing to accept any publications with any Yankee government support and continuing to charge for the publication, or accepting the publications and giving open access. This quandary is fairly fundamental because while the researchers usually have to pay some fees for publication, the bulk of the cash flow is made by selling subscriptions.

A minimal survey of Yankee government agencies indicates that policies are fairly clear – except when the research is under some national security restriction it has to be published in an open access, peer reviewed form that is accessible to all U. S. citizens for an indefinite period. In effect, the message is that unless a regular professional journal agrees up front to eternal open access, the researcher may not publish in the journal. Given an annual research budget of ~ $4.5E+10, a conservative estimate is that half of all research performed in the United States has some Yankee government support.

Now, given that both professional societies like the American Physical Society and commercial publishing houses like John Wiley publish journals and reap big cash flow from them, this is a serious matter. I personally know of several professional societies whose major source of cash is journal publication, and a couple of commercial publishing houses whose scientific and technical divisions have a similar situation. Bottom line, the economics of these organizations is going to change.

That change will not be immediate. Right now the only PLOS journals available are medical and biological, which is the area that prompted the legislation – Joe Consumer doesn’t care very much about Astrophysics or Metallurgy but he does his life expectancy or fat reduction, Nonetheless, the journals in in other disciplines will come as it becomes easier and cheaper for researchers to comply with the law via this route than some tortuous amended means of traditional journals.

If we now add in that most libraries in the United States are financially strapped, in large part due to continuing price increases over the last twenty years or so by commercial publishers. Conservatively, about half of this increase arises from the cost of the paper side of the business – raw materials, printing, binding, and shipment. A regular ritual at most libraries is determination of which book purchases will not be made and which journal subscriptions will be canceled. As more and more research is published in this open-access form, the content of for-pay journals will decrease, placing them in the bind of being both force to reduce cost by reduced content, and reduced interest level by reduced content. This won’t make the libraries healthy but it will help.

The interesting question revolves around peer reviewing. There is a push here to publish, to make the research accessible to the public, but there is a speed bump of the research having to satisfy the reviewers and editor of the journal. A gaping question to be answered is what happens to those research papers that must be published but are are not accepted by the journal. Will the Yankee government force the journals to lower their standards or will they let the mediocre publications fall through a crack?