APPENDIX 3
Memorandum from Professor Adrian P Sutton,
University of Oxford
ACCESS TO
SCIENTIFIC PUBLICATIONS
I have always found it most curious that the
results of research funded by the public purse are not freely
accessible to the public. Instead, the fruits of much of that
research are published in expensive journals that are virtually
impossible to access if one is not a member of a subscribing organisation.
But this is really just the tip of the iceberg.
Academics have allowed themselves to be shamelessly exploited
by commercial journal publishers ever since Robert Maxwell first
recognised this lucrative market. Academics provide their scientific
papers to publishers free of charge, they review other scientific
papers for those publishers free of charge, and they pay exorbitant
prices for hard copy and/or electronic access to their own work
in published volumes. What other business receives the goods that
it sells to its customers from those same customers, a quality
control mechanism provided by its customers, and a tremendous
fee from those same customers?
In my view the only scientific publishing houses
that do not ruthlessly exploit academics are the learned societies
and professional bodies, such as The Royal Society and The Institute
of Physics.
THE IMPACT
OF E-JOURNALS
ON THE
INTEGRITY OF
JOURNALS AND
THE SCIENTIFIC
PROCESS
In general I see e-publishing as a very positive
development for science. Some scientists have boycotted journals
altogether and publish their work on computer servers that can
be accessed freely from anywhere in the world. This approach was
pioneered at the Los Alamos server where anyone with internet
access could deposit a paper for instant free "publication",
and download papers for instant free access. But other scientists
are worried by the absence of peer-review, although this does
not worry proponents of such e-publishing, because any faults
in a paper are quickly corrected by subsequent authors. In some
very fast moving areas of science this is how research is most
commonly disseminated.
There is another aspect to publishing scientific
research that has come to the rescue of publishers. Scientific
papers are the usual product or outcome of most scientific research.
They are the currency of science and of scientific careers, eg
they enable the achievements of one scientist to be compared with
those of another. The list of publications is often the most important
aspect of the CV of any scientist. Therefore, it is crucial to
the careers of scientists that papers are archived and remain
accessible indefinitely, and that they are read and cited by other
scientists. The safest and most durable form of archive is still
paper, and that fact alone has sustained many commercial journals.
To make sure a paper is widely cited it has to be seen by a large
number of scientists, and publishing the paper in a highly prestigious
journal is an enormous help. What makes a journal prestigious?
It is usually the quality of the peer-reviewing, which may be
such that 90 per cent of the papers submitted to the top journals
are rejected. So, it is partly the vanity of scientists but more
the requirement for papers in archived prestigious journals on
a scientist's CV that has saved the day for publishers.
A practical aspect of e-publishing that has
vastly improved the integrity of published papers is the (almost
complete) elimination of type-setting of papers and the errors
that used to introduce. The scientists themselves now produce
the papers in an electronic format (I am thinking here of widely
used, freely available Latex software) that the publisher can
use immediately. This has also significantly reduced the time
for publishing papers, and it should have significantly reduced
the costs for publishers. Some learned societies, such as The
Royal Society, will now accept papers submitted only electronically.
CONCLUSION
I see e-publishing as a positive development
because it should lead to far greater accessibility of scientific
research, and it should reduce costs. I do not see e-publishing
affecting the integrity of the scientific process. The integrity
of the scientific process is in the hands of all scientists, not
publishers, and as recent events at Bell Labs have shown, fraudulent
science will always eventually be exposed for what it is. I do
not believe there is any other professional activity that is more
rigorously and thoroughly self-regulated than science! But there
is no doubt in my mind that commercial publishers of scientific
journals have over-exploited academics for far too long, and by
not making the results of research more widely accessible to the
public who paid for the research they have also exploited the
public purse.
January 2004
| 
