APPENDIX 124
Memorandum from Dr Christopher Walker
1. As a semi-retired scientist who has struggled
for the past seven years to keep up to date with literature, I
request that you consider my opinions during your enquiry into
Scientific Publications.
2. Since September 2003,1 have been fortunate
to be appointed an honorary research associate with the Royal
Botanic Garden, Edinburgh—I thought this would solve my
problems of access to electronic journals and literature summaries
and citations, but I discovered, much to my amazement, that because
of rather bewildering attitude of the BBSRC, Britain's botanic
gardens are not considered `academic institutes', and therefore
have to pay full price for electronic journal content, even for
staff members. The response to criticism of this from the House
of Lords' Select Committee on Science and Technology: What on
Earth? The threat to the Science Underpinning Conservation (2001-02
Session) was woefully inadequate, and it is hard to see how this
can be seen to benefit UK botanical science, which is already
extremely short of funding (see The Linnean, 2003 Volume 19, p
4).
3. For somebody like me (and there are many)
who have for one reason or another taken early retirement, but
who wish to continue making a contribution to science, access
to literature on the internet is of vital importance. I cannot
afford to pay subscriptions to the many journals I require to
keep up to date with my science. I consider that articles from
scientific journals should be free through the world wide web,
just as access to the journals themselves are in university libraries,
etc. I cannot afford the cost of subscribing to a current contents
or abstracting system, so I don't get electronic access even to
titles or abstracts of current literature. I have to resort to
the old and tried, but much slower and more difficult abstracting
journals in the public libraries, or to dependency on colleagues
and co-operators overseas to help me keep reasonably up to date.
4. As an example of one difficulty with
copyright, the following example may interest you. With a colleague
in Germany, I am involved in making up a freely available web
site, listing all the original species descriptions of a group
of fungi with which we work. We wish to make electronic copies
of all the relevant literature available freely on the site, linked
with each species name. This is proving difficult, because some
copyright owners require payment for permission to make such "electronic
reprints" available. These articles generally have been long
out of print, and the norm in scientific research would be to
make a photocopy for personal use. Consequently, if the articles
are not made readily available on the internet, they will be copied
anyway, at considerably more (usually public) expense and unnecessary
use of natural resources. The journal publishers have already
made their profits by the time scientific papers are published
(from library sales). It would be sensible and unlikely to reduce
their profits levels if copyright were automatically waived at
some time (say three months) after publication, and electronic
copies were made available directly to the public free of charge.
5. I wish to make it clear that this is
my own opinion, and does not represent, or purport to represent
through my honorary associateship, any view of the Royal Botanic
Garden Edinburgh or member of its staff.
6. In summary, access to electronic versions
of scientific papers is too expensive and too difficult. Most
of the reported research is publicly funded, and the public should
have easy and ready availability to the published results.
March 2004
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