APPENDIX 42
Memorandum from the Biochemical Society
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
1 The Biochemical Society is committed to
the scientific community, and to its members, to foster scholarly
communication through high-quality publications delivered quickly,
efficiently and cost-effectively, using the best economic model
available to enable it to continue its other vital areas of activity.
2 The surplus from the Society's publishing
activities, the so-called "science dividend" supports
its other charitable objectives and it is not clear how these
vital activities could continue to take place if the Biochemical
Society was unable to continue funding them. This contrasts with
the commercial sector where profits are used to support shareholders.
3 Government intervention is needed to increase
the amount available to its higher education institutions for
library acquisitions to keep pace with the research output.
4 Government action in resolving the adverse
effects of VAT on electronic journals would be welcome.
5 On the open-access question, "It
is the competitive and well-functioning market, and not governments,
that must choose which business models and which publishers are
best equipped to stay apace of the ever-increasing demand for
information exchange".
6 It is essential that the British Library
be provided with the funding to enable it to undertake the archiving,
management and long-term preservation of electronic material.
7 The author-pays model is likely to lead
to lower rejection rates and a reduction in quality. The incidence
of undetected plagiarism and malpractice seems likely to increase
in any environment light on peer-review.
1. What is the Biochemical Society?
1.1 The Biochemical Society, established
in 1911, is the UK's largest and most successful learned society
in the area of the biosciences. The mission of the Biochemical
Society is to promote the advancement of the science of biochemistry.
This is accomplished by:
— efficiently publishing a range of
excellent journals and books;
— organizing a major annual international
scientific meeting in the UK and a number of Harden Conferences
and other specialized focus meetings around the regions;
— rewarding academic excellence via
its prestigious named-Medal awards;
— providing grants and bursaries for
scientists (particularly students) to attend its own and other
meetings both in the UK and overseas;
— providing support for scientific
educational activities, including communication with the public;
and
— acting as an advocate for biochemistry,
and the biosciences in general, to government agencies with regard
to policy matters.
1.2 The Society has around 7000 members,
approximately 27% of whom are based overseas, including N and
S America, Asia, Africa and Australasia. The majority of the members
are active research scientists, although in any one year it has
around 2000 student members (who pay a heavily discounted membership
fee). Revenues from members' subscriptions barely cover the direct
benefits that members receive.
1.3 The Biochemical Society is a major sustaining
member of the UK Biosciences Federation. It has provided, and
indeed continues to provide, much of the financial support necessary
for the establishment and maintenance of this important representative
body.
1.4 The surplus from the Society's publishing
activities, the so-called "science dividend" supports
its other charitable objectives and it is not clear how these
vital activities could continue to take place if the Biochemical
Society was unable to continue funding them. This contrasts with
the commercial sector where profits are used to support shareholders.
1.5 The Biochemical Society carries out
its scholarly communication under the auspices of its wholly owned,
successful, publishing subsidiary, Portland Press Limited. The
Biochemical Society thus retains complete control over its publishing
policy (in relation to price, access, etc.) and in this respect
it is different from many other learned societies who have contracted
out this activity to commercial publishers and some of whom have
sacrificed their "mission" in favour of the "money"
in the process.
2. Portland Press Limited
2.2 Portland Press Limited publishes and
distributes the Biochemical Journal, Biochemical Society Transactions,
Clinical Science, Biochemical Society Symposia, Essays in Biochemistry
and The Biochemist (and its on-line counterpart Biochemist e-volution)
on behalf of its owner, The Biochemical Society.
2.3 It has also published a prize-winning
series of nine children's books under the makingsenseofscience
imprint as part of its commitment to the public awareness of science.
Portland Press Limited also publishes journals on behalf of third
parties and provides an extensive range of publishing services
(eg membership, and journal and book fulfilment, distribution
and meetings registration) to other publishers and sister societies
via its Customer Services Centre, Colchester.
2.4 Portland Press delivers between one-half
and three-quarters of a million pounds each year via gift aid
to the Biochemical Society to enable it to carry out its charitable
objectives. This is the so-called `science dividend'.
3. The Biochemical Journal
3.1 The Biochemical Society's flagship journal,
the Biochemical Journal is Europe's leading biochemistry journal
(ISI impact factor 4.589; cited half-life 7.8).
3.2 The publishing policy of this Journal
serves to illustrate the fine balance that a learned society publisher
achieves between its mission (namely to maximize dissemination
of its subject), while at the same time providing an adequate
source of revenue to support its other important activities.
3.3 The Biochemical Society has made strenuous
efforts to make its scientific information as accessible as possible
to research scientists, the teaching community and the public
via its online journals.
3.4 The Biochemical Journal was among the
first to make its accepted papers available online free of charge
on the day that they were accepted as Immediate Publications (IMPs).
The final papers with the value that Portland Press adds (editing,
integration of text and graphics, inclusion of video clips, three-dimensional
structures and reference linking), are also freely available online
at the end of each calendar year. In addition, as part of the
celebrations of the Journal's centenary (2006), the entire electronic
archive will be made freely available to anyone with internet
access anywhere in the world.
3.5 The high costs of peer-review (including
investment in a web-enabled online submission and peer-review
system and substantial financial support for the Editorial Board
- £186,000 per annum for the Biochemical Journal alone) and
subsequent publication of the Journal, online or as paper copies,
have traditionally been covered by subscription revenues from
libraries in academia and industry, and from individuals. Unlike
many N American journals, there are no page charges levied on
any of the Society's journals.
3.6 The Society's publishing subsidiary
has a strategy of reasonable (close to inflation only) pricing,
and liberal licensing arrangements. At around £0.18 per page
to libraries, the Biochemical Journal is clearly affordable and
represents extremely good value for money. Subscriptions to the
Biochemical Journal and other Society journals also include site-wide
online access by subscribing institutions for one contiguous site.
In addition, multi-site or multi-journal access is also available
at an additional charge.
3.7 The Society provides free access to
current and past journal issues to many developing countries without
subscriptions. This is accomplished via the HINARI initiative
led by the World Health Organization.
3.8 There is a very high usage rate of the
Society's online publications: there are over five million total
page views of the Society's online journals per annum (just over
four million of which were of the Biochemical Journal) and usage
continues to increase. These figures are COUNTER level 2 compliant.
4. What impact do publishers' current policies
on pricing and provision of scientific journals, particularly
"big deal schemes", have on libraries and the teaching
and research communities they serve?
4.1 Publishing is an expensive business
and these not insubstantial costs need to be recovered regardless
of the business model employed. Publishers need to make profits,
not only to support the activities of scholarly societies (or
shareholders in the case of commercial publishers), but also to
support the massive investment in new hardware and software systems,
and processes, such as the provision of technical support for
electronic journals, necessary to stay in business.
4.2 Publishers in the commercial and not-for-profit
sectors have collaborated to adopt standards for greater interoperability,
such as CrossRef, and for electronic usage statistics, such as
COUNTER. Without reasonable profit margins, publishers would not
be able to invest in these enhancements to the scientific record.
4.3 While it would be hard to disagree that
the very high margins enjoyed by some commercial publishers (notably
Reed Elsevier) have contributed to the "library crisis"
in serial purchasing, another major contributory factor has been
that research output, encouraged by Government through the Research
Assessment Exercise (RAE), has consistently outstripped the acquisition
budgets available to libraries.
4.4 Both commercial and not-for-profit publishers
have invested heavily in electronic publishing and the availability
of electronic versions has facilitated the evolution of new add-ons
to the basic subscription model, for example, site-licences and
consortia deals.
4.5 However, electronic publishing has not
so far led to a major decrease in the cost of publishing. This
is largely owing to the slow speed of cultural change, which has
led to what many perceive to be the unreasonable persistence of
print.
4.6 Publishers' fixed costs (cost of peer
review, staff costs, cost of origination of digital information
and posting and maintaining online and associated overheads and
capital expenditure) are the same whether publishing takes place
online or in print. Manufacturing and distributing the paper versions
are variable costs and may decline in the long term, but the change
from paper subscriptions to online only by subscribing institutions
has been slow (for example, only 4% of subscriptions to Biochemical
Journal were online-only in 2003).
4.7 As the electronic version (with its
multi-media adjuncts and other online-only features) has become
the journal of record, academic researchers have become more familiar
with, and trusting of, the electronic publishing environment.
4.8 A real answer would be for more librarians
to opt for online-only journals in the existing model. Savings
on the cost of purchasing hard copies, binding and storage, shelving,
etc. would reduce their overhead costs considerably and free up
additional funds for acquisitions. Publishers' costs would then
also be considerably reduced (although the usual commercial suspects
might just increase their margins even more!). However, librarians
remain concerned about archiving issues in the digital environment
and an important role for the Legal Deposit Libraries could be
envisaged in this respect.
4.9 The Big Deal (BD) is a term used to
describe the situation where a publisher bundles online access
to its entire journal content for a fixed price—usually
based on current spend plus a negotiated increase. The BD usually
refers to deals negotiated by the largest journal publishers with
hundreds of journals (the three largest players are Elsevier,
Taylor and Francis, and the recently merged Kluwer/Springer) locking
libraries into multi-year, no-cancellation agreements. These larger
publishers admit to protecting their share of the available funds,
but point out the BD also encourages usage. In theory the pricing
is simple, but in practice it has proved quite complex.
4.10 The main recipients of the publisher
BDs are the larger library consortia groups. These are either
state-wide consortia in North America (eg OhioLink), national
or regional library groups in Europe (eg BIBSAM, Sweden; NESLI,
UK) and the rest of the world, or multi-national companies, eg
pharmaceutical companies.
4.11 From the library point of view, opinions
are split. The OhioLink consortium has been one of the most active
in signing up for the BD and its experience is widely cited for
the considerable increase in usage of both journals already subscribed
to and to those not previously taken. Others who have participated
in the BD (eg University of North Carolina) have said that the
BD is difficult to administer/manage and that they want more subject-relevant
deals. Even supporters of the BD are unsure whether the model
is sustainable.
4.12 One of the main concerns about BDs
is that these will "top-slice" a larger and larger share
of the library budget, leading to cancellations of journals published
by smaller publishers, of which the learned society publishers
are a large group. To counter this, some of the better-resourced
society publishers [for example, the Royal Society of Chemistry
(RSC) and the Institute of Physics (IOP)] have been quite successful
in selling subject bundles. This still leaves out the smaller
(1-5 journal) society publishers, without such resources, although
there have been attempts to address this by intermediaries like
Ingenta and ALPSP Learned Journals Collection (ALJC).
4.13 Libraries do, of course, have a choice
as to whether to sign up for these deals or not. Larger consortia
have discovered that that they can use their considerable buying
power to influence change in the terms and conditions of the BD
in a way that individual libraries could not. There have been
a number of high-profile cases recently of institutions in the
USA (California in particular) threatening to drop out of the
Elsevier BD.
4.14 Some publishers are beginning to explore
tiered pricing models based on the size of the institutions (in
terms of numbers of student FTEs and faculty), although this is
not yet widespread.
5. What action should Government, academic
institutions and publishers be taking to promote a competitive
market in scientific publications?
5.1 The UK is fortunate in possessing a
number of world-class scholarly Societies, such as the Biochemical
Society, the Society for General Microbiology, the IOP and the
RSC, to name but a few, who all contribute to a thriving science,
technical and medical (STM) publishing industry sector. This sector
as a whole contributes to the financial health of "UK plc".
5.2 The UK has much that would be put at
risk by any de-stabilization of its successful scholarly publishing
industry in terms of exports, employment and sources of non-governmental
support for the science base.
5.3 In any event, publishing is an international
activity and for many publishers, including Portland Press Limited,
the UK is a comparatively small market for both subscriptions
and submissions.
5.4 For the Society's flagship journal,
the Biochemical Journal, for example:
|
| Subscribers | Submissions from authors
|
|
| -13% in UK | -13% from UK |
| -36% in USA | -28% from the Americas (of which 26% from USA)
|
| -24% Rest of Europe | -34% from rest of Europe
|
| -27% Rest of World | -25% from the rest of World
|
|
5.5 It is interesting to explore why so few submissions
originate from the UK. This used not to be the case and can be
traced back to the undue emphasis placed on publishing only in
the highest-impact journals possible in the original RAE. This
led to the wholesale flight of British researchers away from reasonably
priced, well-respected UK learned society journals to American
Society journals (with their inherent bias to citing only US-published
authors). This pressure has also reinforced the dominant position
of commercial publishers, such as Nature Publishing Group and
Cell Press—who publish exactly the type of journal that
Public Library of Science (PLoS) Biology (arguably the most influential
open-access journal) has been created to compete with.
5.6 The resulting "publish or perish" culture
that has developed in science has fuelled the steady increase
in research output as measured by the number of articles published.
For the Government to throw its support behind open-access publishers,
whose stated aim is to change the publishing paradigm that its
funding bodies have helped to create and sustain (grants and promotion
are only awarded to academics with a track record of publishing
in the highest-impact journals) would seem to show a distinct
lack of joined-up thinking.
5.7 It would be helpful if the STC could lend its support
to " scholarly-friendly" learned society journals by
ensuring that publication in such journals (with high standards
of peer-review, an existing degree of open-access (free archives,
IMPs), liberal copyright and licensing policies, and the "science
dividend", etc.) is given full weight in any future RAE or
at the very least by ensuring that such publication is not viewed
pejoratively.
5.8 There has been insufficient funding for the acquisitions
budget of University libraries in the UK to keep pace with the
increases in University research output (in fact, library budgets
have often fallen in real terms). Government intervention to increase
the amount available would be helpful, but seems unlikely.
5.9 The Government could also ensure that adequate funds
are available to the Legal Deposit Libraries to enable them to
take on the task of the preservation of electronic data. Confidence
in the preservation of digital archives should shift the trend
towards online-only subscriptions and help the publishing community
to realize some of the saving originally envisaged in the early
days of electronic publishing.
5.10 One important area where the Government could assist
the market for scientific publications in a real sense would be
removing the adverse effects of VAT on scientific publications.
Currently, the sale of electronic publications within the UK is
treated more harshly than the delivery of print-only publications,
or than electronic publications outside the UK. This discriminates
against UK libraries buying non-print journals. The easiest way
of overcoming this problem would be to zero rate the supply of
electronic journals within the UK.
6. What are the consequences of increasing numbers of
open-access journals, for example for the operation of the Research
Assessment Exercise and other selection processes? Should the
Government support such a trend and, if so, how?
6.1 While Governments and other funding bodies have paid
for research, traditionally publishers have been the agency through
which this science is validated, via the peer-review process.
Publishers have provided a neutral environment, free from financial
taint, in which authors may publish their work and the cost of
this validation has traditionally been paid by subscriptions.
6.2 Many of the recent open-access initiatives are inherently
flawed as it is openly acknowledged that the author acceptance
fees charged by such journals ($500-$1,500) do not cover the costs
of publication. In the case of PLoS, acceptance fees are heavily
subsidized by a nine million dollar grant from the Gordon and
Betty Moore Foundation, but it is not clear how the funding gap
is going to be filled in the long run when such subsidies come
to an end.
6.3 These subsidized experiments have led to completely
unrealistic expectations among members of the research community
as shown by the recent survey undertaken by the Proceedings of
the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America
[PNAS (2004), vol. 101, p. 1111].
6.4 PNAS surveyed 600 corresponding authors of accepted
papers and received 210 responses (34.4%). Almost half of the
respondents were in favour of an open-access option. However,
the vast majority of these (80%), were willing to pay a surcharge
of only $500—about one-quarter of the amount that might
be needed to cover the cost of operating this journal without
subscription income. Only two respondents were willing to pay
$2,000 for open access to their work.
6.5 It is not clear what the effect on the amount of
money available to carry out research would be if the open-access
model is adopted—where will the extra money come from to
pay the acceptance fee at a realistic rate (anything from $2,000-$10,000
for the most highly cited journals)? There is a distinct possibility
that there will be less money available to actually carry out
the research in the first place.
6.6 There are a number of other worrisome features of
the open-access model, besides any impact of the law of unintended
consequences.
6.7 Publication will be based on the authors' ability
to pay. Although open-access publishers state that they will be
willing to waive fees, say to authors from developing countries,
it is not clear how this will be able to work in practice unless
the percentage of such waivers is kept below an economically viable
threshold, say less than 10%? Not all authors are in receipt of
large research grants and it seem likely that the percentage of
authors who cannot pay will be higher than 10%.
6.8 The Biochemical Journal, along with many other journals
has a rejection rate of 60%. It seems invidious that the authors
of accepted papers should subsidize authors of rejected papers.
In fact, why should an author pay at all for open-access when
he or she could publish for free in a good journal like the Biochemical
Journal that already makes its back archives freely available
and its accepted un-edited papers freely available within five
min of acceptance, has no page charges and in addition supports
a major learned society via the "science dividend"?
It may be that authors are not enough aware of the benefits of
publishing in learned society journals. However, the likely answer
is that such publication is discouraged by Heads of Departments
seeking for higher departmental RAE ratings.
6.9 Quality and authenticity are protected under the
existing system, ie the final authentic version of an accepted
paper is the value-added paper published under the aegis of a
particular trusted journal brand. Open-access could jeopardize
the value publishers currently add to the scholarly record in
terms of copy-editing to ensure the correct use of scientific
nomenclature, to ensure reproducibility and improve readability
(some open-access publishers do not carry out any copy-editing
at all).
6.10 In the open-access world it would appear that the
only real winners are going to be corporate pharmaceutical companies
who would no longer have to pay to access information (and whose
employees are not subject to so much pressure to publish or perish).
Where would the money come from to make up the shortfall caused
by these vanished subscriptions? It would be naïve to assume
that such companies would donate the money saved from corporate
subscriptions to support open access.
6.11 Proponents of open access conveniently overlook
the vast overhead in the current HE library system by comparison
with the small (and declining) proportion going toward journal
collections. As open-access is not a suitable model for journals
containing invited reviews, journals containing commissioned news
and views, conference proceedings, books, etc., the costs of maintaining
the library is unlikely to reduce by the amount necessary to pay
for open access. It is wishful thinking to assume that it will
be possible to re-direct money away from HE libraries to government
funding bodies to pay for author acceptance fees at an economically
viable rate.
6.12 Even if an existing journal publisher decides that
open access is a desirable objective, it is difficult to imagine
a transitional state that will not run into financial difficulties
along the way: the perennial "how do you get there from here?"
question.
6.13 While publishers might not need to collect subscriptions
from institutions in an open-access model, they will need to collect
fees from multiple individuals instead, which is likely to be
much more time-consuming and troublesome—and therefore more
expensive to both the paying and collecting institutions.
6.14 There is a real lack of evidence that an author-pays
model can be economically viable, but there are, however, examples
of publishers who have previously made their publications open-access,
but who have not been able to sustain this model for economic
reasons. The most well-known examples are the British Medical
Journal, which has allowed unfettered access online for a number
of years, but has announced the introduction of access controls
in 2004, and the Journal of High Energy Physics, published by
the Institute of Physics, which has also been unable to sustain
an open-access model on reaching a certain level of article submission.
6.15 There have been many studies carried out by ALPSP
and others that show what authors want out of publishing. Authors
should be allowed to continue be the best judges of where it is
appropriate to publish their work, to advance their careers, and
secure future funding.
6.16 The Wellcome Trust (UK) and the Howard Hughes Foundation
(USA) have indicated that they will permit their grants to be
used to pay for open-access and it would seem appropriate for
the Government to decide whether to encourage its research councils
to follow suit, provided there is no element of coercion, which
could be construed as an attack on academic freedom. However,
such encouragement would be mere gesture politics if additional
funds were not made available to cover realistic publication charges.
Such money, if forthcoming, would surely be better employed in
improving the career prospects and rewards of research scientists?
6.17 Publishing is a billion dollar global industry and
it seems like a pie-in-the-sky scenario to imagine that it could
be supplanted by open-access journals. Indeed it is not clear
whether there is sufficient incentive on the part of the author
community for such change. After all, if authors were really so
concerned about these issues they could already refuse to publish
in, or serve as editors for, over-priced commercial journals.
6.18 The risk to learned society publishers, with their
lower operating margins, is likely to be greater than to their
commercial brethren. Any artificial interference in the current
system could result in the disappearance of the "science
dividend" generated by learned society publishers. The valuable
services they provide to their scientific communities could thus
disappear.
6.19 It seems apposite to quote the International Association
of Scientific, Technical and Medical Publishers (STM), which,
in its recent (November 2003) statement on open access, was of
the view that:
""It is the competitive and well-functioning market,
and not governments, that must choose which business models and
which publishers are best equipped to stay apace of the ever-increasing
demand for information exchange".
7. How effectively are the Legal Deposit Libraries making
available non-print scientific publications to the research community,
and what steps should they be taking in this respect?
7.1 Enabling legislation has been passed recently that
will make it possible to regulate electronic journals in the future,
but the current situation is that non-print scientific publications
are not yet subject to the requirement of legal deposit.
7.2 It is important that the legislation for access to
deposited works should not be allowed to undermine publishers'
subscription revenues or revenue from non-subscription sources
(photocopying, document delivery, etc) and that is not its intention.
7.3 Under "Library privilege", legal deposit
libraries are allowed to supply copies of individual journal articles
and book chapters for research and private study, so-called "Fair
Dealing"". Other copies outwith this scope may be supplied
under licence for which the publisher receives a copyright fee.
The British Library working in collaboration with publishers has
developed a system for the secure electronic delivery of such
copies, improving the access of UK researchers to the information
that they require.
7.4 It is essential that the British Library be provided
with the funding to enable it to undertake the archiving, management
and long-term preservation of electronic material.
8. What impact will trends in academic journal publishing
have on the risks of scientific fraud and malpractice?
8.1 Whether a journal is open-access or available on
subscription should not inherently increase the risk of scientific
fraud and malpractice, provided that the highest standards of
peer-review are observed.
8.2 However, in a model where the only revenue stream
is from the authors of accepted manuscripts, it is possible that
an insidious bias towards acceptance could be created. The author-pays
model is likely to lead to lower rejection rates and a reduction
in quality. The incidence of undetected plagiarism and malpractice
seems likely to increase in any environment light on peer-review.
8.3 The extreme ease with which readers can cut and paste
text in a digital environment obviously makes it easier to plagiarize
large quantities of text. But the ease of searching large amounts
of data also makes it easier to detect.
8.4 The major driver of fraud and malpractice would seem
to be the extreme pressure on researchers to publish on order
to progress their careers and receive reward and recognition.
8.5 Peer-review, although not perfect, has proved adept
at revealing instances of fraud and breaches of ethics in publication.
9. Useful sources
http://www.biochemistry.org
http://www.healthinternetwork.org
http://www.portlandpress.com
http://www.stm-assoc.org
http://www.alpsp.org
http://www.alpsp.org/legdep.htm (legal deposit update)
http://www.cla.co.uk (Copyright Licensing Agency update on
changes to UK Copyright Law)
February 2004
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