Open Access: the Future of Scientific

Publishing

Mark Walport

                                             

Opposition to innovation is not new…

• 1408: Arundelian Constitutions (Oxford) against John Wycliffe and his work to publish the New Testament in English. These enactments forbade

“…upon pain of the greater excommunication the unauthorized translation of any text of the Scriptures into English or any other tongue by way of a book, pamphlet, treatise or the reading of such."

• 1850: The 1850 Public Libraries Act was the first of a series of Acts enabling local councils to provide free public libraries funded by a levy of a ½ d rate. Widely opposed in Parliament, because of the cost implications of the scheme, and the social transformation it might effect.

Wellcome Trust mission

“To foster and promote research

with the aim of improving human

and animal health”

Open access: Data

The web has transformed access to research results

……almost

Funded by the Wellcome Trust

……and this is why it matters

Funded by the Wellcome Trust and the MRC

Access denied…

• recent exercise showed only 6% of Wellcome Trust funded articles freely available on internet at publication

• 10-20% of the samples of papers not available in two leading UK university libraries

A funders perspective…• funding the research is a job only part done – a

fundamental part of funders’ missions is to ensure the widest possible dissemination and unrestricted access to that research

• over 90% of research funded in UK universities is public money (government, research councils and charities)

90% of NHS-funded research available online full text

30% immediately available to public

only 40% immediately available to NHS staff

Submission to the House of Commons Science and Technology Committee's Inquiry into Scientific Publications

Freely available around the world…

A key malaria study from SE Asia

Research is not complete until published – publishing costs are part of the research costs

             

 

Wellcome Trust: policy

All research papers – funded in whole or in part by the Wellcome Trust – must be made freely accessible from the PubMed Central and UKPMC repositories as soon as possible, and in any event within six months of the journal publisher’s official date of final publication

Publishers response to the Wellcome grant conditions• Significant number of commercial and not-for-profit publishers now

offer an OA option that is fully compliant with the Trust’s requirements (e.g. PLoS, BMC, Springer, Elsevier, OUP, CUP, BMJPG, Sage, Taylor & Francis)

• Other publishers allow the author to self archive a version of the final article and make that available within 6 months (e.g. Nature, AAAS, AMA, Am. Physiological Assoc)

• However, some publishers have policies that do not allow Wellcome-funded authors to publish in these titles

High profile publishers that do not offer a WT-compliant policy include the American Association of Immunologists, and the American Association for Cancer Research

Whose data?Clinical Experimental Immunology 2004

Clinical Experimental Immunology 2007

Whose data?Clinical Experimental Immunology 2007 – online open access

An Open Access Publication[1] is one that meets the following two conditions:

1.The author(s) and copyright holder(s) grant(s) to all users a free, irrevocable, worldwide, perpetual right of access to, and a license to copy, use, distribute, transmit and display the work publicly and to make and distribute derivative works, in any digital medium for any responsible purpose, subject to proper attribution of authorship,[2] as well as the right to make small numbers of printed copies for their personal use.

2.A complete version of the work and all supplemental materials, including a copy of the permission as stated above, in a suitable standard electronic format is deposited immediately upon initial publication in at least one online repository that is supported by an academic institution, scholarly society, government agency, or other well-established organization that seeks to enable open access, unrestricted distribution, interoperability, and long-term archiving (for the biomedical sciences, PubMed Central is such a repository).

UKPMC: what is it….

• free digital archive of biomedical and life sciences journal literature

• part of a network of PMC International repositories

• to support the open access policies developed by the UKPMC Funders Group

• in addition to mirroring PMC, UKPMC also provides a manuscript submission system to enable researchers to self-archive their peer-reviewed research papers

UKPMC Funders Group

Together control over 90% of the UK’s biomedical research funding

UKPMC statistics• Went live on 7th January 2007.

• Contains over 700,000 peer reviewed journal articles

• Growing rapidly - over 38,000 new articles since launch.

• Holds the details of over 15,700 grant holders from the 8 funders - each has a log on to the system to deposit papers.

• 485 manuscripts from 198 unique grantees deposited in first 3 months

UKPMC Development

• system will evolve to meet the needs of the biomedical research community

• utilising the expertise of the European Bioinformatics Institute in the field of contextualised linking of data.

• Advisory Board consisting of leading researchers, academics and representatives from industry to provide the inspiration to take UKPMC forward.

UKPMC First phase of R&D

• Search & DiscoveryDeveloping and improving the local search capabilities of UKPMC

• Contextual linkage to DatasetsProviding the researcher with live links to various EBI datasets inside UKPMC articles to facilitate research

• Enhanced reporting toolsEnabling UKPMC funders to better monitor outputs from grants to better target research spend

Programmes

UK PubMed Central

Which papers did Wellcome Trust fund?

UKPMC First phase of R&D•UKPMC Biological Dataset Integration

projectMocked from the public “Whatizit” tool available at: http://www.ebi.ac.uk/webservices/whatizit/info.jsf

Benefits of UKPMC• immediate access/6 months delay to allow

market to adapt

• long-term digital archive - accurate, future-proof preservation

• searchable - ‘under one roof’, subject-based

• build on existing research practice e.g. Medline

• funders’ attributions

• links with other databases e.g. genes, proteins

• evaluation and impact

• provision of additional funding to cover the costs relating to article-processing charges levied by publishers who support this model.

• approximately 1% of the research grant budget would cover costs of open access publishing block awards to top 30 universities supplement grants contingency element within the grant

• new open access publishing choices by article OUP, Springer, Blackwell …..

Paying for open access

Publishers and article processing costs• Number of publishers (OUP, Springer, Blackwell, Royal Society,

Elsevier and others) have introduced a hybrid OA model, and others (including Wiley) are considering this.

Costs vary - though seem to be coalescing around $3000 - approx. £1650

Mary Waltham/JISC study reported that in order to cover the average online only costs for a 10 page article and deliver the average surplus these 13 journals delivered to their societies, the OA fee per article for 2004 would need to be set at £1,166.

NAR data from OUP shows no decline in submissions - overwhelming majority of authors meet these costs through their grant funding

OUP data also shows that for their hybrid OA model in the life sciences 11% - (108 out of 957) - of papers have been published under the OA model

What next?• NIH - moving towards a mandate

• RCUK and the Research Councils policy announced 28 June 2006

• EU have adopted a FP& Grant Agreement

• HHMI agreement with Elsevier

• Canadian Institutes of Health Research refuse to extend embargos beyond 6 months

Opposition to innovation is not new…

2004:

• “… Speak to people in the medical profession, and they will say the last thing they want are people who may have illnesses reading this information, marching into surgeries and asking things. We need to be careful with this very, very high-level information.”

Oral evidence to House of Commons inquiry, March 1st 2004

But………

• 58% of patients in the USA consulting their physicians bring along information they accessed on the internet