Yes, open access (OA) is about the FORM of scientific delivery, referring to free online availability of digital scientific contents (mainly research journals) for EVERYONE. Do we really mean EVERYONE here? Including the general public? Please notice, the audiences of the traditional subscription-based journals are other researchers. Only some of them, within an immediate academic circle, are willing to and able to pay the subscription for accessing the research articles. Is OA really serious about delivering scientific contents to the widest possible audiences? We’ve heard it, that is EVERYONE!
Communicating science to the public is a new task for scientific journals. It does require an extension of the OA movement from form to content. Hi, we have new audiences here! OA journals shouldn’t simply throw the same scientific content to the new audience; an effort is needed to present the content in a different way.
OA journals from PLOS require submissions of interest to scientists outside the field. Although this is good, it’s not enough because the content remains in the realm of the scientific community. Of course, we don’t expect the general public to absorb all of the content in scientific journals. In fact, even as experts in the field, we don’t always grasp every point in a research article. Nature and Science, two top-notched scientific journals, subscription-based though, do require the conclusions or abstracts of their publications to address the general public at a basic comprehensive level. So, should the authors of OA journals take the same obligation to broadcast science to the general public? As a reminder, the US National Science Foundation (NSF) does require its funded researches to outreach the public for a broader impact. Should NSF apply a similar Public Access Policy as the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) does? It certainly makes sense.
Perhaps the bar is set too high for all the OA journals? If we are serious about delivering science to the public through OA, we must start somewhere. Therefore, as the Editor-in-Chief of a Springer OA journal, Nanoscale Research Letters, I’m hereby calling for submissions that address public interests in the abstract, introduction or conclusion, especially for a review-type submission. NRL is the first major publisher of nanotechnology OA journal. It provides an interdisciplinary forum for communication of scientific and technological advances in the creation and use of objects at the nanometer scale. Jan Velterop, one of the most prominent figures of the OA community, joined Springer as its OA director in 2005. Thereafter, I proposed NRL to Springer. I have devoted my efforts as the NRL Editor-in-Chief from its launch in the middle of 2006. While all the NRL articles are freely available online for EVERYONE, I have to admit, the journal content significantly lacks interests for the general public. I accepted the criticism received while promoting the journal, “Open Access is just a game inside the immediate academic circle”. To encourage more NRL submissions that addresses the public interests, any submission that specifies “Open Access Day" in the message to NRL editors and meets the standard, the publication fee of $950 per article will be voluntary for submissions received in 2008.
OK, I believe I addressed all of the 4 key points raised to enter the synchroblogging competition in the first Open Access Day. To summarize:
• Why does Open Access matter to you?
This is my opportunity to better serve the scientific community and the general public.
• How did you first become aware of it?
I can’t remember exactly. I gained awareness at the beginning of 2005. Ever since, I started my efforts to launch an OA journal on nanotechnology.
• Why should scientific and medical research be an open-access resource for the world?
Is this a question? I hate to repeat what others have said and would say. Why not open-access to scientific and medical research? This is a question.
• What do you do to support Open Access, and what can others do?
I have a well-visited blog in Chinese, to broaden awareness and understanding of Open Access. Besides publishing with OA journals, refereeing for OA journals, using OA articles, and broadcasting the OA movement, I hope that more scientists realize the necessity for appropriate scientific contents for open access. This is about how we are going to write manuscripts for OA journals.
- Zhiming M. Wang, synchroblogging at the first open access day (October 14, 2008)
This is my first NN blog post, as an entry for OAD synchroblogging. I will write an introduction of myself soon…
Welcome to the Nature Network blogroll! I am looking forward to reading more about your work in nanotech and on an OA journal.
Open Access is one publishing model, in which the author (or his/her institution) pays for publication. In subscription journals, the reader pays – or in the case of an academic journal, the library via a site licence. The end-result for most readers is the same, they don’t pay.
In addition, many subscription journals including the Nature journals, not only encourage authors to deposit their manuscripts in repositories, but perform this service for them.
Communicating science to the public is a new task for scientific journals. It is very good to know from your post that more journals are appreciating this goal, which is in _Nature_’s mission statement of 1869 and also in its present-day version.
Interesting post, please look at my commentary on this subject. I do warn that we all may be a little too “open accsess crazy” right now, and I warn that this may be a little too trendy and groupthinkish to be productive…I have posted on that too.
Yes, Michael. I was writing a post as an antidote to the group think. I’ll have to finish it tomorrow, though. Bring a bit of realism back, eh?
Zhiming – welcome to the club! I look forward to reading more from you.
@Maxine
- Yes, for subscription journals, most readers don’t pay from their own pockets. For those who need to pay from their own pockets, most likely they won’t become readers of subscription journals :-(. None needs to pay to become a reader for Open-Access journals.
- Yes, Nature has the best scientific CONTENT for Open Access. Don’t you think Nature should take the Open-Access FORM to better realize its mission statement :-?
@Michael – I have a post on how we can broadcast science as in the mass media, but in Chinese :-(.
@Bob – look forward to your antidote post.
Hi Zhiming
It seems there is a lot of open access debating going on in parallel at the moment. I just posted a comment in Martin Fenner’s blog that deals with the same issue. For example, I am not sure an open-access model could be applied that readily to journals like Nature where only relatively few papers are published in relation to costs.
A point I haven’t discussed there, but that struck me in your post is the use of “general public”. What does this imply? My friends outside science certainly won’t read original research papers, whereas scientists have access to at least most key publications…
Hi Joerg,
-I agree with you that the cost to produce an article in Nature is much higher than in archival journals. Let’s take your number, 10 times higher! NRL is NOT an archival journal, but let’s take its publication charge of $950 to continue the assumption. Then the open-access charge for a Nature article should be $9500. If you think this is not feasible, rethink, the fame of Nature articles. In china, universities are willing to pay over $10K to authors of a Nature article. I’m not talking about millions dollars of research funding behind Nature articles.
- I would say your friends outside science won’t read ALL of the original research papers. Scientists won’t do it either. Your friends maybe never read a FULL original research paper before. However, how about an abstract and a conclusion? None of the Nature articles struck your friends before? For example, if you mention one to them… Communicate science to the “general public”, EVERYONE, everywhere, anytime, one bite at a time :-).
you may be right saying that the fame to publish in Nature may indeed drive people to pay such high publication charges in excess of $10,000 (and multiplying the 150 odd papers we publish at Nature Materials probably gets you in the right order of magnitude albeit on the low side, although I frankly have no idea about the revenue we generate, we are strictly separate at this interface for good reasons).
On the other hand, if I go out to lab visits, many senior and established scientists are more reluctant and sometimes claim they only submit to us “because of the postdocs’ career” (so they claim!). Not sure how that scenario really would play out if tested. Apart from places like China, my feeling is that publication allowances that come with grants would need to increase significantly (as library budgets go down). And this needs to happen on a global level rather than a given national one.
As for friends interested in science, I still feel they might read about breakthroughs in the science pages of good newspapers, or if they are really keen in places like Scientific American.
To me, the debate boils more down to the payment model, and how this affects research-intensive places versus subscription-only places. The issue with “open access” (i.e. access to all) might be blurred further in future anyway, given that the license agreements our authors sign with us have a tendency to provide more and more rights to authors. Already now you have the rights for example (if proper reference is made and it is not in our own format):
“To reproduce the Contribution in whole or in part
in any printed volume (book or thesis) of which
they are the author(s).”
“To post a copy of the Contribution as accepted
for publication after peer review (in Word or Tex
format) on the Author’s own web site, or the
Author’s institutional repository, or the Author’s
funding body’s archive, six months after
publication of the printed or online edition”
Anyway, I think it will be very interesting to see how these issues develop in the coming years. If open access works for your journal, I think that’s great…
- It is not just about the publication allowances from grants. As long as the authors have the choice to publish with subscription journals like Natures, most of them don’t want to pay a fee to publish with open-access journals, even if they have enough money for it. No one thinks they have enough though. Never :-). Grants like NSF allow to pay the publication charges. However, if don’t have to, why pay? The open-access publication model simply punishes whoever lead it :-(.
-Internet changes the way to deliver Science. The general public may get more chance to access science through Google, instead of newspapers and Scientific American.
yes it would need a more concerted approach. If you like, arxiv already gives free access to submitted papers, and our license agreement allows you to put the peer-reviewed final version on there after 6 months.
If you like, we may go into a direction like the film industry. First you play the film in the big theatres, and after a while you have networks broadcast it (almost) for free to everyone…
But on the upsite for you, as you may know the Optical Society of America has two almost identical journals, Optics Letters and Optics Express. The former is subscription based, the latter open access. And OE seems to be the more popular one of the two (also as they seem to be really fast I hear)