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Rapid Responses: Rapid Responses published:
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![[Read Rapid Response]](/icons/misc/sectionDOWN.gif)
public access decreasing
- Robert Rands (6 May 2004)
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Global Open Access
- Siroos Mirzaei (7 May 2004)
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The Cost Of Scientific Publishing
- Tom Love (7 May 2004)
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What about the author of the "rest of the world"?
- Martha SM Silveira (9 May 2004)
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Open Access is a Pipe Dream
- Trevor G Marshall (10 May 2004)
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The free electronic journals solution
- Fernando Fernandez-Llimos (10 May 2004)
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The risk of a publication fee is two-tier research
- Rodger C Charlton (10 May 2004)
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PubMed Central evicted from the Big Brother household.
- Phillip J. Colquitt (11 May 2004)
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Open All Hours : www.Medical-Journals.com
- Jay Ilangaratne (12 May 2004)
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Re: Open All Hours : www.Medical-Journals.com
- Dr. Naseem A. Qureshi, MD, IMAPA, LMIPS (12 May 2004)
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Not all bad news
- Janet H Darbyshire (2 June 2004)
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Re: Open Access is a Pipe Dream
- Gunther Eysenbach (3 June 2004)
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Robert Rands, lay reader Tasmania
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As one who is interested in the topic of depleted uranium, I find the Wellcome Trust's suggestions tantalizing [Mayor 328 (7448): 1094]. I am currently unable to access many of the publications which I formerly found helpful on the topic of low level radiation. My guess is that little of significance would change for the better where access to current radiation research is concerned. Within my own constraints, I have yet to improve on regularly visiting and browsing a good medical library's periodical section. Now that paid subscriptions to specialist material are tending toward online resources rather than hard copy, what promised to be democratisation threatens to become cargo cult, with unsubscribed readers the losers, as libraries tighten their purse-strings and abandon their hard copy subscriptions. The shelves are thinning out, it seems. I wonder how many public libraries offer all comers access to subscriber-only electronic journals? My guess is very few indeed, and that, compared to 10 or 20 years ago, fewer interested laypersons have good access to current scientific results. Competing interests: None declared |
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Siroos Mirzaei, Centre Hospitalier de Luxembourg 1210- Luxembourg
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I've made known the open access publishing by "Biomedcentral (BMC)" and I found it very rapid in the prepublication period. Further, the prepublication history which is available online by BMC contains much interesting information for the reader. The knowledge should be accessible everywhere if the scientific society will promote the research work wherever it takes place. The online publication costs which are not at a low level should be covered by part by the authors and by part by the industry and/or the states and they should be at a different ranking regarding the level of economic status of different countries. The charges for access to the online journals should also be in the same manner giving the oppurtunity to the colleagues with lower income in non-western countries to obtain the new informations in their field of speciality. Open Acccess Publishing can be a new engine for the industry just if it is "Open" for all and not only for a "Closed" part of global community. Competing interests: None declared |
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Tom Love, Research Fellow Tayside Centre for General Practice, University of Dundee, Kirsty Semple Way, Dundee DD24BF
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The aspirations of those who seek to provide free access to scientific journals (News, 7 May) are admirable. But the mechanism of author charging will bring costs as well as benefits. The existing system of publication certainly has its flaws, but it is a system which can be approached upon an equal basis by researchers regardless of personal or institutional circumstances. Author fees for publication will destroy this equality. Although the proponents of author fees promise to waive charges in circumstances where the author cannot pay, this has the potential to regress into a damaging and arbitrary system. What if research passes peer review, but the department in which the researcher is employed doesn’t make that article (or person) a priority in their budget round? If editors are not to find themselves in the situation of rejecting some articles on purely financial grounds, then arbitrary and unfair decisions about author charges will be the inevitable result. Moreover, there will be pressure upon editors to accept articles from paying authors, rather than from exempt ones. If publishers are not currently good enough at deciding who should receive their product free, why should we expect them to be any better at deciding which authors should pay for publication? There is already an issue of publication bias in the medical sciences, when researchers and their sponsors are reluctant to publish studies which produce negative or neutral results. When authors or sponsors have to pay for the privilege of publication, the bias is likely to get worse, not better. In today’s research environment the publication record is, like it or not, the major measure of individual and institutional achievement. This is being further entrenched by mechanisms such as the RAE. In this environment, a publication system which has an inherent bias towards those individuals, departments, institutions and disciplines which are already most successful in the competition for funding can only make access to research resources less equal, rather than more so. Author funding for publication is likely to entrench conservative research approaches, and to favour established departments and individuals over new departments and younger researchers. Making research freely accessible to all is a very good goal, but if it reduces the potential for people to participate in scientific research in the first place, it will harm science. Competing interests: None declared |
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Martha SM Silveira, Medical Librarian. Federal University of Bahia. Pos-Graduation Course in Medicine & Health Salvador, Bahia 41110-170
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The open access to scientific literature has an axcellent and worthwhile goal, which is to make the outcomes of research free to all. Less developed countries could certainly take great advantage of this access, because their scientific communities would have no longer to pay US$30 or £13 to obtain an article from an international journal. However, a big issue is not being taken into consideration: How can a South American author pay US$1950 ou £1110 to have an article published in a major journal? Do people in the rich countries think that there isn't valuable scientific research in the rest of the world? Don't have the scientists in poor countries the right to make their production, opinions, etc, known abroad? I have not seen this subject in the "open access" discussion. Competing interests: None declared |
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Trevor G Marshall, Managing Editor, JOIMR Thousand Oaks, California 91360
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As the editor of an emerging internet-based journal (the Journal of Independent Medical Research) we know the power of the "Association of Learned and Professional Society Publishers", and this is just one of the institutions holding fast to preservation of the 'status quo'. A medical journal cannot solicit papers until it has the capability to index them into services such as PubMed Central. Yet these institutions are also firmly entrenched in the print-publishing 'status-quo'. In our case, JOIMR was told that it had to have three members on its board who were current principal investigators on NIH research grants. Further, those board members are expected to guarantee the quality of the published papers in writing. What a farce! If you are already publishing you have no similar accountability, and can continue to publish whatever your peer reviewers deem suitable. But if you are an emerging publisher then the journal's board has to guarantee the integrity of its papers. The whole ethos of an "independent" journal is to move away from the 'status quo' of big-money research and focus upon independent studies. Most independent authors cannot afford 1100 pounds to publish, for example, an interesting case report. I don't see any way that the "Association of Learned and Professional Society Publishers" is going to let go of their power base, no matter how many studies Wellcome might promote. The BMJ is as keen to maintain 'status quo' as any other publisher. A senior BMJ editor, who sits on the PubMed advisory committee, voted to continue these unreasonable restrictions on JOIMR. Open access? Dream on... Competing interests: None declared |
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Fernando Fernandez-Llimos, Editor of Seguimiento Farmacoterapeutico Facultad de Farmacia. Universidad de Granada. 18071 Granada (Spain)
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Some of the Wellcome Trust (WT) report(1) statements are not acceptable, so conclusions may be biased. Cautiously and conservatively, they assume that total costs of paper and electronic articles are broadly the same. As editor of a free electronic journal, I cannot agree. Following WT report description of variable costs, we see that they do not exist for free electronic journals (paper, subscription management, licensing, distribution, sales and marketing). WT report establishes a 200USD cost for reviewing per published paper. To calculate it they considered a 90% rejection rate (although in other part of the report they accept a 40%), and a 20USD cost per ‘administrative’ costs of peer-reviewing; because they accept that reviewers are not normally paid. Free electronic journal editing process is much simple than they pretend. Receiving an email with an article, forwarding it to peer- reviewers, receiving their comments, forwarding them to corresponding author, and then receiving a new version of the article is very cheap. The real origin of this who should pay discussion is the old-fashioned idea of dividing journals into ‘good’ and ‘bad’ depending on biased indicators, like Impact Factor. These visibility indicators are calculated from secondary sources whose biased journal selection has been widely demonstrated. Idea to resolving this problem was published more than 100 years ago(2): self-indexing in a global secondary source. Free electronic journals supported by scientific societies and universities, with a free peer-review electronically based, and a global self-indexing in secondary sources, is a sustainable model for scientific interchange in XXI Century. 1. Major S. Open access could reduce cost of scientific publishing. BMJ 2004;328:1094. 2. Anonymous. International Catalogue of scientific literature. JAMA 1901; 36: 1121. Competing interests: Author is editor of Seguimiento Farmacoterapetico (a free electronic journal) |
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Rodger C Charlton, General Practitioner The Surgery, Marsh Lane, Hampton-in-Arden, Solihull, West Midlands B92 0AH, United Kingdom.
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Yes, open access might reduce the cost of scientific publishing, but at what cost? Introducing a fee to authors for publication could quickly lead to two-tier research as access to publishing research in on-line journals would be limited to a small number of practitioners who may have gained the necessary research funding. This would result in a potentially limited pool of advances in medicine being disseminated to the scientific community and thus quality journals such as the BMJ with their present reputation would be lost. Competing interests: None declared |
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Phillip J. Colquitt, Technical Advisor Self Employed
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PubMed Central hypothetically expresses openness in the sciences by offering articles without fee to anyone connected to the Internet, - the reader simply clicks on logo links attached to the left of a particular PubMed indexed article to gain access. But this service is not accessible to many health care workers at their workplace. A screen asking for a user name and password, which pops up and prevents access to PubMed Central, though it may be a manifestation of poor network skills of the administrator, is probably intended. Big Brother at work. In contradiction, hospital administrators attempt to present themselves as progressive by batching journals they already subscribe to, into a “knowledge network” accessible to all staff on campus without password. Meanwhile, privileged professionals such as doctors are seen using their passwords to check their Ebay and Hotmail, and some doctors react with open hostility to the idea of “lesser” health care workers trying to gain access to “their”(doctors) medical knowledge. Competing interests: I publish independently |
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Jay Ilangaratne, Founder Medical-Journals.com
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No user name or pass word required.It is free!.Go there and see it yourself,what little independent electronic publishers could do.We are now about four years old.Still growing. Competing interests: Founder www.Medical-Journals.com |
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Dr. Naseem A. Qureshi, MD, IMAPA, LMIPS, Medical Director [A], Director, CME&R Buraidah Mental Health Hospital, Postcode.2292, Saudi Arabia
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Dear Sir: The managers of this site:WWW.Medical-Journals.com, which is free and provides to the point information on a very selective and hot medical topics are in fact very generous and by and large they are rare exceptions. This free website would help many researchers and also public audiences who can update their knowledge and use it usefully in many ways. Indeed, we need more such free websites in order to reduce the cost of writing papers and of course their publication. Competing interests: None declared |
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Janet H Darbyshire, Chairman, MRC/DH Joint project Steering Group Director, MRC Clinical Trials Unit, 222 Euston Road, NW1 2DA
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Susan Mayor’s article “Squeezing academic research into a commercial straitjacket” (BMJ 2004; 328: 1036 (1 May) highlighted the academic community’s significant concerns about the EU Clinical Trials Directive. It is a pity that she buried the good news. The article referred to the Medical Research Council’s May 2003 impact assessment of the draft UK regulations. Much has changed since then. The UK Medicines for Human Use (Clinical Trials) Regulations, which came into force on 1 May, contain significant improvements over the draft regulations. In particular, it is the principles of the International Conference on Harmonisation Good Clinical Practice that will be the GCP standard for the UK. The Medicines and Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency's (MHRA) now recognises that there many kinds of clinical trial and that the controls need to appropriate and proportionate to the trial. The full detailed guidelines that accompanied the ICH GCP are likely to be appropriate only to a small fraction of academic trials, specifically those designed to gain marketing authorisation. The regulations’ provision for a group to accept the sponsorship responsibilities recognises that many trials do not fit within the “single sponsor” model. How this might work is set out in the papers published by the MRC/Department of Health Joint Project to Codify Best Practice in Publicly Funded Trials. The Joint Project aims to cover a range of topics from sponsorship and insurance, clinical trial commencement, risk assessment, trials supplies and safety reporting. It provides information of practical value to trialists and R&D managers. http://www.ncchta.org/eudirective/index.asp As the BMJ points out and the Steering Group of the Joint Project recognises, some important problems remain to be resolved – not least how sponsorship and insurance arrangements will be handled in multinational European trials. It is time to stop shooting at old targets. We need intelligent collaboration to tackle the real issues. Professor Janet Darbyshire
Competing interests: None declared |
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Gunther Eysenbach, Editor, Journal of Medical Internet Research Toronto M5G2C4
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As editor of the Journal of Medical Internet Research (www.jmir.org) I am not as pessimistic as Trevor Marshall, who feels that "institutions [such as PubMed Central] are firmly entrenched in the print-publishing 'status-quo'." This has not been my experience.
The success of the Journal of Medical Internet Research, an independent electronic journal, proves that it is possible to create and operate a successful high-quality Open Access journal on a shoestring budget, independently from any large publisher. The Journal of Medical Internet Research was started in 1999 with zero budget as an independent Open Access journal run by scientists for scientists, and is now indexed in Medline [Index Medicus], CINAHL, Information Science Abstracts, INSPEC (Institution of Electrical Engineers), Communication Abstracts, The Informed Librarian Online, LISA, EMBASE, Scopus, and other interdisciplinary databases and abstraction services. It will also be in PMC soon. ISI is currently monitoring the Journal of Medical Internet Research to establish an Journal Impact Factor, which is - according to our own calculations - around 2.0, making the journal one of the leading and most cited health informatics journals. I am more worried by the "rich-gets-richer" phenomenon of funders putting most of their money to only two OA publishers (PLOS and BMC), forgetting that this creates an unequality and unfair competition between these big shots and smaller independent OA publishers. One should think that PLoS and BMC, who have already millions of dollars in venture capital or grant money, would not need a lot of external support, while smaller OA publishers should be the primary target for public support and donors, to foster a diverse OA publishing landscape. Yet, funders such as the OAI Grant Initiative are supporting the memberhship schemes for PLoS and BMC only, but not other OA publishers such as JMIR. We have in the past received only a single $500 grant from OAI to fund the submission of an author from Nigeria (while we had to waive the APF or reject the paper in other cases if the author was unable to pay), while in the same period of time the OAI Grants program has paid at least $90.000 to BMC in APFs and probably several hundreds of thousends in dollars in membership fees. Despite our frequent requests to OAI to broaden their support to other OA publishers and journals, they continue to support PLOS and BMC only. The OAI grants program comes from the Open Society Institute, an organization set up by financier and philanthropist George Soros to promote greater openness in society. The money is intended to finance initiatives to make research freely available to scientists around the world, free of the financial constraints of journal subscriptions. It appears to me that most of the 3 Million dollar, which OSI has allocated for this cause, is going to BMC. I am wondering how many OA journals aside from BMC have received any support? Smaller OA publishers will have increasing difficulties to compete with BMC, who can keep the Article Processing Fees low. Do we really want to have an Open Access monopoly, with only one or two OA publishers controlling >95% of OA journals? [1] From my point of view, it is time to put some pressure on funding bodies such as OSI/OAI and also to increase the awareness among the public that there are other succesful OA publishers out there, and that directing all the money and attention to mainly two publishers (one of them having the immodest slogan "THE Open Access publisher" - as if no other OA publishers exist) eventually will harm the OA movement, as they destroy smaller grassroots publishers and create a OA publisher monopoly / oligarchy. If you agree with me, please send an email to mhagemann@sorosny.org at the Soros Foundation and ask why their OAI grants program only supports membership in PLOS and BMC, and why they no longer support article processing fees for any kind of OA journal or membership fees in other OA journals such as the Journal of Medical Internet Research (and yes, we do have a membership program).
Reference Competing interests: Editor of the Journal of Medical Internet Research (www.jmir.org) |
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