From: technews <technews@ou.edu>
To: "'it-fyi@listserv.ou.edu'" <it-fyi@lists.ou.edu>
Subject: it-fyi: Project Promises Alternative to Costly Journals (Chron of
Date: Mon, 29 Nov 1999 17:53:15 -0600
From the issue dated December 3, 1999
'Open Archives' Project Promises Alternative to Costly Journals
Proponents see free worldwide repository for research, but hurdles
abound
By VINCENT KIERNAN
In the latest attempt to harness the Internet to improve communication among
scholars, a group of researchers is proposing that universities and
scholarly societies around the world create electronic repositories of
research papers that would be connected through the Net so that they could
be used as a single collection.
Scholars would deposit their papers in the system, called the Open Archives,
and retrieve papers written by others -- all for free. Universities and
scholarly societies would bear the cost of operating individual repositories
that would form the global archive. The system is described in a plan
drafted recently by 25 scholars from academe and the government at a meeting
in Santa Fe, N.M.
Proponents say it could be operating within a year, but its prospects may be
dimmed by a number of factors, including opposition from journal publishers
and the reluctance of some scholars to place their work in the archive.
Because each repository in the Open Archives would use the same standards
for indexing papers, a scholar could search all the repositories with a
single command. "The idea is to make all the public archives in all the
universities in the world into one global, virtual archive," says Stevan
Harnad, a professor of cognitive science at the University of Southampton,
in England, and an organizer of the Open Archives project.
But the central virtue of the project, in the eyes of many of its
supporters, is that it could offer an alternative to conventional journals,
allowing universities to cancel at least some of their high-priced
subscriptions. While observers say they don't expect the project to threaten
the most prominent scholarly publications, the smaller and more expensive
journals offered by commercial publishers could be affected if the archive
idea proved successful.
Researchers at Old Dominion University already have demonstrated the
feasibility of the Open Archives, linking six existing archives that contain
200,000 articles through one interface that allows a user to search all six
with a single command, says Kurt J. Maly, a professor who is chairman of the
computer-science department at Old Dominion.
Although technical challenges must be overcome if the system is to be
expanded to handle millions of articles efficiently, Mr. Maly says that, "in
principle, it can work."
The National Institutes of Health is planning a vast electronic archive of
its own, called PubMed Central, that would archive both papers that had been
published in peer-reviewed journals and papers that had not been peer
reviewed. David Lipman, director of the N.I.H.'s National Center for
Biotechnology Information, says that he does not see the Open Archives as a
competitor. "If this Santa Fe initiative gets off the ground, we'd certainly
coordinate with them," says Dr. Lipman.
Like PubMed Central, the Open Archives would include both peer-reviewed and
unreviewed papers. Therein may lie a major roadblock to both: A journal's
publisher, rather than its authors, typically owns the copyright to articles
in the journal. Commercial publishers are likely to be reluctant to permit
published papers to be deposited in the Open Archives, for fear of
undercutting subscriptions to their electronic and print editions.
Elsevier Science, the world's largest commercial publisher of scholarly
journals, would not permit the texts of papers from its journals to be
placed in the Open Archives, says Arie Jongejan, Elsevier Science's managing
director for physical-sciences publishing and a member of the Elsevier
Science board.
Elsevier's contract with authors does allow them to deposit the published
versions of papers in electronic archives maintained by their academic
departments. But Mr. Jongejan says he believes that provision would not
cover putting a paper in a departmental archive that was part of the new
open system. An author could, however, contribute a preliminary version of a
paper to the open system, Mr. Jongejan says.
The preliminary version also could contain a link to the final version of
the paper in an electronic data base maintained by Elsevier, he says,
adding: "Our general philosophy is that we like to see usage of our material
increase." But only subscribers to the electronic edition of the journal
would be able to follow the link to the final version of the article.
David Shulenberger, the provost of the University of Kansas and an outspoken
advocate of the expanded use of electronic communication in science, says
that the Open Archives project will be much less attractive to universities
if it does not include peer-reviewed articles.
"As an unrefereed repository, it gives scientists another tool," Mr.
Shulenberger says, but that tool would cost universities more rather than
save them money. However, if published articles were included in the Open
Archives, "then we could use some of the funds that we spend on enormously
expensive subscriptions to pay for computer servers on campus" to house the
repositories, he says. "Then they will have made a real contribution."
That prospect is far off, according to one leader of the project, who
predicts that subscription journals and the Open Archives will exist side by
side for a period, but that the archive will eventually win out.
"For years to come -- 5 or 10 or more -- we will have to live with both
worlds," says Herbert Van de Sompel, a librarian at the University of Ghent,
in Belgium. Such a period of double expenditures is the only solution to the
problem of the escalating cost of journals, he says. "If we don't do
something, we'll be stuck with the same serials crisis until the end of our
days."
For many journals, the Open Archives won't be much of a threat, says Richard
K. Johnson, enterprise director of the Scholarly Publishing and Academic
Resources Coalition, a project of the Association of Research Libraries that
seeks to develop lower-cost alternatives for scholarly communication.
"People will still want to subscribe to Nature, people will still want to
subscribe to Science, because there is value added through their peer
review," says Mr. Johnson. Journals published by for-profit companies
probably would be threatened more than journals published by scholarly
societies, because the subscription prices for some for-profit journals are
excessive, he says.
"The ones who should worry are the ones that are not delivering value for
what they charge," he says.
Donald W. King, co-author of a forthcoming book called Towards Electronic
Journals: Realities for Scientists, Librarians and Publishers (Special
Libraries Association, 2000), agrees that the archive may not present much
of a threat to publishers. "These data bases are going to complement the
traditional library subscription," not replace it, he says.
Scholars already share articles that have been published, he notes. "There's
an awful lot of photocopies going from person to person," for which the
publishers receive no income, says Mr. King. Distributing journal articles
electronically would be little different, he says.
Even though the Open Archives is being envisioned as free, Mr. King says it
should levy a small fee for each journal article that is downloaded from it.
The fee would go to the publisher. The Association for Computing Machinery,
a scholarly society in computer science, collects such a charge for
electronic access to articles in its journals, and that would serve as "a
wonderful model" for the global archive, he says.
Such a fee would encourage university libraries to maintain their
subscriptions to popular journals, because those subscriptions would still
cost less than the aggregate expense of downloading from the archive many
individual articles from those journals, he says.
However, the University of Southampton's Mr. Harnad opposes such fees,
saying they would fundamentally change the nature of the Open Archives.
Both royalty fees and subscriptions hold "the literature hostage behind a
financial firewall instead of freeing it for one and all," he says, adding
that publishers should abandon the business of distributing journals -- in
print or electronically -- and limit themselves to conducting peer review.
Publishers could recoup their costs for peer review by charging scholars a
small fee when their papers are accepted, akin to the page charges levied by
many journals, and authors and universities could afford to pay that fee
from their savings from canceled subscriptions, Mr. Harnad says. The result,
he says, would be "a refereed, certified literature, firewall-free, for
everyone, everywhere, forever."
Another key question is whether researchers in all disciplines would use the
Open Archives. Scholarly disciplines vary widely in their receptiveness to
electronic archives, says Rob Kling, a professor of information systems and
information science at Indiana University at Bloomington.
He has studied scientists' use of electronic media. "There are important
disciplinary differences" that would influence the degree to which scholars
in a field would participate in the global archive, says Mr. Kling.
For example, physics is a relatively small, tightly knit discipline, and
physicists are more interested in quickly learning about new discoveries
than in waiting through a lengthy peer-review process that assesses the
validity of research results. So they enthusiastically use archives,
particularly a popular data base of physics papers maintained at Los Alamos
National Laboratory, says Mr. Kling.
By contrast, there are many more molecular biologists than physicists, and
consequently many more research papers in the field, so molecular biologists
depend on journals' peer review to sift the wheat from the chaff, Mr. Kling
says.
Moreover, fields like physics and computer science can afford to establish
electronic archives because they receive extensive financial support, such
as grants from the federal government or industry. Other fields, which
receive less government money, might have difficulty financing the servers,
he says.
Organizers' optimism that scholars will flock to the archive once it is in
place may prove unfounded, says Mr. Kling. "They have a Field of Dreams
rhetoric," he says. "Their particular model doesn't fit all fields."