Sunday, August 22, 2004

Frank Spilhaus, Spreading the word, The Economist, August 19, 2004. A letter to the editor in response to the unsigned story on OA, Access all areas, from August 7. Your article on 'open access' to scientific literature is shockingly one-sided ('Access all areas', August 7th). As with most utopian visions it contains fatal flaws. Open access depends upon payment for all costs of publication by the author, or the supporter of the research, to replace the income currently made from subscribers. In many countries, government would become the principal source of funds for science publication. Spilhaus is the Executive Director of the American Geophysical Union. [Open Access News] One might naïvely assume that scientific societies would be for wider access to science. But, like the guilds of old, their power is tied to restricting the access to knowledge. They are some of the worst offenders in the scandalous inflation of journal prices, under the pretext that their journal revenues provide important services for their members. In the US, scientific societies are non-profits, under the assumption that they work in the public interest. But by that they seem to understand the narrow interests of their bureaucracies, and maybe the only slightly broader interests of their members, and only accidentally the broad public interest. Is there a more important service for a scientific society than maximizing access to new science? At some point, inquiring legislators might start asking how the public interest is served by societies placing tolls on the distribution of research results paid for by the public. Anti-OA agitators continue to spread FUD about "author pays," deliberately hiding the fact that some of the most successful OA journals are run by volunteers benefiting by the huge economies of Web-based publishing, and need no author fees. It may be the case that translating a traditional high-overhead journal to OA is economically impractical, but most of that overhead is useless anyway, since the scientists who to the real work — authors, reviewers, editors — are volunteers anyway. 3:24:39 PM