AS SCIENTIFIC wagers go, Lenny Teytelman’s isn’t up there with the greats. It doesn’t have the celebrity appeal of Stephen Hawking’s bet on black holes or the intrigue of the wager between Christof Koch and David Chalmers on consciousness. But the outcome will, arguably, have greater impact than any of them. In February last year, that, by 1 January 2030, all biomedical research will be published in open-access journals. In other words, it will be freely available to read as soon as it is in print. No subscription, no paywall, no restrictions – ever.
This may sound like the beginning of a tedious story of interest only to academics and publishers. I suspected so too when I started looking into it, but I soon discovered I was wrong. The battle over scientific publishing is a tale of big money, piracy, hacking, infighting, fake news and free speech. At stake is the soul of science itself. And after bubbling away for 20 years, it is about to boil over, with unpredictable consequences for all of us.
To understand what is going on, it is helpful to hark back to the late 1990s, when a notorious website called Napster was spreading panic through the music industry. Napster and its many imitators were in the business of music piracy. Their technology allowed people to access play lists on each other’s computers, making almost any song freely available to anyone with an internet connection. The industry rightly regarded this as a criminal, existential threat, and sued Napster. The site was shut down in 2001. However, it is credited with forcing the industry to rethink its business model, first by embracing legal digital download stores such as iTunes and eventually subscription-based streaming services such as Spotify.
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Today, in the shape of a website called Sci-Hub, which lets anybody download almost any academic paper free of charge. And there is an awful lot of research out there: according to a recent estimate, , and rising. Most are published by traditional publishing houses and available, legally, only with a subscription or on payment of a one-off fee. Neither option is cheap. For instance, an – required reading for biochemists and biophysicists – costs £4574. Access to a single research paper is likely to set you back £30 or more.
This all adds up to a very lucrative business. In 2013, academic publishing . Profit margins are reported to be between 30 and 40 per cent: the figure is hard to verify, although not disputed by the industry’s leading trade body, the International Association of Scientific, Technical and Medical Publishers. Indeed, last year Elsevier, the world’s largest academic publisher, reported a profit margin of , amounting to £913 million. In other words, academic publishing is one of the most profitable businesses in the world.
It is also one of the most controversial, because it is built on privatising assets created by public money and free labour. Here’s how it works. Research funders receive taxpayers’ money, which they dole out to scientists, who then submit their findings to journals in an attempt to get them published. If a subscription journal accepts a paper (usually on the recommendation of peer reviewers who aren’t paid for their work), it publishes and then charges people to read it. Taxpayers often pick up these charges too, for example when a university library buys a subscription. That is if they can afford to. Many universities, even in the US, lack the resources to buy all the journals that scientists need to keep up with their field, says Teytelman. “It’s an absurd situation.”
Sci-Hub was set up in 2011 as a direct (although illegal) challenge to the status quo. Since then, its founder, Kazakhstani graduate student, hacker and activist Alexandra Elbakyan, has begged, borrowed and stolen millions of paywalled research papers. Sci-Hub’s technology isn’t the same as Napster’s, but its effect is. The site claims to have 70 million papers in its repository, and growing. Accessing them is simple: you just input the web address or digital identifier of the paper you want. Both are easy to discover. According to Elbakyan, last year there were 150 million downloads, with users in China and India leading the way.
“Everyone agrees that flipping to open access is the right thing to do”
Sci-Hub has been playing legal cat-and-mouse as the academic publishing industry tries to take it down. Elsevier and the American Chemical Society have won lawsuits against it. Elbakyan is in hiding to avoid extradition. And, of course, Sci-Hub isn’t an alternative to the traditional way of publishing research because it doesn’t produce any papers itself. Nevertheless, like Napster before, it may be the catalyst that changes how an industry works.
In fact, a small group of Davids began fighting the Goliaths of academic publishing two decades ago. They argue that the traditional, subscription model undermines one of the accepted norms of science: openness. Scientific progress depends on open communication, so research shouldn’t be locked behind paywalls. They have shed blood, sweat and tears to invent a new way of publishing openly while still covering the cost. “Open access” comes in various forms (see “The many faces of openness”) but they all have one thing in common: a paper can be read for free by anyone, anywhere.
From small beginnings in the 1990s, open-access publishing has grown into a thriving industry. The lists more than from 62 publishers, including pioneers such as the Public Library of Science (PLoS) and eLife, as well as traditional publishing powerhouses such as Sage, Wiley and Springer Nature. Veteran publishers are increasingly “flipping” their business models from subscription to open access, or at least a mixture of both.
What is more, many open-access publishers make a decent living – not from subscriptions and paywalls, but by charging authors a fee to publish their papers. The highly respected . “Nobody is arguing that publishing should be free. It does cost a lot, and you need a source of revenue to cover the expenses,” says Teytelman, who is CEO of protocols.io, an open-access repository of experimental methods in life science. On the other hand, the aim isn’t to make big profits and, in fact, both PLoS and eLife registered losses in their most recent financial reports. In addition, although open-access journals still rely on unpaid peer reviewers, many academics see this as part of their duty and they feel less exploited working for open-access publishers.
Admittedly, some scientists are wary of this model too, arguing that high publication fees create inequalities. “That removes barriers for reading, but creates barriers for publishing,” says , a biochemist at Uppsala University in Sweden. She leads a growing campaign group that supports open science in principle but has concerns about it in practice. “Getting published should be about the quality of your research, not the size of your wallet,” she says. Some open-access publishers make a living by publishing large volumes of mediocre papers and that should concern us all, she adds. “We’re living in a world where we have a big problem with fake news. There are problems in academic publishing, but we do have systems of checks and balances and gatekeepers on how information is disseminated.”
Free for all
Advocates of open access point out that these journals have essentially the same quality controls as traditional ones, including reputation and impact factors, which measure how frequently the average paper is cited in a year. But there is another problem with open access, as they see it. The original ambition was to totally replace traditional publishing, and that is far from happening. “Most research is still published in subscription journals,” says Teytelman. In 2016, just 15 per cent of journals were pure open access; 38 per cent were pure toll access. Most of the rest were “hybrid” journals: subscription journals that will also publish papers as open access, for a fee. This hybrid model is the bugbear of openness purists who argue that it gives traditional publishers two bites of the cherry, so no incentive to fully embrace open access.
Perhaps surprisingly, traditional publishers are quick to profess admiration for open access. “We are highly supportive of all forms of sustainable open access,” says Matt McKay of the International Association of Scientific, Technical and Medical Publishers. “We’re aiming for as much open access as possible.”
So why hasn’t it happened? Is it a case of “please God make me good, but not just yet”? When I put this to McKay, he replied that what may look like stalling is actually an attempt to engineer an “orderly transition”. There are risks associated with flipping to open access, he says, not least preserving the integrity and continuity of the scholarly record. That will not be aided if the transition is badly executed or journals go bust. “I don’t see any real disagreement over whether open access is a good thing or a bad thing – the key differences are over how we get from A to B,” says McKay.
The latest bid to break the logjam came in early September, when a group of 12 European research funders delivered what they hope will be : as of 1 January 2020, any research they pay for must be published in an open-access journal. Subscription publishing will be totally banned, including in hybrid journals, but beyond that the details are negotiable. “We do not advocate any particular open publication model. The research communities can take over and design publication models that fit their needs best,” says Marc Schiltz, president of Science Europe – an umbrella organisation of science funders, including the group of 12 that signed up to the move.
The group calls itself , where OA stands for open access and S for “science, speed, solution, shock”, according to Schiltz. “It was a working title and it kind of stuck,” he adds. Between them, they control more than €18 billion of annual research funding. And the coalition is growing. The Wellcome Trust has said it will implement the plan. Two more European funders have also joined and, according to Schiltz, there is interest from many of .
This looks potentially transformative. “It took nearly 20 years to get one funder to commit to immediate open access – the Gates Foundation – so to suddenly get 12 more is quite an outcome,” says Teytelman. “I’m sure the other bodies will join.”
What if they don’t, though? This worry is one reason the plan hasn’t been met with universal acclaim. If funders in the US and Asia won’t follow suit, that would create disadvantages for European researchers by locking their work out of prestigious journals such as Nature and Science. Some members of Science Europe may also demur, leading to the Balkanisation of the European research landscape. But, if that happens, the journals stand to lose too, and cOAlition S is gambling that the publishers will blink first. “This is basically a line in the sand saying, if you don’t flip to open access you’re going to lose the output from our grantees. And if you reject top research you cannot be a top journal, your impact factor will slide, your brand will be damaged,” says Teytelman.
Not everyone is convinced. Kamerlin and her campaign group dislike the ban on hybrid publishing, which they say will exclude them from some of the most prestigious journals in their fields, and so restrict academic equality and freedom. She is also nervous about the assumption that research communities will come up with new models to make this work. “It’s a shove into the unknown,” she says.
But perhaps a shove is what is needed. Everyone, whatever their position, agrees that flipping to open access is the right thing to do. The benefits will go far beyond science and publishing. “Most people are not researchers, but they care about things like advances in medicine and technology. And a lot of public policies depend on evidence that is turned up by researchers,” says , a leading expert on open-access publishing. “Open access helps researchers do their work, and so helps the benefits that flow from research.”
Teytelman agrees: “At this point, coming out and saying that subscription publishing is good for society is a bit like saying smoking is good for you.”
I know who I’m rooting for to win $100.
The many faces of openness
Under open-access publishing anyone can read a research paper free of charge. However, open access takes a variety of forms.
GOLD: Articles are published in online open-access journals. Authors pay the processing costs and retain copyright.
PLATINUM: Like gold but article processing costs are met by a third party, such as a philanthropic body.
DIAMOND: Like gold but without article processing costs; the publication work is done by volunteers.
GREEN: Articles are published in a paywalled journal but authors are permitted to deposit a copy in an open online repository.
HYBRID: Articles are published in a paywalled journal but authors pay a fee to lift the paywall for everybody.
DELAYED: Articles are behind a paywall for an embargo period of between 6 and 12 months and then the journal makes them freely available.
LIBRE: Articles are published under a creative commons licence so they are free to read and even reprint, provided they are republished under creative commons.
This article appeared in print under the headline “Access all areas”
