This problem has to be solved on the supply side. As long as researchers keep voluntarily publishing in journals that jealously guard knowledge from the people who (often) paid for it via their taxes in the first place, nothing will change.
The only reason the journals can do this is that the governments that fund the research allow them to. A simple change in the rules for government funded research would fix that.
I think that this excellent point is what's missing from most of these discussions: a realisation that most academics, who are under intense pressures to publish, simply don't have the freedom to "vote with their feet" ("vote with their papers", I suppose), and that the change must come from an institutional body. That's why I love open-access policies like the NIH's (http://publicaccess.nih.gov/policy.htm):
> The Director of the National Institutes of Health ("NIH") shall require in the current fiscal year and thereafter that all investigators funded by the NIH submit or have submitted for them to the National Library of Medicine's PubMed Central an electronic version of their final, peer-reviewed manuscripts upon acceptance for publication, to be made publicly available no later than 12 months after the official date of publication: Provided, that the NIH shall implement the public access policy in a manner consistent with copyright law.
(Actually, this seems to be weaker than what I remember; is there another law that says that NIH-funded works must appear in some open-access forum, or am I misremembering the import of the law?)
Oh - and Science is one of, if the the, only journal that does not do deposition to Pubmed Central for the authors. The authors have to do it themselves and many do not.
To be sure!—I agree with all of your points. However, we have to start somewhere, and it is something—I'd rather have an imperfect solution, as long as it stimulates a search for the perfect one, than no solution. For example, as far as I know, no common grants in mathematics carry this stipulation. (I am thinking here of the situation where it is (relatively) easy now to obtain non-DRM'd music; the initial solutions were far from perfect, but they showed that the world didn't end when they were implemented.)
The last team I was in always wanted to publish open access, but only the Wellcome Trust funded person had a specific budget to pay for it. So we either crammed him on the author list and pretended he contributed significantly (unethical all round) or went non-OA (not what we wanted either).
And this is before we get into whose government paid for what. I was US-funded and working at a British university alongside EU & charity funded researchers. Who has the right to see what? And what if the work was partially funded by a company? Or do you argue that all Europeans have the right to read US-funded work and vice versa? I personally would, but I think many people would disagree if I'd written China instead of the EU.
Also, though I think many people will disagree with this, I'm not sure open access - while ideologically preferable - is a panacea for much at all. I've been publishing OA for >10 years, but in practice it makes virtually no difference to accessibility for professional western researchers. Research papers are perhaps best understood and used as professional communications on method rather than descriptions of truth or the state of the art (as a side note I believe this conflict is where many of the arguments over the quality of the literature arise)*. Professional researchers have access to all the papers they need.
OA really really helps researchers in poor countries. And this is the strongest argument for it, where the impact can really be felt and measured, but this is almost never the argument I see put forward by the tech/gadget communities.
1. I worked at a small research institute for 8 years. The place was called TIGR. It was one of the world leaders in genome sequencing. But we had only 200 people. We did not have subscriptions to most journals. I think this is common - sure - researchers at big universities have access to most papers. But researchers at small ones, or start ups, or reporters, etc do not.
2. Open access is NOT just about getting papers for free. It is also about the license for reuse of materials. When papers are truly open access they can be reused and reshared in diverse ways. This allows for new types of research (e.g., full text cluster analysis) and for better sharing and reuse (e.g., online textbooks).
3. I disagree about research papers being best seen as only professional communications among researchers. I think a good paper should also be readible and understandable (at least in parts) by people outside of the professional research community. The more we engage the public with REAL science the better.
1. So I found this quite interesting. I think in the UK it's rare for an institution of that size to not be affiliated with a university and so able to get access. I was at the Sanger which was Cambridge Uni affiliated. However, this is also an issue of journal bundling and secret negotiations. Unless you're suggesting the complete dismantlement of the publishing scene, then this needs a complex solution. And re startups, I'm not sure why giving commercial entities subsidised access to the literature is a priority?
2) Full text analysis is not really an OA issue either (I've also not been very impressed with the results from it so far, but that's a different story). Yes it can be done more easily via OA, but most major publishers are increasingly supporting it. They can be obliged to support it without forcing OA as a publishing model. Many other issues fall under local copyright laws which makes it more complex. However, educational purposes and informal sharing is normally covered by fair use. And even with online textbooks, I'm not sure even if I publish as OA that I necessarily want someone else using it for commercial purposes for free. And licensing commercial use is a valid method for OA publishers to make money, surely (something they are struggling to do)? Of course, there are many different OA models with very varied licensing.
3) So I absolutely agree with improving public engagement, but increasingly methods sections are small print, very small word limit and stuck at the end of the paper. This utterly and fundamentally breaks the most important part of the scientific literature - reproducibility. And that is at crisis level now (ok hyperbole, but have you ever replicated something and not discovered that half the essential information is missing?). Similarly poor but simple/comprehensible papers will be higher rated than superior but complex papers.
We are asking the core literature to server two masters with very different needs, and my instinct is that this is ultimately not tenable. Review papers are far more useful to the public in general, since unless you're getting your hands dirty with the data, and learning it's foibles, then it's difficult to evaluate focussed research. This is especially true when dealing with sequence databases (assumptions of sequence accuracy, over/under representation etc), as I'm sure you appreciate.
For those interested, I'm a molecular biologist at Harvard (REF.1) and am working to encourage people to give it a try. If you might spread the word or would be interested in hearing more I'd love to hear your thoughts at tim@onarbor.com.