After more than 10 years of the official kickoff of the open access movement, I wonder why we want scientific literature to be open, why it is so necessary.
Stevan Harnard, one of the most influential supporters of the open access movement, in his article The optimal and inevitable outcome for research in the online age[1] says that “open access (OA) means free, online, worldwide access to research” and he emphasises that “OA’s purpose is to make research accessible to all its would-be users worldwide, not just to those whose institutions can afford subscription access to the journal in which it was published”.
The open access movement started officially with the Budapest Open Access Initiative in 2002, as the first initiative to use the term “open access” for this purpose. BOAI brought together other projects with the same goal that had begun in the mid 1990’s: to promote open access to scholarly journal literature.
As librarians, especially those who work in health libraries, we must be clear about our mission in this movement, and its two well-known complementary strategies, self-archiving and publishing in open access journals. We have to teach our users the benefits of open access publishing, how to find scientific open access journals and assess their quality. We also have to maintain institutional repositories and promote among authors the self-archiving of their research papers.[2] y [3]
The spread of the idea of openness and the awareness that authors and reviewers are those who provide the content of scientific publications has brought into question many aspects of traditional scholarly publishing. The business model of scientific journals, the peer review process, the publication bias in clinical trials or the impact factor, all these are affected; in short, the foundations of scholarly communication are being shaken.
As Maria Kowalckzuk comments in her post Are journals ready to abolish peer review?[4] “John Bohannon’s sting published in Science, the rise in retractions and disillusionment with the top journals have sparked much discussion on whether the peer review system is actually broken”. I would add that the demand for transparency surrounding clinical trials and the publishing of negative results have an important part in this too. Different initiatives have arisen related to this: for open (non anonymous) peer review, that is especially critical and important for clinical trials[5], we have examples as eLife, F1000 Prime, or Rubriq; for manuscript transfers or portable peer review we may cite NPRC Neuroscience Peer Research Consortium, Peerage of Science,Axios Review; and for post publication peer review, F1000 Research or PubMed Commons.
With regard to research impact and visibility, impact factor has long been questioned because what was created as a measurement tool to evaluate the scientific journals of a single academic discipline and compare them, has been extended to evaluate the papers therein[6]. For that reason new metrics are appearing based on the article, not the journal, as a unit.
Researchers, like Randy Schekman, one of the three 2013 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, have become editors and have taken the reins and created open access journals as eLife. These journals aim to provide an alternative to those corrupt or criticized aspects that must be changed in scientific publishing.
In all this changing landscape, I wonder why we want scientific literature to be open, why it is so necessary. Perhaps part of the reason lies in what John Willinsky reminded us, in his enjoyable keynote What Is It About the Intellectual Properties of Learning[7] given in Warsaw in March. In it, he brought back to the audience the British Statute of Anne from 1710, considered as the first copyright act provided in the world. He highlights two aspects present in the act:
An Act for the Encouragement of Learning. 1710
Firstly, this act recognized that authors, as creators of works of culture, had certain rights “over printers, booksellers and other persons” who took the liberty of printing, reprinting and publishing the books or papers made by them without their consent. To encourage and protect those authors, the act granted them an exclusive license for fourteen years to copy that work, by virtue of having composed it and created a public good. Secondly, nine copies of each book had to be delivered before its publication for the use of the Royal Library, the Libraries of the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge, the Libraries of the four Universities in Scotland, the Library of Sion College in London and the Library of the Faculty of Advocates at Edinburgh respectively[8]. The point is that they had to place the copies in the Commons of the library where people could access to this knowledge because learning had to be protected.
So John Willinsky reminds us that the idea of intellectual property is rooted in the encouragement of learning, precisely as this act is entitled: “an Act for the Encouragement of Learning, by Vesting the Copies of Printed Books in the Authors or Purchases of Such Copies, during the Times therein mentioned”. He states that Universities are involved in the production of learning and are at the very center of copyright, although he insists this distinction is being lost and we need to bring it back. For this reason he concludes: “We are not fighting for open access in some kind of technical device or technical strategy, we are fighting for a basic principle that was at the very foundation of intellectual property: for the encouragement of learning.”[9]
But there is one step more. Many people know Jack Andraka’s story: the 15-year-old teenager who developed an early detection test for pancreatic cancer diagnostic using inexpensive strips of filter paper, carbon nanotubes and antibodies sensitive to mesothelin. In a Ted Talk[10], he tells us his experience after a close family friend’s death from pancreatic cancer when he was 13 and he went online to find out about this disease. He learnt that over 85% of all pancreatic cancer was diagnosed late when the chance of survival was extremely low because the existing detection test was very expensive and grossly inaccurate. He looked on Google and Wikipedia and found an article that listed a database of over 8,000 different proteins that are found when you have pancreatic cancer: A Compendium of Potential Biomarkers of Pancreatic Cancer, published by PloS One. So he decided to find out which one could serve as a biomarker for this type of cancer. And he found it: mesothelin. In an interview with Dr. Francis Collins, Director of the National Institutes of Health[11] he says “I hit a lot of paywalls, like you have to pay $40 per article, and unfortunately I couldn’t shell out a lot of that”, especially when many of them turned out to be useless when he read them. But in his Ted Talk, he finishes by saying: “…through the Internet anything is possible. Theories can be shared, and you don’t have to be a professor with multiple degrees to have your ideas valued. It’s a neutral space, where what you look like, age or gender, it doesn’t matter. It’s just your ideas that count…You could be changing the world. So if a 15-year-old who didn’t even know what a pancreas was could find a new way to detect pancreatic cancer, just imagine what you could do.”
Open Access means not only free, unrestricted and indiscriminatory access for the encouragement of learning, but also sharing knowledge to generate new knowledge, to advance and enrich research and to reach open science.
Many authoritative voices speak about the inevitability of open access, but in the field of Health Sciences, open access is not only inevitable, but also vital, because people´s health and lives are at stake.
[1] Harnard S. The optimal and inevitable outcome for research in the online age. CILIP UPDATE, Sept 2012. p 46-8 [cited 2014 Jun 6]. Available from http://eprints.soton.ac.uk/342580/.
[2] What you can do: Budapest Open Access Initiative [Internet]. Budapest: 2002 Feb 14 [cited 2014 Jun 8]. Available from: http://www.budapestopenaccessinitiative.org/help#libraries
[3] Bethesda Statement on Open Access Publishing [Internet]. 2003 Jun 20 [cited 2014 Jun 8]. Available from http://legacy.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/bethesda.htm#libraries
[4] Kowalckzuk M. Comments on: “Are journals ready to abolish peer review?” 2014 Apr 11 [cited 2014 Jun 8]. In: Biomed Central Blog [Internet]. Available from: http://blogs.biomedcentral.com/bmcblog/2014/04/11/are-journals-ready-to-abolish-peer-review-2/
[5] Harriman S. A case for open peer review for clinical trials. 2014 Jun 4 [cited 2014 Jun 5]. In: Biomed Central Blog [Internet]. Available from: http://blogs.biomedcentral.com/bmcblog/2014/06/04/a-case-for-open-peer-review-for-clinical-trials/
[6] Wikipedia contributors. Impact Factor [Internet]. Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia; [updated 2014 jun 1; cited 2014 jun 8]. Available from: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impact_factor#Validity_as_a_measure_of_importance
[7]Willinsky J. What Is It About the Intellectual Properties of Learning?[Video]. In Opening Science to Meet Future Challenges [Internet]; 2014 March 11, Varsaw [cited 2014 Apr 22]. Available from: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8za8R–9WD8
[8] http://www.copyrighthistory.com/anne5.html
[9] See supra note 7
[10] Andraka J. Jack Andraka: A promising test for pancreatic cancer … from a teenager . In: Ted Talk [Internet]. 2013 feb; [cited 2014 may 1]. Available from: http://www.ted.com/talks/jack_andraka_a_promising_test_for_pancreatic_cancer_from_a_teenager
[11]The Right To Research Coalition [Blog on the Internet]. Open Access Empowers 16-Year-Old Jack Andraka to Create Breakthrough Cancer Diagnostic. 2013 jun 11; [cited 2014 may 1]. Available from:http://www.righttoresearch.org/blog/open-access-empowers-16-year-old-to-create-breakth.shtml
Abierto hasta el amanecer 