If open access —a movement gaining momentum in academic publishing that proposes journal articles be made universally available online to all readers for free—becomes reality, the results could dramatically reshape the activities of all scholarly publishers, including the IEEE.

Three events last year rocketed open access from the realm of the hypothetical to that of a hard-nosed practical concern. In July the British House of Commons published a 114-page examination of academic publishing, which took to task well-known publishers (though not the IEEE) for charging libraries annual subscription rates of up to US $30 000 for a single journal. The Commons recommended that “all [United Kingdom] higher education institutions establish institutional repositories in which their published output can be stored and from which it can be read, free of charge, online.”

In November Google launched www.scholar.google.com, a search engine that makes it easier to find academic publications in higher-education repositories as well as in researchers’ private Web sites. And finally, in December, U.S. President George W. Bush signed into law an appropriations bill for the National Institutes of Health (NIH) that included the request that authors deposit a digital copy of the final version of a peer-reviewed journal article resulting from NIH-sponsored research into the NIH’s public depository, PubMed Central. These documents would be freely available no more than six months after the article is published in a paid-subscription journal. (Anyone wanting the information immediately would still have to pay for a journal subscription.) This request affects the IEEE, whose biomedical technology journals publish some NIH-sponsored research.

“Good or bad, open access is happening,” declares John Vig, IEEE’s 2005 Vice President of Technical Activities and the past chair of the Technical Activities Board’s Strategic Planning and Review Committee. “It’s not a matter of ‘if,’ but ‘when.’”

Accordingly, the IEEE’s Publication Services and Products Board (PSPB) is undertaking a strategic analysis of the publishing options open to the organization. Vig urges the IEEE to experiment now, “when we have the luxury of income from subscriptions and can afford to,” rather than being forced into it from the outside by congressional legislation or other events.

Michael Lightner, IEEE’s 2004 Vice President of Publication Services and Products and an electrical engineering professor at the University of Colorado in Boulder, says open access is a revolutionary principle. He likens the movement to the once-revolutionary early 19th-century movements for free public libraries (in contrast to private mercantile libraries, which made books available only to users who paid an annual membership fee). But public libraries are not free, Lightner points out. Today, public libraries are financed by property taxes or other levies exacted from all local residents, regardless of whether they or their children use the facilities.

He explains that open access is a philosophical movement with two premises. “One premise is that the information environment of the Internet is leading people to expect to get all information online for free,” he says. “The other premise—so far limited to scholarly publications—is that since much of scientific, technical, and medical research is funded by taxpayers’ dollars, why should taxpayers have to pay a second time to access the results?”       

WHO PAYS? And therein lies the rub for the IEEE—indeed, for any professional organization contemplating moving from subscription journals to free open access. Producing a journal—sending manuscripts out for peer review, editing them, formatting text and artwork, and proofreading them—costs time and money. So does maintaining enormous online servers to provide access. Many publishers ask, “How can you pay for operating expenses if you give away the journal for free?” Clearly, the business model for any open-access publication is critical.

“Open access sounds like an altruistic social movement, but it’s really an alternative business model,” says Anthony Durniak, staff executive for IEEE Publications, the area that oversees much of the organization’s publishing activities. “The discussions among advocates of various models become emotional, and overlook facts.”

For example, the single most widely advocated model to make open access financially viable calls for shifting the burden of paying from the subscriber to the author, who would pay a fee to cover editorial costs—which could range from $1000 to $3000 per article. This author-pays plan—discussed at length in the House of Commons report—is based on the assumption that scientific authors supported by public funds or philanthropic grants can simply write the additional costs of publication into their grant applications. But while an author-pays model might cover current costs of getting an article into print today, in the absence of subscription income the amount might be insufficient to cover all the expenses of maintaining that article online in perpetuity, including migration to future digital platforms.

Durniak also fears that an author-pays model could jeopardize editorial quality controls by creating a fundamental conflict of interest. The current subscriber-pays model encourages a publisher to be circumspect about which articles it accepts or rejects to control operating costs, he explains. “But an author-pays model could motivate a publisher to accept more articles [than it otherwise might] because it would mean more income from authors, thereby tempting a publisher into becoming a ‘vanity press,’ ” he says.

While the physical and medical sciences are largely supported through government (and thus taxpayer) funding, the humanities and social sciences are not, so they might be faced with paying journal fees out of their own pockets. Indeed, Lightner points out that individual consulting engineers might be equally hard-pressed to raise the necessary fees. He worries that publishing could become restricted to those who could afford to pay, rather than being open to all excellent ideas.

BUILT-IN DISADVANTAGE Lightner, 2005 IEEE President-Elect, notes that the author-pays precedent would place at a disadvantage IEEE authors from several countries and regions—such as China, India, Russia, and Central and South America—that encompass a growing portion of IEEE membership. “At typical income levels in many of these countries, these members work hard just to pay their IEEE dues. Asking them to pay to put papers in IEEE journals would effectively bar them from publishing their research,” Lightner says.

Moreover, Lightner notes that several large research universities have examined the potential cost of faculty publishing under an author-pays model and have concluded that, for them, open access would not be the most cost-effective publishing solution. He says the schools discovered they would pay more in author fees than it would cost to continue to pay to subscribe to journals from publishers, even at current high prices. That’s not only because of the large number of faculty members  publishing; it is also because of the additional overhead incurred in having to process paperwork, including individual purchase orders and cutting checks to pay the publishing fees.

In short, Lightner concludes, “the rhetoric around open access does not acknowledge the complexity of the world of publishing.”

There is still much to be discussed. All the uncertainties about business models and their potential effects on authors and readers are “why the PSPB is carefully considering a number of options before taking a position on open access,” Durniak concludes.

WHO ARCHIVES?
With open access to e-articles stored as electronic bits and bytes in cyberspace rather than in paper journals on shelves, “the traditional role of libraries will diminish,” predicts John Vig, IEEE’s 2005 Vice President of Technical Activities. He cites the example of his own employer—the U.S. Army Communications Research and Development Center—disbanding its library a few years ago at Fort Monmouth, N.J. Yet requirements for keeping e-articles always accessible means “archiving will continue to be an important function,” says Mary Jane Miller, IEEE corporate librarian. “ ‘Open access’ has become almost a magical term, as if articles will become available by themselves.”

In reality, she points out, an entire information technology infrastructure is needed for storing and searching materials, including "aggressive plans for migrating the archived information to the latest platform so that access in perpetuity is assured. It's not clear whether libraries will continue to archive or if publishers or yet another entity will assume archiving responsibility."

FOR MORE INFORMATION
The full report of the House of Commons’ Science and Technology Committee, “Scientific Publications: Free for All? Tenth Report of Session 2003–04,” is available at http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200304/cmselect/cmsctech/399//399.pdf

The National Institutes of Health’s position on open access can be found at http://www.nih.gov/about/publicaccess

The Public Library of Science’s peer-reviewed open-access journals on biology and medicine can be accessed from http://www.plos.org