A new decision - which will greatly undermine the status of the prestigious scientific journals - raises again for discussion a fundamental question: to whom does scientific knowledge belong
Yanai Ofran, Haaretz, Walla News
In the mail room of the Department of Biochemistry at Columbia University in New York, several white postcards are received every day. "Dear Dr. R., please send me a copy of your article published in July 2003 in the journal 'Journal of Molecular Biology'. Sincerely, Professor C, National Academy of Sciences, Bulgaria," one of them read in standard wording. It is evident that the sender, probably a senior Bulgarian scientist, sends many such postcards every month. The text is printed on cheap Bristol and only the addressee's name and the bibliographic details of the article are scribbled each time in a sloppy hand.
A casual rummage through the mail room one morning early last month turned up similar postcards from India, Mexico, Thailand, Brazil, and also a tattered brown envelope sent from a Pakistani research institute containing a similar request: "Dear Professor Dr. N., please send us a copy of your article published in the journal Nature' in December 1999". Similar postcards sometimes also come from small research institutes in rural cities in Europe and the USA.
Any student at the major universities in the US, Europe or Israel can find these articles in the library and even on the websites of the journals. But the senders of the postcards are students, scientists and doctors, who, or the institution to which they belong, cannot afford the outrageous subscription fees of the scientific journals. When they are looking for information for research, for studies, and even to provide appropriate medical treatment to a patient whose problem is rare, they turn to a website operated by the National Institutes of Health in the US Department of Health. There they can scan the titles and abstracts of biomedical articles published from the XNUMXs to the present day. But copyright laws prevent distribution of the full article. To read the article in its entirety, seekers should drop their plea before the writer. He will not always be able to pull out a printout from the drawer or the printer, put it in an envelope, seal it and send it. Sometimes, even when the author is right to help, the rules of the journal prohibit him from distributing the article. And even in the best-case scenario, if the printout eventually goes ahead, weeks or months may pass from the moment the request is sent until the printout arrives. In the meantime, studies, research or medical treatment are at a standstill.
Now the US Department of Health plans to end the plight of low-income researchers by requiring government-funded scientists to waive their copyrights and deposit an electronic copy of each paper on the National Institutes' website. The scientists, for the most part, are actually happy about the initiative; They transfer the rights to the scientific journals anyway. But the plan of Ministry of Health officials will not go down without a fight. Even a bitter fight. Expensive lobbyists serving all sides in this battle are already raiding Capitol Hill and trying to interest the media in the expected catastrophe if their opinion is not accepted.
An article every three minutes
For many decades, scientific journals have been the main, almost the only, means of communication in the scientific world. No discovery, finding or new drug exists in the eyes of the scientific community until it has been published in a scientific journal. Before publication, the editor will send the manuscript to two or three scientists, so that they will evaluate its importance and ask the author for clarifications and corrections. Only if these judges are convinced of the quality and value of the study, will it be published.
The increase in research budgets, and the decrease in printing and distribution costs, enabled the establishment of thousands of new scientific journals and their number currently reaches tens of thousands. The number of articles published in them is unfathomable. In the field of genetics, for example, a new article is published every three minutes. But the competition and falling costs did not lead to a drop in subscription prices for the journals, and they continue to rise.
An annual subscription to the journal "Research Brain", for example, costs $21,269. A researcher or library that wants to stay updated in the field of brain research alone needs subscriptions to several dozen such journals. Cornell University in New York calculated and found that since 1986 its spending on journals has increased by 150% but the number of journals to which the university subscribes has hardly changed. Where does all this money go and why do universities and researchers continue to pay?
The answer to the first question is simple: to the publishers. Several hundred publishing houses dominate the field. The scientists who write the articles receive prestige, publicity and promotion, but do not receive payment for the article. So are the judges who decide whether the article is worthy of publication. For the most part these are university scientists doing it as good citizens of the scientific community. Elsevier, one of the largest Dutch publishers in the field, recorded an operating profit of 2003% in 34. Still, according to Cornell University, Elsevier continues to raise the subscription price of its journals by 10% and sometimes 20% each year. Ari Yunhian, director of the science and technology division at Elsevier, claims that after deducting taxes and depreciation, the publisher's profit amounts to 17%. Still a nice coupe.
"This is the biggest scam of all time," exaggerates Nobel laureate Richard Roberts. He organized a group of Nobel laureates, including James Watson, the decipherer of the structure of DNA who was in his prime a father figure, or grandfather, of the world of American science, and Harold Vermus, who previously headed the National Institutes of Health. In a petition to Congress and the Ministry of Health, they wrote: "As scientists and also as taxpayers, we oppose obstacles that hinder, delay or block the dissemination of scientific knowledge produced with government funding." The National Institutes of Health in the US Department of Health are the largest financiers of scientific research in the world and every year they pour almost 30 billion dollars to researchers in America and abroad. The Nobel laureates proposed that the US Department of Health oblige the researchers who feed off the public success to transfer their findings to the public free of charge. "In this rule", they wrote, "also our own research". The National Institutes of Health were enthusiastic and a few weeks ago published an announcement about the plan, which will of course break the hearts of the publishers.
The Ministry of Health's initiative is attacked by the publishers from the soft underbelly of the American ethos: it is an infringement on the freedom of initiative and occupation. Their business is conducted in an open and strictly capitalist manner, according to the laws of supply, competition and demand. In Congress, the legal community and the American public these claims fall on attentive ears.
Each field and its journal
But why do the customers - universities, research institutes and scientists, mostly powerful and influential bodies - bow their heads and pay? And why in many cases do they claim that it is the current system that protects low-income scientists, like Prof. G. the Bulgarian? Here the answer is more complicated and can perhaps explain why this initiative may die out.
Tens of thousands of scientists write many thousands of articles each month. No scientist is able to follow all this information and sort out the chaff from the bar - the good studies from the bad or what is relevant to his research from the huge pile of studies that do not interest him. The journals perform this task effectively. First of all, they are divided into sub-topics and areas of interest. Each journal maintains a community around it, sometimes very small, of people who devote their research to the very limited subject that the journal deals with. Almost every gland in the human body, every research method and every type of particle has its own journal. The important task of sorting the manuscripts and editing them costs money. So is the distribution and printing. The proposal of the National Health Institutes is to establish public journals and roll this cost onto the researcher's research budgets. For this purpose, new journals have already been established, which charge the authors about 1,500 dollars for each article they publish. Many researchers in poor countries or small research institutes will find it difficult to raise this amount.
The role of journals in the academic world goes far beyond disseminating information. Equally important is the role they play in the ranking of articles and researchers. The prestige and importance of any scientific finding is largely determined by the journal in which it is published. The status of a scientist is mainly determined by the prestige of the journals that accept his articles. There are two or three journals in which the publication of one article is enough to win a researcher a position at a reputed university, tenure or promotion. The scientists will continue to try to publish their articles in these journals, and the journals will continue to accept out of thousands of manuscripts only the best. No library will be able to give up a subscription to the journals that publish the revolutionary, dramatic and best research, no matter how much it costs.
The National Institutes of Health are now trying to concoct a compromise. They withdrew from the demand for immediate free access to every article and content themselves with the demand that within six months from the date of publication the article be deposited on their website. The hawkish parties are now evaluating the new policy and it is not yet clear what their position will be.
Beyond the debate about money and accessibility, at the root of this polemic is the question of who is the rightful owner of knowledge. The existing system gives the copyright to those who print the findings and market them. The position of the national institutes, supported by the group of Nobel laureates, is that the legal ownership belongs to those who finance the research. Interestingly, neither side of the debate suggests that the rightful owner of scientific knowledge should be the scientist-discoverer.
Jurists specializing in intellectual property estimate that, in view of the huge sums of money at stake, eventually the issue will be brought to court and it will be required to decide on it.
Courtesy of news and voila!
