Physicists Set Plan in Motion to Change Publishing System
In what some are calling a peaceful revolution, researchers have mounted a takeover of high-energy-physics publishing. One signature at a time, national research agencies and university libraries have pledged to support a radical new system that would replace expensive subscriptions to leading journals with membership in a nonprofit group. The new organization would then dole out money to journal publishers, while pushing them to distribute all articles free online and to keep their prices in check.
The key: By teaming up, the libraries, which pay the bills, and the researchers, who provide the articles, will exert unprecedented leverage. The strategy might also convince journal editors — who have been reluctant to give away all of their content for fear of losing money — that libraries will continue to pay them even in an open-access system.
The group is called Scoap³, the Sponsoring Consortium for Open Access Publishing in Particle Physics. Since the project first announced its plan, in 2007, some of the world's leading institutions have expressed willingness to participate and pledged millions of dollars in support if the project comes together.
"For the first time in centuries, researchers are getting back control of the process of scholarly communication," says Salvatore Mele, a project leader for open-access efforts at CERN, the European particle-physics laboratory, who is one of the leaders of the group. He and others say they recently reached the halfway point in their pledge drive, and they hope to be up and running in another year. But while European institutions were quick to jump in, building support in the United States is taking longer than they initially hoped.
Under Pressure
Rising journal prices and falling library budgets have long pushed scholarly publishing toward a breaking point. The souring economy could lead more libraries to cancel more journal subscriptions, cutting researchers at those colleges off from published information. Fans of making journal articles free online say that a sustainable model for open-access publishing is key to keeping scholarly communication flowing.
So the time may be right for a grand reshaping of academic publishing, and leaders in physics hope that if their experiment works, other disciplines will follow suit.
Here's the pitch. Libraries would stop paying for subscriptions to journals in high-energy physics. Instead, each library or government agency would pay a set amount every year to the new nonprofit group. Each journal publisher would then apply for a portion of that money, submitting a bid spelling out how much it would cost them to review, edit, and publish their articles that year (building in some profit as well). To win a bid, the journals would commit to publishing their articles free online for anyone to see.
The amount that each library pays would be determined by the group, based on a formula that took into account how many of each institution's researchers published in the journals. Leaders of the project estimate that it would take about $14-million a year to support all the journals in the research area.
Project leaders hope the same familiar journals would continue to appear, and with the same number of articles. But the libraries, by teaming up, would gain unprecedented power in influencing prices and dictating how articles are distributed.
Reluctant Publishers
So far the journal publishers say they are willing to consider such a model, but they are hardly enthusiastic. "We must show some good will," said Christian Caron, an executive editor at the publishing conglomerate Springer Science+Business Media, which oversees a major high-energy-physics journal. "We pledge that we will sit down at the table for negotiations." He described his attitude toward the project as "a very cautious 'Let's see and discuss it.'"
Mr. Caron argued that Springer's journals already allow authors to publish their articles in an open-access format if the scientist pays a fee, and he defended the company's subscription prices. But he said everyone was looking for a business model that would hold up over the long run.
Several factors make high-energy physics an ideal field for this experiment. For one thing, it is a relatively small and tight-knit research area, where almost all major papers appear in just six journals. And the scientists are accustomed to teaming up on big projects and sharing facilities, like the Large Hadron Collider, the $10-billion atom smasher that recently opened at CERN.
High-energy physicists also boast a history of innovation in scholarly communications. It was a researcher at CERN, Tim Berners-Lee, who invented the World Wide Web back in the 1990s as a way for colleagues to collaborate. (The first Web server sits enshrined under Plexiglas at CERN, just down the hall from Mr. Mele's office.)
And for years, physics researchers have posted rough drafts of their papers in digital archives to quickly share their findings with colleagues. In that sense, they were pioneers of open access.
The popularity of those free drafts, called preprints, raises the question of whether the scientists need old-fashioned journals at all. An estimated 90 percent of findings in high-energy physics appear in digital preprint repositories like arXiv, a major international collection hosted by Cornell University. Some journals in the field even allow authors to post their final, edited papers in the archives free of charge.
But Mr. Mele says journals still play a crucial role in the professional life of scientists, even though readership has declined. "We do not buy journals to read them, we buy journals to support them," he said. "They do something crucial, which is peer review."
Without journals, he asks, how would colleges evaluate the work of scientists to know whom to hire or whom to promote? And how would other scientists know which of the thousands of preprints contain the most important findings?
"What we are really paying for here is for a service of peer review," he said.
Shuttle Diplomacy
Mr. Mele has now become a kind of international traveling salesman for the project, shuttling from library to library and from publisher to publisher. "I've lost count of how many countries I've visited this year," he said.
The project quickly gained a critical mass in Europe, where in many countries Mr. Mele needed only to convince a single government agency or consortium that wields broad purchasing power. So far more than 19 countries have pledged to participate, including Belgium, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Israel, Italy, Norway, Sweden, Switzerland, and Turkey, according to project leaders.
Colleges in the United States have been a tougher sell. Mr. Mele held a meeting at the University of California at Berkeley last February to pitch the plan to college librarians from around the country.
The librarians praised the goals of the project, but some asked whether it was sustainable. After all, if the journals make their contents free online, why should college libraries use their shrinking resources to pay for them?
Some librarians at public institutions say they cannot participate even if they want to. "Most states require that public funds allocated for purchasing have to be used to actually purchase something," said Dennis Dillon, associate director for research services at the University of Texas at Austin. That is certainly the case in Texas, he said. "They can't be used to pay for something that everyone already has for free."
Some journal editors are also anxious about whether the project will work.
"We are gravely concerned about the difficulty of reassembling our subscription model were Scoap³ to fail," said Gene D. Sprouse, editor in chief at the American Physical Society, in a written statement. The society publishes one of the major journals in the field, Physical Review D. "The current subscription-based funding model, though far from perfect, has provided adequate and stable funding, in harmony with the arXiv," he said, referring to the popular preprint database.
Paul Ginsparg, a physics professor at Cornell who started arXiv, also expressed skepticism about the new project's viability, echoing concerns about the project's financial model.
He said he hoped that open-access options would become so compelling — and incorporate new features that are so useful — that researchers would only want to publish their papers in journals that choose to be completely open. "Such systems are currently under construction," Mr. Ginsparg said, "but some of my colleagues argue that it's useful to have additional mechanisms to force the materials out there — to hasten the transition to 21st-century scholarly-communications infrastructure."
Despite such skepticism, more than 30 colleges and several library consortia in the United States have pledged to participate.
"We have to find better ways to use the funds from libraries," said Kimberly Douglas, head librarian at the California Institute of Technology, one of the first to sign on. How likely does Ms. Douglas think the project is to succeed? "We'll never know unless we try," she said.
Peter Suber, a research professor of philosophy at Earlham College and a longtime promoter of open access to scholarly publications, praised the project for involving publishers in the discussions and for searching for a compromise.
He said CERN holds a dominant position in the high-energy-physics field that is unusual in academe. "If any institution can make it work, it's CERN," he said. "It really got the stakeholders together, and it got them to agree that this is worth a try."
Even so, the project has already proved more unwieldy than organizers hoped.
"It's taking a good bit of time just to line up the necessary expressions of interest," said Tom Sanville, executive director of OhioLINK, which has pledged support for the project.
In fact, organizers had hoped to have reached their pledge goal by now, but they say they are still months away.
Fans of the project, especially those in Europe, say that Scoap³ or something like it is coming.
"I call it the logical next step, to move beyond the repository and subscription model scheme," said Ralf Schimmer, head of scientific-information provision at the Max Planck Digital Library, in Germany. "Open access is an inevitable, unstoppable, and irreversible development."
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Section: The Faculty
Volume 55, Issue 21, Page A1
