Scientific journals: Open access for all?

Last week, a bill was introduced in the US Senate that would require all scholarly publications that were conducted with federal research dollars to be made publically available on-line within six months of their publication. (See brief UPI article here).

The goal of the legislation seems noble, that it, to increase access to scientific literature. Those opposed to the measure, including many publishers, fear that it will hurt their bottom line.

Publishing in scientific journals is a odd affair for the unitiated. Unlike published a magazine article or book, one of the key things that distinguishes journals is that all papers need to be peer-reviewed. If your not familiar with this term, peer-review means that several (usually two but sometimes three) other scientists review your work and give it a thumbs-up or thumbs-down. Spefically, reviews can classify an article as "acceptable in present form," "acceptable with minor revision," "acceptable with major revisions," or unacceptable.

Our progress as scientists is measured in no small part by the quality and frequency of publications. This is not a free service - publication fees vary by journal but typically from several hundred dollars to several thousand per publication depending on the amount of color figures and the number of reprints desired. Journals, in turn, charge fees to their subscribers. Usually, there's one level of pricing for individual subscribers and another, near-astronomical price for libraries. I don't have any numbers in front of me, but I would verture a guess that a major fraction of the budget of any modern library is chewed up by journal subscription fees.

So one can understand the unease that publishers feel towards this legislation. Scientific journal publication, by the way, is dominated by a few large publishing houses (Elsevier, Blackwell, etc.) and also by various discipline organizations (for example, I subscribe to the Journal of Geophysical Research published by the American Geophysical Union). As a producer of scientific literature, I'm not sure how I feel about this legislation. On the one hand, it would be nice to get access to some of the articles in journals not in my institution's library. I don't directly stand to lose any revenue from the publishing process since I don't get any now. But it would suck greatly if publication fees went up considerably as a result. And I have little doubt that if publishers get squeezed in one area, they won't give a second thought about squeezing us.