Yesterday's lab meeting went fine. Afterwards I got a chance to flip through some journals that I've ignored for the past 2-3 weeks. Among other items, I came across a commentary by Mike Rossner and Ira Mellman, the two big guys at the Journal of Cell Biology. The commentary concerns the resolution of a year long fight between the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and Elsevier. To force the hand of the publishers and to support open access, HHMI instituted a new policy - they would evaluate prospective and continuing HHMI investigators based on published manuscripts that were freely accessible within 6 months of the publication date. In other words, HHMI evaluators could not consider any manuscript that was published in a journal like Cell, whose policy is to allow open access of manuscripts only after 12 months. Since Elsevier is one of the major publishing companies that has a >12month wait period, and since Elsevier owns Cell, one of the premiere journals, this action by HHMI was seen by some as a clash between these two institutions.
Recently HHMI and Elsevier came to a compromise, in that the former would pay the latter 1,500$ per manuscript that came from an HHMI investigator. In exchange, Elsevier would allow free access to these publications via PubMed Central within the 6 month waiting period. So is this a victory for open access? Not really.
Many think that HHMI has capitulated to Elsevier and also set a bad precedent. On the flip side, journals need some income source to be able to produce their ware. As a colleague once told me, publishers are like McDonalds, except that the beef is paid for by the tax payer and non-profits like HHMI. Publishers should earn some income for converting the beef to hamburgers, but they shouldn't charge the public and non-profits for the cost of the raw materials.
Below the fold is the editorial from the June 18th edition of JCB:
How the rich get richer
HHMI will bestow monetary rewards on a commercial publisher in return for the type of public access already provided by many nonprofit publishers.Mike Rossner and Ira Mellman
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The Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) has announced that it will pay the commercial publisher Elsevier $1,500 for each article by an HHMI investigator published in an Elsevier journal (1). This payment will allow public access to the article via PubMed Central six months after the publication date.1
Two problems with this deal immediately come to mind. First, there is a clear potential for conflict of interest when a publisher stands to benefit financially by publishing papers from a particular organization. Second, and even more seriously, this action by HHMI undermines the effort to persuade commercial publishers to make their content public after a short delay, by rewarding them for not doing so.
The HHMI-Elsevier deal coincides with an impending mandate to make publications resulting from HHMI-funded research available to the public after a six-month delay (2). To fulfill this mandate, HHMI had two options: (1) take a stand against commercial publishers by prohibiting the highly productive and influential HHMI-funding recipients from publishing in journals that do not release their content after six months, or (2) capitulate to the commercial publishers and pay them to release HHMI papers after six months. Choosing the former option had the potential to force the commercial publishers to reconsider their policies or risk losing prized content. HHMI chose the latter.
For many years The Rockefeller University Press and many other nonprofit publishers have released all of their content to the public after only six months, and have proven that such a policy does not reduce subscription revenues. We thus provide all authors with a free service for which HHMI will now pay Elsevier. Commercial publishers should need no financial incentive to provide this service to the scientific research community, on whom they rely for their content, their quality control, their subscribers, and for the patronage of their advertisers. Instead, Elsevier has accepted a deal that does a disservice to that community by increasing publication costs and thus further reducing the funds available for research.
HHMI has rewarded Elsevier for their steadfast refusal to release their content by further enhancing their already highly profitable business model.2 Although nonprofit publishers are motivated by the dissemination of knowledge rather than the acquisition of profits, we still require considerable sums to operate. If we can afford to release our content after six months without the benefit of HHMI's largess, then surely commercial publishers can do so as well. It is unfortunate that HHMI has forfeited its substantial bargaining power in a deal that represents a setback to the mission of public access.
Notes
1 For journals published by Cell Press, which is owned by Elsevier, the payment will be $1,000. Papers published in Cell Press journals are already released to the public after twelve months--Elsevier has convinced HHMI that they will lose this much revenue by releasing this content just six months before they normally would.2 Elsevier reported profits of US $925 million in 2006.
Ref:
Mike Rossner and Ira Mellman
How the rich get richer
JCB (07) 177:951 doi:10.1083/jcb.200705199
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Beef production in the US is heavily tax-payer subsidized, all the way from the growing of the feed and the leasing of the range land to the retail joints where the finished products are sold. Of course, perhaps that is not as it should be.
HHMI got off lightly. The Wellcome will pay Elsevier FIVE GRAND for each article published in Cell Press.
I'm disgusted that either of those agencies agreed to this (and they did so while Elsevier was still funding arms fairs).
THINK TWICE INSTEAD OF DOUBLE-PAYING FOR OPEN ACCESS
HHMI did not "sell out" to Elsevier. They (and the Wellcome Trust) just made a silly mistake -- and a mistake that no one at HHMI (or Wellcome) seems to be willing to note and re-think:
What HHMI should have done was to mandate that all HHMI fundees must deposit the final, accepted, peer-reviewed drafts ("postprints") of all their published articles in their own institution's Institutional Repository (IR) immediately upon acceptance for publication. Instead, they unthinkingly followed the (equally unthinking) "e-biomed" model, and mandated that it must be deposited directly in PubMed Central, a central, 3rd-party repository, within 6 months of publication.
The reason this is silly (and the reason it is equally silly to keep harping on HHMI's "selling out") is that all Elsevier journals, including Cell Press, are already "Green" on immediate Open Access self-archiving in the author's own IR: It is only 3rd-party archiving that they object to (as rival publication).
But there is no reason whatsoever to hold out (or pay) for direct deposit in a central repository: All IRs are OAI-compliant and interoperable. Hence any central repository can harvest their metadata (author, title, date, journal, etc.) and simply link it to the full-text in the author's own IR. (Oaister, Scirus, Scopus, Google, Google Scholar, etc. can of course also harvest and link for search and retrieval).
So in exchange for their completely unnecessary and arbitrary insistence on having the full-text deposited directly in PubMed Central within six months of publication, HHMI (and Wellcome, and other equally unthinking imitators) have agreed instead to pay arbitrary, inflated, and unnecessary "Gold" OA publication charges. That would in itself be fine, and simply a waste of money, if it did not set an extremely bad example for other research funders and institutions, who are also looking to mandate OA self-archiving, but do not have the spare change to pay for such extravagant and gratuitous expenses.
Below is Cell Press's Self-Archiving policy, ignored by HHMI, Wellcome and others. Read and weep:
Authors' rights (Cell Press):
"As an author you (or your employer or institution) may do the following:
"...Post a revised personal version of the final text (including illustrations and tables) of the article (to reflect changes made in the peer review and editing process) on your personal or your institutional website or server, with a link (through the relevant DOI) to the article as published, provided that such postings are not for commercial purposes..."
See also:
Elsevier Still Solidly on the Side of the Angels on Open Access
Double-Paying for Optional Gold OA Instead of Mandating Green OA While Subscriptions Are Still Paying for Publication: Trojan Folly
Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum
BK aned Stevan,
Your many links caused the spam filters to block your comments, I just de-spammed you.
Stevan,
As far as I understand, you can only post revised versions, (i.e. not the original) of your paper. If that includes a version of the manuscript where errors in the print edition have been corrected, or a version that is not formatted with the Cell font & page layout, I'm not sure - but reading their policy I'm guessing that it is the former.
Just as an aside, in the case of Nature Publishing Group the author retains the copyright to the material. This would allow the author to make the manuscript available on his or her own website. Perhaps HHMI and Welcome trust could have pushed for that.
"Selling out" or "paying ransom"?
Elseiver would only be like McDonalds if the restaurant charged cows an access fee for the privilege of getting slaughtered.