Today at the European Geosciences Union General Assembly in Vienna, the EGU media and communications office hosted a debate called “Open Science and the Future of Publishing.” Not being well versed in the issue, I figured this was an excellent opportunity to get up to speed. Perhaps I wasn’t the only one, as the room was filled to capacity (150-ish?) and then some.
Moderated by Edvard Glücksman, science communications postdoctoral fellow from EGU Headquarters, the six-member panel included representatives from six publishing organizations: Elsevier, Springer, PLoS One, Oxford University Press, Copernicus, and Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association. They provided opening remarks from their various perspectives, mainly revolving around permanent and open access, quality control, and a sustainable business model, or models, as panelist Erik Merkel-Sobotta from Springer seemed to favor.
Merkel-Sobotta seemed to be the odd-man-out on the panel, admitting that Springer’s original position on open access was neutral, but has since swung to the favorable side. He refused to answer a question about “profit levels” but instead offered up that “surpluses” gained by the non-profits are the same as profits but “it just sounds nicer.” This elicited some subdued chuckling, but nobody refuted it. He then explained that while some profits go to shareholders and staff wages, a good portion of profits are directed toward investments in technology and infrastructure to support and improve the publishing services. There seemed to be a general acknowledgement of this need across the board. Panel members also noted that profits or surpluses were partially used to cover the costs of science contributors who are not able to afford the costs of page charges.
The floor was then opened to audience questions. I’m not going to cover all that was discussed, as the entire session lasted an hour and half. I’m sure you’ll be able to Google a much more in-depth piece than this quick perspective. Suffice it to say the general gist of audience questions were related to the topics covered by the panelists in their introduction, particularly the business model and issue of costs. Transition to an open access model removes source of revenue to publishers as well as to scientific societies. To the wry amusement of both panel and audience, there were a few references to Harvard University Press being “too poor” to transition to open access publishing.
The last question from the audience challenged the panel to speculate about what scientific articles in the future might look like. The general consensus was that the form of scientific literature will change – to include not only open access, but also tighter links to data and perhaps multimedia information.
In the end, the panelists all seemed to agree that the need for open access has been clearly established and interest will only continue to grow. They also seemed to generally agree that quality control by online publishers will be determined by the market. This was succinctly summarized by Caroline Sutton of OASPA: “if they do a crappy job, don’t go back to them.”
—Lynne Roeder, ARM Public Information Officer
p.s. The American Meteorological Society recently announced a new policy called Open Choice, in which, in addition to paying the customary page and color charges, authors can pay a flat fee of $800 for the right to make the full contents of their paper freely available to all, subscribers and nonsubscribers alike, at the AMS Journals Online site immediately upon final publication of the typeset and edited version. For more details and background, refer to AMS Executive Director Keith Seitter’s column in the January 2012 edition of the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society, p. 99.
Oh, by the way – you need to be an AMS member/subscriber to access BAMS.