Open access - the view from a
research funder: Robert Kiley
A report on the CILIP in London
meeting on Tuesday 10 July 2007.
Robert Kiley, Head of E-strategy at
the Wellcome Library laid out the Wellcome Trust’s agenda on Open Access. This
built very nicely on the issues raise by Ruth Rikowski in her presentation on global trade
agreements and intellectual property rights on 13 Feb 2007.
The Wellcome Trust (WT), which is
the second largest medical charity in the world, invests some £500 million in
medical research every year, the results of which are published in commercial
medical journals. The increasing costs associated with scholarly journal
publishing, and the high inflation rates of journal prices have restricted
access both to the public and to the academic community, as have increasingly
stringent applications of the law of intellectual property. WT found that even where researchers had
access to well-funded library services between 10% and 20% of WT funded research
papers were inaccessible. Research by the British Medical Council showed that
while 90% of NHS funded research is available online in full text, only 30% is
immediately available to the public and only 40% available to NHS staff. Access
to underlying data for combination and re-analysis between different research
projects (“mashup” in Web 2.0-speak) is also of increasing importance as
computer programs are developed to process the information and create new
knowledge. One instance of this is the creation of a malaria atlas map from the
various written reports on the prevalence of malaria mediated by the mapping of
“Google Earth”. Such developments “derivative works” are not possible under
what have been standard contracts of publication entered into by researchers.
In a co-operative scheme WT
together with seven other funders of medical research set up UK PubMed Central (UKPMC) in January 2007. This aims to
provide “a stable, permanent and free-to-access online digital archive of
full-text, peer-reviewed research publications and access to the underlying
datasets”. The eight organisations between them fund some 90% of biomedical
research that is funded in the UK. UKPMC is based on, and mirrors the content
of PubMed Central (PMC) - the US
National Institutes of Health (NIH) free digital archive of biomedical and life
sciences journal literature, which was founded in Feb 2000.
The WT policy has been to
write into grant agreements the obligation to deposit the research papers and
the underlying data with UKPMC. This may be achieved either by publishing in a
journal that has a policy to deposit papers (often for a fee) or else by the
researcher archiving the final version of the report within six months. This
would include any revisions that were made as a result of the peer review
process undertaken as part of the commercial publication. The published article
with all its apparatus of review and attribution remains the primary building
block of knowledge creation.
There has been a movement in the
research community away from the property based marketing of intellectual
rights towards a licensing framework. Art galleries, museums and image
libraries are all taking this route. The financial implications where medical
research is concerned obviously make this complete revision of the business model
a scary one for major scientific publishers. Nevertheless some 59% of
biomedical publishers have complied with WT requirements on open access, 15%
are in active discussion and while only 10% are non-compliant 16% have no
policy at present. This represents fairly fast development in the course of six
months. There are some high profile non-compliant publishers, and they maintain
their power by their prestige within the medical profession. While it would be
possible for WT to enter the field of journal publishing in competition the
preferred route is by commercial negotiation with the journal publishers, The
publishers still provide the services of peer review and of distribution in
print form for which they expect a financial return.
While there may be dissatisfaction
with way that capitalism organises and exploits knowledge, it does not need a
very long memory to recall the results, in tangible goods rather than knowledge
and ideas, of the planned and command economies that were so popular in the
1960s. These were equally as susceptible to grotesque distortion of the supply
of everyday necessities as the capitalist system. It really does seem that the
safest route is that of a healthy tension between both systems of production.
The Wellcome Trust and its partners
have emerged as major players in the promotion of open access to medical
information and its re-use. Their strategy has included the establishment
UKPMC, and the introduction of contractual constraints in the disposition of
Trust funded research grants. The future for the freer exploitation of medical
information and the creation of medical knowledge must be brighter for these
developments.
