SNAP In Touch, Issue 45
January 23, 2004
SNAP In Touch
News and notes about association publishing brought to you by SNAP, the Society of National Association Publications.
“Free for All Publishing” Sparks a Free for All
By Peter Banks, Publisher, American Diabetes Association
Here’s a hot new publishing scheme. Get your authors to pay you $1500 to have an article published. Force them to surrender almost all their rights -- now and forever. Encourage Web sites worldwide to post the article or any adaptation they choose. And allow commercial companies to profit from the work -- with no compensation to you or to the author.
One more thing -- you, the publisher, will need to give up subscription sales. And since your content is no longer exclusive to you, but wandering the Internet like a lost child, you can pretty much kiss advertising income good-bye too.
Sound like a plan?
If you were thinking, “This can’t be for real,” amazingly, it is. What’s more, it’s the brainchild of some of the best minds in the country, at least in science and medicine. And the concept had fawning coverage from The Washington Post, not to mention a warm reception on Capitol Hill, where it has sparked legislation that would eviscerate some aspects of copyright law.
Welcome to scholarly publishing “open access” style, where what you thought you knew about the economics of publishing scholarly journals no longer applies.
Open access publishing emerged from a perfect-storm convergence of three parties: a group of eminent scientists, angry at scholarly publishers; a group of academic librarians, even angrier at the publishers; and the Internet, which finally gave all the angry, angry people a way to vent.
The scientists are Nobel Prize-winning geneticist Harold Varmus, former director of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and now CEO of Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center; Patrick Brown, a professor at Stanford University School of Medicine; and Michael Eisen, a biologist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. Together, the three scientists became frustrated in their research, as they attempted to access the latest journals online and repeatedly came up against the blockade of “Subscription required.” With the Internet able to make the latest research instantly available, they wondered, why should so much of it remain tantalizingly locked behind subscription access controls, rather than freely and immediately available to help scientists, doctors, and the public.
At the same time, librarians trying to manage journal collections were seething over journal price increases that had outstripped the consumer price index year after year. Data from the American Library Association show, for example, that average serials prices increased on average 9.5% per year between 1988 and 2003, vs. 3.1% for the CPI. The librarians’ patrons were demanding access to journals, but library budgets could not keep pace.
The stage was set for a “mad as hell and not going to take it anymore” moment. It came in 2000, when Varmus and his colleagues founded the Public Library of Science (PLoS), an organization dedicated to promoting open access to medical and scientific journals. At first, PLoS focused on trying to encourage publishers to make articles freely available online. Not surprisingly, publishers were about as eager to give away their bread-and-butter content as grocers were to hand out free bread and butter.
So Varmus and his colleagues took a different tack. Armed with a $9 million grant from the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, they set out to start their own journals, which would offer free access online and prove the viability of their ideas. In place of subscriptions, they would support the journal by levying a $1500 fee on authors of published papers. Authors weren’t required to transfer copyright to the journal—but were instead required to allow immediate posting of the article in an online repository and to allow anyone, commercial or nonprofit, to post the article in any format. (The first of these journals, PLoS Biology, debuted last October.)
But Varmus didn’t stop at journal publishing. With the political savvy of the Washington insider he had been at NIH, Varmus launched an end run around publishers, going straight to the general public with a tugging-at-the-heart-strings public relations campaign. You, the taxpayer, have already paid for life-saving medical research, the PLoS pitch went. Why, then, are greedy, profit-obsessed publishers keeping you from reading the study that could save your—or your child’s—life? (For advocates of open access, the greedy publisher most mentioned was Elsevier, who seemed to become the fourth arm of the axis of evil.)
The popular press gobbled up the story. In a front page article in The Washington Post, reporter Rick Weiss began his coverage of open access this way: “The family was poor, living on the Great Plains, and the child had a rare medical condition...” After their family doctor was unable to come up with an effective treatment, the family went to the Internet and found a treatment that worked. Writing that “such tales are increasingly common,” Weiss went on to cheer Varmus and his colleagues for the effort to “overthrow….a $9 billion publishing juggernaut” that put a “stranglehold on scientific literature.”
The PLoS media offensive also got traction in Congress. Rep. Martin O. Sabo (D-Minn.) introduced legislation that would ban copyright on journal articles describing federally funded research."It is wrong when a breast cancer patient cannot access federally funded research data paid for by her hard-earned taxes," he explained.
Where the open access movement stands today is hard to gauge. To some proponents, scholarly publishing has already arrived in the open access promised land, and all that remains is for pesky publishers who insist on selling subscriptions to get with the program. Writing in the January 3 British Medical Journal, editors Tony Delamothe and Richard Smith headily announce that the movement is now unstoppable, prefacing their editorial with Gladstone's famous provocation to the House of Commons, “You cannot fight against the future. Time is on our side.” (There is no small irony in the open access movement being so rabidly advanced by the editors of the British Medical Journal, a publication that derives a substantial proportion of its revenue from traditional subscriptions and has announced plans to begin charging for access to its Web site.)
But very few, if any, association publications have embraced the radical open access program of Varmus and his colleagues, believing there are too many unanswered questions to rush into an untested publishing model. For example, will authors (or their funding agencies) really pay $1500 to publish an article? If so, will $1500 really support the type of peer review association publishers are noted for, given that subscription income will disappear? And would providing free access actually help scientists, doctors, and the public as much as Varmus and his colleagues claim?
Most association scholarly publishers are taking a wait-and-see attitude, watching whether PLoS Biology survives, and whether its novel economics can be transplanted to other types of journals.
Already, though, some open access advocates are gunning for association publishers to change their ways. Decrying the supposedly high profits of scholarly journal publishers in general, Delamothe and his colleagues at the British Medical Journal recently took direct aim at associations. “‘Not for profit’ publishers have also been cashing in on this bonanza, becoming cash cows for the scientific societies that own them.”
Many in association publishing must be thinking: Some cash. Some cows.
For Additional Information
Brown P.O., Eisen M.B., and Varmus H.E. Why PLoS became a publisher. PLoS Biol 2003: 1 (October). (http://www.plosbiology.org/plosonline/?request=get-document&doi=10.1371%2Fjournal.pbio.0000036)
Delamothe, T., and Smith, R. Br. Med. J. Open access publishing takes off. 2004: 328,1-3 (3 January). (http://bmj.bmjjournals.com/cgi/content/full/328/7430/1)
Held, M.H. Proposed legislation supports an untested publishing model. J. Cell. Biol. 2003: 171-172. (http://www.jcb.org/cgi/content/full/162/2/171)
Weiss, R. A fight for free access to medical research. Washington Post August 5, 2003. Page 1. (http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A19104-2003Aug4)
EXCEL Judging Location Secured
Thank you to everyone who supplied us with suggestions for judging locations. We are pleased to announce that the American Bankers Association, located on Connecticut Avenue in Washington, DC, has generously volunteered to host the judging on Friday, March 26, 2004. If you would like to volunteer to be a judge send an email to Marilee Peterson at mpeterson@snaponline.org.
You can’t make the trip to Washington? We still need you. Several categories, including electronic publications, will be judged “virtually” in the comfort of your home or office. And yes, you can enter the competition and still be a judge! Contact Marilee today!
SNAP Dates to Remember
January 28, 2004 and February 4, 2004
Chicago Chapter Lunch/Munch & Learn—Join SNAP Chicago in downtown Chicago on January 28 or for an encore presentation in Northbrook on February 4. The discussion, Integrated Marketing: Solution or Minefield?, will explore how association communicators can evaluate their skills and adapt them to other facets of marketing and communications. For complete details and to register visit http://www.snaponline.org/public/calendar/
February 11, 2004
D.C. Chapter Lunch & Learn—Luncheon sponsored by Mercury Publishing Services. Registration information to be announced.
March 3, 2004
SNAP EXCEL Awards Entry Deadline! Submit your association’s best work to be judged in categories including editorial, graphics, advertising and marketing, and online publishing. Visit http://www.snaponline.org/public/articles/excel04cfe.pdf and download the Call for Entries now. Or call SNAP headquarters and request a copy be mailed to you—703.506.3285.
March 30 and April 22, 2004
Producing Effective Association Newsletters Seminar – back by popular demand! If you missed this lively and information filled seminar last year you owe it to yourself to attend in 2004! Learn about developing content, writing and editing tips, how to do an electronic newsletter and more. New for this year, we are holding the seminar in both Washington, DC (March 30) and Chicago, IL (April 22). Visit http://www.snaponline.org/public/calendar/ and click on the appropriate date to register.
June 17, 2004
SNAP DC Publications Management Conference, returning to the Renaissance Washington DC Hotel. Details to come!
November 17, 2004
SNAP Chicago Publications Management Conference at the Hyatt Regency Chicago. Mark your calendar!
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