Open Access Publication in Science: past and present
Before the internet existed, in a time when discs were floppy and letters were sent by post, accessing scientific articles was a time consuming process. ‘Keeping up with the literature’ for us PhD students involved scouring Science Citation Index, followed by a trek to the library and a marathon session of photocopying. These periodic trips to the library were an essential part of research and often resulted in the casual flicking through several journals just for the pleasure of reading and discovering new things. At that time, everyone kept a stash of re-print request postcards in their office drawers. If the library didn’t subscribe to a particular journal, then a re-print request postcard would be sent off to the corresponding author of the paper that you needed to read and a few weeks later it would arrive in the post. These re-print requests were the main way in which scientists attempted to open up access to their research, to fellow scientists who did not work at institutions with well-funded libraries. As a consequence, when a paper was accepted for publication it was the done-thing to purchase about 20–30 reprints and then wait for the re-print request post-cards to roll in. Some journals provided a few reprints free of charge, but in general the onus was on the corresponding author to purchase them and send them out. This personal contact from scientists in far flung labs, often in the former Soviet Union, China, or Eastern Block countries was exciting — evidence that someone out there in the scientific community wanted to read your work and found it interesting. As a PhD student this proof of your scientific worth was extremely gratifying.
Thirty years later there is no longer any need to physically go to the library, every journal that I could ever need is now one click of a mouse away. Not only that, but finding key articles has never been so easy. Everything is archived on the internet on websites such as, PubMed and in the time it takes to enter a few key words, several hundred articles are listed, from diverse journals of varying quality ranging from the iconic Nature to the Indian Journal of Tropical and Medical Microbiology. Thanks to electronic publishing all that then remains is to down load the PDF and to read the paper. However, unless you are fortunate enough to have access to an institutional subscription to the journals that you need, or are able to pay for them yourself, then your ability to read these online papers is restricted to the abstract. In the age of the internet, when obtaining information is so easy, many students and researchers around the world are still having to send off reprint requests, albeit by e-mail, to access key papers that they need for research and teaching. It is clear that scientists are willing to share their published work because they know that dissemination of information is what drives research.
This financial embargo on who can access published research is not limited to poorly funded academics, but also applies to secondary school teachers and other interested individuals for whom reading published science may be of value. Since tax payers contribute to the public purse which funds research, then arguably they should be able to read the science that they have helped to pay for. Ultimately it is the journal publishers however who are preventing this from happening and demanding payment for journal access. In an audacious and somewhat subversive attempt to get around this problem, Alexandra Elbakyan, a scientist from Kazakhstan set up Sci-Hub, a website which by passes journal pay walls and provides free access to nearly every published paper. Sci-Hub manages to achieve this by enlisting the help of academics who provide their institutional logon details, which then allows Sci-Hub to link its subscribers directly to the journal articles that they require. In many ways Sci-Hub is simply an automated way of delivering printed reprint requests, eliminating the need for e-mails to be sent requesting PDFs. Whilst Sci-Hub is a pioneering venture there is clearly a need for a legal repository of published work which can be freely accessed. Individual universities and conglomerates of universities have repositories and all publications must also be archived in these. This has been described as the so-called Green Access route and allows anyone can access these articles for free. These individual repositories however are difficult to search and are not linked to some of the main search engines, such as PubMed which is used Biomedical Scientists. With a view to developing an integrated and easily searchable repository, the National Centre for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) set up Pubmed Central (PMC). This repository archives publically accessible scientific articles, indexes them and tags them so that they can be searched for and retrieved using NCBI databases such as Pub Med. As of February 2014 PMC contained 2.9 million articles, deposited directly by publishers and individual authors. Some publishers place an embargo period on papers archived in PMC such that they cannot be accessed for a specific period, typically 6–12 months. Such embargos are often operated by journals published by learned societies who use the revenue from their publications to fund society activities.
A growing trend within publishing is Gold open access. This model is free to the end user, the scientists who want to read the paper, but requires authors to pay an additional sum for this to occur. These journals can be read directly but are also automatically archived in PMC. When a PubMed search is carried out both an abstract and a link to the journal article can be retrieved. The journal Nature is unique amongst scientific journals in that there is no free access to this or the majority of other journals published by the Nature Publishing group. In October 2014, to answer their critics, they launched a new open access journal, Nature Communications. However given that Nature is an iconic journal that all scientists aspire to publish in and that funders of science now require all publications to be accessible, I suspect that some further concessions towards enabling open access may occur in the future and rightly so.
Although, far from perfect, open access in the world of scientific publication has improved immeasurably and the hope is that it will continue to do so. Whilst this is undeniably a good thing, I will always hold fond memories of sending and receiving re-print request postcards with their spidery handwriting and exotic stamps and post marks.
