The leadership of JCO certainly believe in their mission and want their journal to remain respected and useful to the clinical oncology research community. Here’s how they tell it, in very nice suits.
From the medical library viewpoint, the 2010 cost for a JCO institutional subscription is somewhere in the middle, neither cheap nor expensive, though some hospital libraries would be hard pressed to pay:
What if you are at a hospital that cannot afford a subscription to JCO? To view a full-text article without a subscription, you can purchase access to the article for 24 hours at a cost of $19.00 per article.
By the way, ASCO had an extremely good year in 2009, ending up with a $7,800,000 surplus and net assets of nearly $50,000,000:
Excerpt from ASCO 2009 Annual Report
Yes, cancer care and research is big business. Now, before you start to think that those ASCO assets are going into ASCO-sponsored scholarships and research funding, you should be reminded that there is an independently-operated ASCO Cancer Foundation which raises research funds and distributes grants and scholarships.
So what does the ASCO do with a $7,800,000 surplus and net assets of nearly $50,000,000?
According to the video you might have just watched above, their flagship journal JCO wants to be “the one journal that every hematologist/oncologist has to read.” So what if the cost of that journal’s subscription prevented some hematologist/oncologists in certain hospitals from reading it? I bet there are plenty of oncologists that understand the critical nature of their research findings and would be willing to use a portion of their grant funding to publish in author-fee based open access journal, the more prestigious and noticed by colleagues, the better. PLoS gold open access has made this point.
My modest proposal is that ASCO use some of its prosperity to fund an experiment in gold open access and test the waters for those that are willing to pay for universal access to their results. Perhaps even price this gold experiment with the additional waiver of copyright assignment and permission to place the paper on an institutional repository.
There are certainly many major publishers that are trying to maintain revenue while testing the waters of the rising tide of open access with a model such as this.
Washington, DC – The U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Oversight and Government Reform Subcommittee on Information Policy, the Census and National Archives announced it will hold a hearing on the issue of public access to federally funded research on Thursday, July 29. The hearing will provide an opportunity for the Committee to hear the perspectives of a broad range of stakeholders on the potential impact of opening up access to the results of the United States’ more than $60 billion annual investment in scientific research.
The Subcommittee’s interest stems from the growing number of visible expressions of interest in the issue of public access that have surfaced in recent months, in both the Legislative and Executive branches of government. Notably, the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy earlier this year hosted a Public Access Policy Forum on mechanisms that would leverage federal investments in scientific research and increase access to information.
Additionally, H.R. 5037, the Federal Research Public Access Act (FRPAA), which was introduced into the House on April 15 by Rep. Mike Doyle (R-PA) and is supported by a growing bi-partisan host of cosponsors, was referred to the Committee. The bill, and its identical Senate counterpart (introduced by Sens. Joe Lieberman (I-CT) and John Cornyn (R-TX)), proposes to require those eleven federal agencies with extramural research budgets of $100 million or more to implement policies that deliver timely, free, online public access to the published results of the research they fund.
========= END SPARC PRESS RELEASE==============
Want to see the arguments that the commercial sector will take? They are going to try to kill the House bill H.R. 5037 with this kind of argument:
the government to become a competitor of independent publishers operating within the private sector in a well-established marketplace.
Duplicates existing mechanisms that enable the public to access research in the sciences, social sciences and humanities published in scholarly journals.
It would require the affected federal agencies to develop and maintain costly electronic repositories.
Agencies will need to divert millions of dollars away from federal research grants and towards database costs.
Acoustical Society of America
American Academy of Pediatrics
American Association of Anatomists
American Association for Cancer Research
American Association for Clinical Chemistry
American Association for Dental Research
American Association of Immunologists
American Association of Physics Teachers
American Astronomical Society
American Chemical Society
American College of Clinical Pharmacology
American College of Radiology
American Dairy Science Association
American Dental Association
American Geophysical Union
American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics
American Institute of Biological Sciences
American Institute of Physics
American Medical Association
American Psychiatric Publishing, Inc.
American Psychological Association
American Physiological Society
American Registry of Professional Animal Scientists
American Roentgen Ray Society
American Society of Animal Science
American Society of Agronomy
American Society for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology
American Society for Investigative Pathology
American Society for Pharmacology & Experimental Therapeutics
American Society of Plant Biologists
Association for Research in Vision and Ophthalmology
AVS–Science &Technology of Materials, Interfaces and Processing
Cambridge University Press
Crop Science Society of America
Elsevier
The Endocrine Society
Entomological Society of America
European Association for Cardiothoracic Surgery
Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology (FASEB)
Genetics Society of America
Human Factors and Ergonomics Society
International Association for Dental Research
International Union of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology (IUBMB)
John Wiley and Sons
Lynne Rienner Publishers, Inc.
The McGraw-Hill Companies
Mycological Society of America
The Optical Society
Oxford University Press
The Physiological Society
Poultry Science Association
So it has come down to special interests promising to honor and protect the public interest, even as libraries continue to drop subscriptions from many of these publishers (some public libraries do not have a single journal from any of these publishers). Does the current system work? Will we be better off with more open access or with the status quo?
Time for you to contact congress or plan to be in DC on July 27th.
Acoustical Society of America
American Academy of Pediatrics
3
American Association of Anatomists
American Association for Cancer Research
American Association for Clinical Chemistry
American Association for Dental Research
American Association of Immunologists
American Association of Physics Teachers
American Astronomical Society
American Chemical Society
American College of Clinical Pharmacology
American College of Radiology
American Dairy Science Association
American Dental Association
American Geophysical Union
American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics
American Institute of Biological Sciences
American Institute of Physics
American Medical Association
American Psychiatric Publishing, Inc.
American Psychological Association
American Physiological Society
American Registry of Professional Animal Scientists
American Roentgen Ray Society
American Society of Animal Science
American Society of Agronomy
American Society for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology
American Society for Investigative Pathology
American Society for Pharmacology & Experimental Therapeutics
American Society of Plant Biologists
Association for Research in Vision and Ophthalmology
AVS–Science &Technology of Materials, Interfaces and Processing
Cambridge University Press
Crop Science Society of America
Elsevier
The Endocrine Society
Entomological Society of America
European Association for Cardiothoracic Surgery
Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology (FASEB)
Genetics Society of America
Human Factors and Ergonomics Society
International Association for Dental Research
International Union of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology (IUBMB)
John Wiley and Sons
Lynne Rienner Publishers, Inc.
The McGraw-Hill Companies
Mycological Society of America
The Optical Society
Oxford University Press
The Physiological Society
Poultry Science Association
Back in May I highlighted Jeffrey Beal’s article in the Charleston Advisor open access archive (the OA archive is open, unlike the rest of the journal) , an entertaining exposé about several open access publisher websites that don’t describe or respond to questions about peer review or anything else…just register as an author, insert your credit card, and hope for the best. Yes, it was a sure sign of tarnished gold open access.
Lots of us appreciated Jeffery’s diligence and used various means to circulate his indictment. That means that as new open access publishers appear, they get the scrutiny they deserve from more eyeballs, and Jeffrey will get new nominations for potential predatory practices. It didn’t take long for Jeffrey to sound the warning bells again.
There are several questionable things present in the Medwell Journals website.
What did I notice?
The contact information page is an ingest form. Will they get back to you?
Use of a gmail account for contact on the subscription ordering page.
No contact information linked or provided for journal editors.
Must register and enter the manuscript system to see information about fees.
A “News” page which actually prints news, not from their own journals or business, but from the Journal of Clinical Investigation( see “Genetic Link to Heart Failure.” [a subliminal appeal to legitimacy?!]
Use of a gmail account on the contact page. Refreshingly, there are two Nigerian cell phone numbers listed. The weekend had already begun in Nigeria when I used skype to verify the numbers worked.
The Guide to Authors for the Journal of Medicine and Medical Sciences attempts to describe a unique submission style for paper elements and citation references, apparently in ignorance of the International Biomedical (Vancouver) style, a well-known international standard that would really simplify the production of manuscripts with citation management tools, as well as provide guidelines for nearly every detail you might forget to think about in setting up a new biomedical journal.
Author processing fees for articles are published, mostly around $400US – $450US . Since my first impression is that this at best an immature or amateur start-up, a competitively low fee is not a bad strategy. On the other hand, the expenses of what we see in this website are pretty minimal, so what does the money go for? There is no advisory board to lend credibility or confidence.
On June 4th the University of California Library System issued a very public complaint about Nature Publishing Group‘s proposed triple-digit increase in institutional subscription costs, coupled with a threat of author and editorial boycott by faculty.
On June 24th, David Carlson, the Dean of Library Affairs at Southern Illinois University(SIU), Carbondale, and Associate Dean Connie Poole at the SIU School of Medicine, Springfield, issued a memo to their own faculty regarding the recent NPG controversy with California State University Libraries.
Here are the major recommendations to SIU faculty on the Carbondale and Springfield campuses, if you don’t have time to read the entire memo:
Be aware of the financial value of the work you contribute when you write, review, and edit articles.
Whenever possible, choose to publish in journals with equitable business models – open-access journals, or those with reasonably priced subscriptions.
Assert your rights as an author. Negotiate with publishers for better control of and broader access to your published work through an author addendum such as the Scholar’s Copyright Addendum (http://scholars.sciencecommons.org/).
Place a copy of your work in SIU’s digital repository, OpenSIUC, and encourage your colleagues to do the same. This will not only be a positive contribution, but will advance the visibility, impact, and reach of your research.
This past year, the SIU Faculty Senate and Graduate Council endorsed a resolution for faculty to support Open Access. A second resolution called for faculty to “grant SIUC permission to make his or her scholarly journal articles… openly accessible in OpenSIUC.” Support this effort and provide your permission when you are surveyed in the Fall.
OASIS combines the traditional notion of pulling together useful content with the practice of community building, allowing registration and participation among a group of pre-defined communities of interest:
If you browse around the site, it becomes quickly apparent that all the content dates from mid to late 2009, so OA bloggers and tweeters can rest assured that OASIS is not attempting to be generating its own report of immediate news. There is certainly usefulness in creating and distributing customizable materials that project a consistent story, as well as build an easier on-ramp to open access advocacy. The organizers and advisors of OASIS are some of the busiest and in-demand advocates for open knowledge issues in their respective countries and in cross-pollinating advocacy organizations.
Now that is it built, will users come? It would be interesting to see the pattern of users registering for the site. Just as my blog is attempting to fill a niche of need -to-know about open access and biomedicine, perhaps the simple categories of librarian or researcher are too general to lead a reader to enroll. But for front line advocates new to their advocacy roll, there is a good set of repurposeable material to get started, endorsed by the champions of open access and covered by a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License.
When a library tweets about open access funding, I sit up and listen. The University of Tennessee, Knoxville Office of Research and University Libraries have renewed a fund of $20,000 for FY 2009-2010 to support publishing in open access journals. Credit must be given to the Library Scholarly Communication unit, which guides digital library initiatives, including an institutional repository and promotion of scholarly discussion on the benefits of open access.
eIFL.net is an international not-for-profit organization building partnerships with libraries around the world to enable sustainable access to high quality digital information for people in developing and transition countries. Like SPARC in the U.S., eIFL.net was originallystarted to address the serials pricing crisis in academic and research libraries in Central and Eastern Europe. eIFL.net currently partners with libraries and library consortia in over 45 developing and transition countries in Africa, Asia and Europe with common goals of leveraging open knowledge for local prosperity and increasing educational opportunities.
321 open access journals in Armenia, Bulgaria, China, Egypt, Macedonia, Nigeria, Poland, Russia and South Africa use liberal Creative Commons Attribution license.
Please see the report for other evidence uncovered by Iryna’s analysis. There are also short individual case studies on 14 of the countries represented in the report. As I have visited Armenia two years ago, it was interesting to see the seeds of open access represented in their report:
On the scale of news, PeerChoice is a murmur. Reviewers for one journal will now have the freedom to choose which articles they would like to review, hopefully matching their expertise and interest, in an attempt to increase efficiency and effectiveness of the peer review process.
But what is the content of these peer review assessments? How is the reader to know how many or whom rose to the editorial challenge of an unbiased evaluation?
Until the recent open access movement, there was simply an expectation that peers reviewing peers conducted themselves ethically and morally under the supervision of an ethical and uncorrupted editor. This traditional “black box” peer review mechanism received scant attention, as the disciples of Ingelfinger stood guard for health consumers by stopping premature medical information with the peer review black box at prominent journals.
That was then, this is now: most of us in academic medical centers are beginning to deal with issues of corporate influence in medical education, be it free lunches at sponsored grand rounds, free samples of pharmaceuticals, and the use of corporate ghost writers to help busy clinicians report results of clinical trials. Could not the sanctity of peer review be tainted, at a minimum, with some sort of competing interest? What if there were public acknowledgment of peer reviewers and perhaps the publication of their review, noting any competing interests and allowing readers to draw their own conclusion about whether a competing interest was significant?
The open access publisher BioMed Central (BMC) recognized the interest that might be generated open peer review and began to offer their journals this option. With BMC open peer review, reviewers for journals that select this option ask reviewers to declare any competing interests, and a full publication history, including the reviewers’ reports, is made available with the final article. This option has been around for new and converted independent BMC journals for at least five years. Here is an example of a BMC article history with peer reviews.
Effect of open peer review on quality of reviews and on reviewers' recommendations: a randomised trial. BMJ 1999;318:23-27 ( 2 January )
It has been more than 10 years since the BMJ article. Elsevier is finally getting around to tinkering with peer review for its journals. I think it is time for Elsevier to see the advantage of supporting a movement toward open peer reviewing. I welcome comments.
The Open Access @ UNT Symposium on May 18 featured a keynote address by Stevan Harnad, the über evangelist of the green open access movement. Dr. Harnad has a standard address about the benefits of pre-print self archiving that translates into the open access advantage.
This carefully edited video transcription also works in Harnad’s answers to many faculty questions about self-archiving. He talks fast, and I bet some UNT students might have been tempted to do the single clap every time he infrequently takes a breath.
In a story line out of the post- Reagan excesses of substituting the private sector for governement activity, the Journal of the National Cancer Institute (JNCI), a highly respected research journal for a narrow, exclusive slice of taxpayers, is neither published nor sponsoredby the National Cancer Institute(NCI). It participates in Pubmed Central archiving only at the bare minimum of article availability 12 months after publication. It earns significant income and profit for Oxford University Press. It is one of many examples of business as usual where taxpayers subsidize the intellectual content and are told to expect that their investment appears in a clinic or hospital where the promise of cancer research becomes personal.
The history of how JNCI went from public to private property is outlined pretty well on the NCI website with a fact sheet to address the persistent questions that have dogged the privatization since 1996. Under the terms of a 1996 cooperative agreement with NCI, Oxford University Press over a five-year transition gradually took over responsibility for JNCI and became the sole private owner.
President Obama said some very gratious things about Dr. Varmus in nominating him: ““…brings unmatched expertise at all levels — not only in cutting edge scientific research, but also as a leader in the development of strategies for improving patient care, in scientific education and training, and in the design of novel public-private partnerships.”
Should not the fruits of cutting edge, federally funded cancer research be immediately and readily available to the public and other researchers? I wait to see if Dr. Varmus is successfully appointed and uses this leadership position to advocate for a more open JNCI.
