The Rationale for "Full and Open Access" of Scientific Information

by R. Stephen Berry,
Department of Chemistry and the James Franck Institute
The University of Chicago

Recent discussions about the ownership and proprietary rights to scientific publications have generated something of a polarization of the communities that have stakes in this issue. There are some "middle-grounders," but the intensity of the discourse has made them less visible than the spokesmen for one extreme or the other. Let us examine these positions and then present a case for a specific policy, in light of the views of the various parties.

The issue can be expressed succinctly in the words of the title of a recent discussion in Science[1], "Who should own scientific papers?" Traditionally, in the sciences and in most publishing of academic works, publishers expect authors to assign the copyrights of their papers to them. So long as print media were the principal vehicles for disseminating the results of academic research, this arrangement provided a healthy symbiosis. Authors were rarely able to reach the audiences that publishers had, and publishers, often the professional societies of the authors, supplied various forms of added value such as critical reviewing prior to acceptance for publication (refereeing, usually done anonymously), and editing, which, when well done, can far too frequently do wonders for the intelligibility of an academic paper. Publishers, as the owners of copyrights, also took the responsibility for granting permissions for reproduction of parts or all of articles in works by others. It is sometimes said that publishers pursue violations of copyright such as plagiarism, but the impression gained by asking various publishers about this is that, while they may chase plagiarists of books, they in fact never do the same for people who steal articles from academic journals.

The advent of electronic communication has changed the scene. We are now in a transition, probably still in the early stages of that transition, as we learn to use electronic mail, the World Wide Web and other means to communicate on the Internet and its successors. This medium has made it possible for anyone to post information, and as we all could predict, people are trying as many ways of doing this as they can invent. In the context of this discussion, and from the perspective of this writer, the most important issue is how the Internet can best serve the needs of science. There is another set of perspectives—not a unified one—that we must recognize, however we choose to deal with it, which is that of the publishers who have been the traditional disseminators of scientific results. A question facing both communities is whether, or how much, the new medium creates a divergence of what was, for many years, a common interest. Or, put more positively, can electronic communication be used in some new mode that produces a win-win situation for all.

We concern ourselves here with scientific work supported by funds from government agencies and not-for-profit foundations. The primary rationale, far more important than any other, for such support by public institutions is this: the results of the research supported by such funds become public goods. These are goods whose value does not diminish with use. In fact, because science functions in a cumulative way, building on previous knowledge, the more the results are used, the greater is their value. It is unlikely that a society produces any other good whose value to that society has a stronger positive feedback from its use.

The public goods ensuing from such research can only be realized if and when the information about the results of the research reaches the community of scientists and engineers. Dissemination of the results is as integral to the process of "public research" as the experimental and theoretical work that we traditionally consider scientific research. This perspective was institutionalized in the context of research on global change in the "Bromley doctrine" which recognized the practice of "full and open access" to scientific information as the norm. The principle of full and open access was recognized as a practice appropriate to all research supported by public funds when the National Academy of Sciences/National Research Council published its report on global exchange of scientific data.[2]

"Full and open access" is not free access; this doctrine establishes the principle that the information should be distributed at the marginal cost of distribution, at least to the community within which the information and whatever it stimulates remains in the domain of public goods. This means, principally, the world of academic and government scientists. "Full and open" does not preclude differential pricing, so that commercial users who convert the information to private goods would face higher charges than the academic and government scientists. There are strong economic justifications for different pricing for different markets.[2] The principle also does not, of itself, determine which participants in the enterprise should actually pay the marginal costs to the information distributor. This is a secondary question, probably best answered by determining where that responsibility would minimize transaction costs. It might be the funding agencies, via direct payments to the publishers, in whatever general sense that should be taken; it might be the authors, via a sort of generalization of page charges, in which case the funds for those charges would necessarily be included in the grants supporting the research; or it might be the users of the data, who pay the equivalent of subscription or downloading charges, which again would put the burden on the users' grants or institutional funds. At present, subscribers, especially libraries, pay the largest part, but there is some of each of the other modes. Because the libraries are the prime supporters, it is their institutions that now pay the greatest share of the costs of distributing scientific information. How much of those costs come from overhead on government grants is a matter of how overhead is treated in the internal accounting system.

Now we return to the central question. If the results of government-supported research must be disseminated to realize the public goods for which the support was given, and should be maximally distributed to maximize those public goods, then anything that thwarts that distribution acts against the interests of the government that provided the support. This is a fundamental principle, but it does not in any way inhibit the attainment of benefits that might accrue to private enterprises from that research. The use of public goods, particularly of the results of scientific research, is by no means restricted only to the sectors who return other public goods. A very important secondary product of publicly-supported research is obviously the value of goods derived from private investment in applying and developing results of such research in profit-making ventures. But these ventures must not inhibit the public good. The manner in which those goods transfer to and are used by the private sector must remain consistent with the purposes of the original investors, the government agencies. They must not diminish the distribution that maximizes the public-good value of the research. The "full and open" doctrine is a way to institutionalize that principle.

In response to this position, it has been said that charging only marginal costs of distribution to academic researchers for scientific information would make it very difficult, perhaps unprofitable, for commercial publishers to vend some of that information. This may well be the case. When a commercial publisher considers a potential new market, it is the publisher who must decide whether that market is likely to produce profits. There is no reason for every potential new journal in every field of science to be profitable. Fiscally responsible publishers must be willing to say "no" to some possible ventures. During the 1970s and '80s, many new commercial journals appeared. Libraries and even individuals were willing to buy subscriptions at the prices charged by publishers, and it may be that many of those journals were worth the price. Now, libraries and individuals are dropping subscriptions, for a variety of reasons, including rising costs, limited budgets and diminishing space. We may well be coming into a new era, in which commercial publication of many scientific journals is simply not economically efficient, maybe not even feasible at all for the small-market, highly specialized journals. It may be that some of those specialized journals, with small readerships and only libraries as subscribers, will disappear from the commercial market as fewer libraries subscribe, the subscription costs increase and still more libraries cancel.

How will scientists distribute and acquire the information if those specialized journals disappear, or if no commercial publishers take the initiative to put out certain databases? How will the public goods be achieved? The answers are straightforward. First, the cost of distributing the results is part of the cost of the research, though a very small part of that total, and it must be included in the funding for the research itself, whenever there is not a feasible and rationally-priced commercial market. Research grant budgets very often carry line items for publication costs, typically including estimates of page charges. In other words, granting agencies already pay part of the distribution costs in the direct costs of grants. They also can be said to pay part of the distribution costs in the indirect costs that go to the institution of the grantee, insofar as those indirect costs help support the library of the institution. Second, scientists and their professional societies manage to find ingenious ways to distribute their results when new vehicles appear. Photocopying led to wide distribution of preprints, as well as reprints, among groups of researchers active in a field. Now electronic distribution is finding its niche in a growing number of fields. All-electronic journals are appearing. A possible paradigm for the highly specialized journal in electronic-only format is the American Physical Society's new publication, Physical Review Special Topics-Accelerators and Beams. Others include the independent Internet Journal of Chemistry and the new all-electronic journal, PhysChemComm, from the Royal Society of Chemistry.

Many people are watching closely to understand the costs to run such a journal on a regular, sustained basis. Clearly the largest are personnel costs. Could the total be half or less than half the total for a traditional print journal? The question is still open, and it may hang on whether almost all the interchanges between author, publisher, reviewer and subscriber can be handled electronically, virtually eliminating paper from the entire production process. (Publishers and libraries might want to make and keep paper copies, as well as electronic copies, for archiving.) All this means that electronic publication by not-for-profit groups may win in a competition with traditional, commercial paper publication of specialized, small-circulation journals. The one obvious course commercial publishers might pursue in order to try to retain their markets for such journals would be to provide significant added value of kinds a specialized publisher could offer, those that would be too difficult or cumbersome for individuals or not-for-profit organizations to supply. However, it would not be surprising if some not-for-profit professional societies were at least as far ahead and as fast in providing such added value as any commercial publishing house. Every mode that adds public-good value to results of government-supported research is itself valuable.

Now we come to the specifics of realizing the maximum public-good value of that research. To what extent can and should scientific results be distributed? Should an author be able to post any scientific paper on her or his Web page? Should the author be able to submit a paper to an automatic e-print archive such as "xxx.lanl.gov"? Should the author be able to present results at a conference and publish a brief report in the conference proceedings? In the world of paper-only publication, publishers exacted agreements from authors in which the author assigned to the publisher of each article the copyright to that article. Only investigators working in government laboratories or in a few private firms that had made special agreements with publishers were exempt from this. And the use of past tense is not really appropriate here; the practice is normal today. Authors of novels, however, do not normally assign copyrights to their publishers. They give their publishers licenses to publish, but they retain their copyrights. The proposal has now emerged in several venues and several specific forms such that authors of scientific papers, particularly of papers based on government-supported research, retain the copyrights to their papers and give the publishers licenses to include the papers in journals and subsequent collections.[3] A parallel proposal for databases ineligible for copyright but for which some new sui generis form of protection might appear would be for the producer of the data to hold the new form of protection and grant a license to the database publisher.

The science publishing world is divided at present in two camps, which we may call "Camp A" and "Camp B". Camp A consists of those publishers who look on electronic postings as a way for material they publish to be captured and redistributed, even resold, and therefore as a potential form of unfair and perhaps even illegal competition. In Camp B are those other publishers who look on electronic postings as a) advertising for their published material, and (or perhaps "or") b) inevitable, and therefore to be used and assimilated in a manner as compatible as possible with the uses of the Internet most attractive to the scientific community. Many in Camp A are confident that they can hold their particular constituencies with the policies they now follow, or with relatively small modifications of those policies. (The American Chemical Society, for example, will allow authors to distribute, by electronic means, up to 50 copies of their papers from ACS journals.) Whether they are correct may take a decade to determine, but probably not much longer. The publishers in Camp B tend to be in fields in which preprint distribution has been common, and in which electronic communication took root early. This might signal a delay between the wide adoption of electronic media of communication in those fields and a similar adoption in other fields. Alternatively, it may indicate significant differences in how people in different fields want to behave. If the former, then it is likely that in the next decade, new, electronic "journals" will spring up in fields whose publishers are in Camp A, and that these new media, in Camp B, will compete with those in Camp A; which journals would win is impossible to predict. That may depend sensitively on how inventive the journals become in inventing new forms of added value, especially forms that would be difficult for authors to provide to readers of personal Web pages or e-print archives. If the latter, two-culture situation describes the evolving sciences, then we simply will live with two coexisting publishers' Camps for a long time.

How to be a Camp B journal is still in flux. From the perspective of the working scientist, this must be the more attractive mode, simply because it is more permissive. The American Physical Society, already very permissive toward postings either on personal Web pages or on an e-print archive such as the Los Alamos-based "xxx.lanl.gov," is exploring ways that one might write a license that would provide the journal with essentially all the positive rights it now has, yet be only a license so that the author would keep the copyright. If the Society succeeds, the major change from the current situation, with the journal holding copyright, would be that the journal would not be able to prevent or prohibit the author from doing whatever the author chose to do with the paper. In other words, the positive rights of the journal would remain, but its negative powers would disappear.

It is possible that other means might achieve the same ends. An extreme and unlikely possibility would be the extension of the rules now applicable to results of research from government laboratories to all results stemming from government-supported research. This obviously would present problems for research supported jointly by government and private funds. Author's retention of copyright obviously has no problems here, because the author can make any sort of arrangement with a commercial supporter of the research. (Commercial support may, however, pose other problems associated with openness of communication of research within the academic community, but this is a topic for another essay.) As an alternative model, publishers might offer copyright assignments that give authors considerably more freedom than typical Class A copyright assignments now allow.

The scientific community probably would be saddened to see a diminution of the essentially friendly, productive relationship of mutual self-interest it has had with the publishing community. However, just as the publishing community can be expected to put its own interests first in any time of change, so can the scientific community. If a new accommodation can be found, it would be very good for all concerned. The publishing community cannot realistically expect the scientific community to cling to old ways of communicating when people invent other modes that are more effective for meeting the goals of science; scientists will find their own new ways and use them.

• S. Bachrach, R. S. Berry, M. Blume, T. von Foerster, A. Fowler, P. Ginsparg, S. Heller, N. Kestner, A. Odlyzko, A. Okerson, R. Wigington and A. Moffat, Science 281, 1459 (1998); see also F. Bloom's editorial in the same issue, p. 1451, for a different view.
• National Academy of Sciences/National Research Council, Bits of Power: Issues in Global Access to Scientific Data (National Academy Press: Washington, D.C., 1997).
• C.f. Chronicle of Higher Education, September 18, 1998