There are so many science journals that no library can afford to subscribe to them all. The internet has the potential to give researchers instant access to all the information they need, but this potential is not exploited because scientific journals still operate a subscription-based model inherited from the days of print publishing.
For centuries, scientists have written up the results of their research and voluntarily submitted them to scientific journals, which publish them and recoup their costs, along with a healthy profit, by charging subscribers. Although scientific articles are now predominantly accessed online, the old model has remained largely unchanged - journal publishers act as gatekeepers to the scientific literature.
For the past few years, however, change has been brewing. The research funders, who spend hundreds of millions of pounds each year on scientific research in the first place, have grown impatient with traditional publishers, who take an exclusive license to all the research findings that are published in their journals and then sell limited access back to the scientific community.
Funders realise that the scientific literature represents a distillation of the knowledge that has been obtained at huge expense through the research they have paid for. The literature is an extremely valuable resource, so why should they surrender control of it to publishers who are responsible only for the final stage of the process? In many cases, funders do not even have full access to the research they themselves have funded: a recent study found that fewer than half of the articles resulting from NHS research grants ends up accessible online to NHS employees.
Scientists, too, want as many people as possible to see their research, since the wider the readership, the greater the impact the research will have and the more it will benefit their career. More and more of them have been choosing to publish their research in new "open access" journals.
For centuries, scientists have written up the results of their research and voluntarily submitted them to scientific journals, which publish them and recoup their costs, along with a healthy profit, by charging subscribers. Although scientific articles are now predominantly accessed online, the old model has remained largely unchanged - journal publishers act as gatekeepers to the scientific literature.
For the past few years, however, change has been brewing. The research funders, who spend hundreds of millions of pounds each year on scientific research in the first place, have grown impatient with traditional publishers, who take an exclusive license to all the research findings that are published in their journals and then sell limited access back to the scientific community.
Funders realise that the scientific literature represents a distillation of the knowledge that has been obtained at huge expense through the research they have paid for. The literature is an extremely valuable resource, so why should they surrender control of it to publishers who are responsible only for the final stage of the process? In many cases, funders do not even have full access to the research they themselves have funded: a recent study found that fewer than half of the articles resulting from NHS research grants ends up accessible online to NHS employees.
Scientists, too, want as many people as possible to see their research, since the wider the readership, the greater the impact the research will have and the more it will benefit their career. More and more of them have been choosing to publish their research in new "open access" journals.
No comments:
Post a Comment