How to bring knowledge to the entire planet
The problem of poorer countries not having access to knowledge can be remedied, writes Allan Fels.
The promise of the internet as an easy-to-search, open-access archive holding all humanity's accumulated research and information is not being realised.
According to a new report from the British Parliament, much of the best scientific and medical research is being locked away in for-profit journals whose rising costs are increasingly putting them out of public reach.
The House of Commons Science and Technology Committee report confirms what many Australian universities have been saying for a while. It found that prices of major scientific and medical journals rose an average of 58 per cent between 1998 and 2003. Most library budgets have been held steady or been reduced during this time, so subscriptions are being cancelled and book purchases cut back.
Journal publishing is a very profitable business. As an example, stockmarket analysts frequently describe the academic journal division of the publicly listed publishing group Reed Elsevier as its cash cow.
Much of the research appearing in journals is taxpayer-funded. Journal publishers claim their charges are justified because of the costs associated with distribution and with the peer review process. However, in most cases the academics who referee articles before publication do so for the prestige associated with the role and are paid small amounts, if at all. As for distribution costs, if the journals were made available via the internet these would be minimal.
It is time that the Australian Government changed its funding criteria and approach, to encourage researchers to publish their work in ways that ensure it is accessible to all.
There are a number of models emerging for what has become known as open-access publishing that would allow this to happen. All share the objective of making access to research articles free for the reader. There are a range of approaches to funding, including an author-pays system whereby the article's author or his or her sponsoring organisation pays a fee to deposit the research into the archive.
Prosperity in a knowledge economy depends as much on knowledge distribution as on knowledge production.
A fascinating demonstration of how an open-access research distribution universe would look is the Los Alamos E-Print Archive (arxiv.org). This website has revolutionised physics research by serving as an open and respected resource for serious scientists.
There are 280,000 papers in the archive, divided into sub-fields including quantum physics, nuclear theory and astrophysics. The site is funded largely by the United States National Science Foundation, but about two-thirds of visitors are from other countries. The calibre of participating scientists is extremely high, and for many scholars checking the site is a daily routine. Researchers typically post successive drafts of articles on which they are working, incorporating comments from readers to the site.
Such open-access structures lower the barriers to entry to science, bring more brains into the innovation process, and increase the potential for breakthroughs.
There are a number of active contributors of research to the Los Alamos archive from countries in Africa and Eastern Europe whose institutions are too poor to subscribe to traditional journals.
In Australia, a group of academics known as the National Scholarly Communications Forum has been pushing for a structure whereby government funding of scientific and medical research would include a provision for an open-access publishing fee. This would ensure the financial viability of a free online journal of articles in each discipline.
If the Government takes the lead here, it will also provide the endorsement necessary to overcome the understandable reluctance of researchers to give up the prestige of publishing in well-known subscription-based journals. Having a single, standardised system for open-access archiving will also ensure that what is archived is able to be searched efficiently.
Colin Steele, one of the conveners of the NSCF, makes the insightful argument that prosperity in a knowledge economy depends as much, if not more, on knowledge distribution power than it does on knowledge production power.
One could not make a stronger case for the end of the era of high-priced academic journals and the beginning of an era of open-access publishing.
Professor Allan Fels, the former chairman of the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission, is dean of the Australia and New Zealand School of Government.