Deposit or lose

Maxim Medvedev, STRF.ruRussian world-class scientific journals are on average four times more expensive than American publications.

As sources of relevant scientific information, they are less accessible, and as a means of promoting their ideas, they are less interesting. Where is the exit? Move towards open archives of scientific publications!

Publications on advanced research and its results remain the main source of information for most scientists, especially in fundamental science. Since these studies are mostly (if not completely) funded by the state (in other words, paid for from public funds), the question arises: how legitimate is the demand for payment for access to this information? Perhaps, for the public good and for the purpose of more efficient spending of funds, the authors of such publications are obliged to provide open and free access to the results of their research? The discussion on these fundamental issues has been going on for more than one year and has generated many initiatives united by the idea of open archives (OA).

The new model of circulation of scientific publications involves both independent depositing of articles by scientists in electronic archives, and the release of peer-reviewed journals that do not charge a subscription fee or for access to their archives. Some features of the market of scientific publications make this model very popular today and even more so in the future. The problem is that this model seriously undermines the business of scientific publishing houses, which until now had a kind of monopoly on the channels of knowledge dissemination.

Help :
In May 2006, the collection of signatures for consideration by the U.S. Senate of the "Act on Public Access to the Results of Research conducted at the expense of the Federal Budget" (Federal Research Public Access Act, FRPAA) began. The document obliges the grantee (scientist) to deposit the publication in an open archive after six months from the date of its publication in the journal. It is assumed that this practice will be extended to works carried out at the expense of most grant-making funds and competitions. The project was supported by 132 leading US universities, including Harvard and Carnegie Mellon. If the initiative is supported by the Senate, we can expect an explosive growth in the number of open archives and, as a result, a rapid increase in the level of services implemented on their basis.

Price restrictionsThere are about 24,000 peer-reviewed scientific journals in the world that publish about 2.5 million articles annually [1,2], access to these publications is usually provided under the standard paid subscription scheme.

This is how the scientific information market is formed, the volume of which Outsell, specializing in the study of information markets, estimates at $ 19 billion per year.

The high concentration — 43% of sales are accounted for by the ten largest publishers, including: Elsevier, Springer, Taylor & Francis (T&F), Kluwer Medical, Thomson, Wiley and Blackwell — indicates the maturity of this market, and the consolidation of players through mergers and acquisitions (Wiley and Blackwell) — its saturation.

The research results also reveal a clear trend of subscription price growth (8% per year): publishers are trying to compensate for the increase in the cost of maintaining channels for collecting scientific information and marketing products (Table 1).

Table 1. Dynamics of average subscription prices in some scientific areas

There are other negative consequences of the rise in the price of subscriptions, due to the fact that traditionally the value of an article is determined by its demand, and the latter is characterized by a standard indicator — the citation index. It is not necessary to remind that in the fate of a scientist, this indicator plays, if not a decisive role, then at least it is very important, including in the allocation of funding, the distribution of grants and other incentives. But, as will be shown later, in conditions of paid access, the value of a scientific article in this interpretation decreases, since artificial restrictions on access to scientific work lead to a decrease in its citation.

Reference:The Open Archives Initiative (OAI), as a new model for the circulation of scientific publications, suggests two directions.

1) Green road: a scientist, according to the copyright agreement with the publisher, can independently deposit (self-archiving) an electronic copy of his article in open electronic archives compatible with the standards of the Initiative;
2) Golden road: publishers refuse to charge for subscriptions or for online access to the archives of their journals and seek other sources of funding for the publication of open-access journals.

Thus, Steve Lawrence noted [3] that in the field of computing, articles to which access was open were cited three times more often than those to which access had to be paid. Michael Kurtz gives similar results [4,5] in the field of astrophysics, and Andrew Odlyzko [6] discovers in mathematics.

These conclusions were unequivocally confirmed by a large-scale study [7] conducted in 2004 based on a sample from the ISI database, which includes 14 million publications in several disciplines over a 10-year period. It turned out that, for example, in the field of physics, open access publications are cited on average 2.5—5 times more often than paid ones.

New modelAn excellent example of the benefits of openness for science is an open archive arXiv.org : the avalanche-like growth of the audience of this resource characterizes the genuine interest in it, first of all, on the part of scientists.

Depositing in arXiv.org copies of their publications, they can demonstrate the results of their research immediately on a global scale, making them available for discussion and evaluation by all members of the scientific community at once.

In addition, open archives provide increasingly high-quality services to both scientists and researchers, which also stimulates the growth of interest in these services.

Open archives are created by separate scientific organizations, usually on their own basis, but in accordance with standard data exchange protocols developed within the framework of the OAI.Thus, the system of physically distributed institute archives as a whole can be made interoperable, in other words, functioning as a whole, which simplifies and significantly expands the possibilities of searching for information.

Figure 1. Traffic dynamics arXiv.org , 1991-2007 (high energy physics, solid state physics, astrophysics, mathematics)

The functionality of the open archives system can be increased by using alternative technologies for calculating citation indexes. For example, the Citebase specialized scientometric system allows you to assess the degree of demand for an individual article by the number of its downloads (hits), this indicator correlates well with the citation index (Figure 2).

Resource Citebase.org It is still under development, but already today it provides many additional services to authors of publications and researchers. For example, you can compare the statistics of publications by different authors and find out (by IP addresses) which visitors from which countries showed interest in a particular publication.

Evaluation indicators can be used to construct more complex models, for example, to assess progress in the context of disciplines, countries, scientific organizations, etc., in general, for a more detailed analysis of the movement of the "scientific front". And the results of such studies can help investors in choosing the most promising areas when allocating funding.

The strong advantage of open archives is based on the network effect: the more archives are included in a single circuit, the more publications are contained in each of them, the higher the value of the entire system. And there is no doubt that this value will grow. Today, the publication of material in an open archive is more of an option for a scientist, but an increasing number of "grant-giving" organizations are changing their policy, requiring the mandatory deposit of a copy of the publication in an open archive after a certain period. Resource Citebase.org It is still under development, but already today it provides many additional services to authors of publications and researchers. For example, you can compare the statistics of publications by different authors and find out (by IP addresses) which visitors from which countries showed interest in a particular publication.

Evaluation indicators can be used to construct more complex models, for example, to assess progress in the context of disciplines, countries, scientific organizations, etc., in general, for a more detailed analysis of the movement of the "scientific front". And the results of such studies can help investors in choosing the most promising areas when allocating funding.

The strong advantage of open archives is based on the network effect: the more archives are included in a single circuit, the more publications are contained in each of them, the higher the value of the entire system. And there is no doubt that this value will grow. Today, the publication of material in an open archive is more of an option for a scientist, but an increasing number of "grant-giving" organizations are changing their policy, requiring the mandatory deposit of a copy of the publication in an open archive after a certain period.

Reaction of publishersWhat is the reaction of publishers to such trends?

Most of them are building a business based on a paid subscription, and, of course, they cannot ignore the exponential growth in the number of open access fans.

Publishers are trying to minimize the risk of revenue cuts by experimenting with two new business models.

Figure 2. Scientometric characteristics of the publication entitled Azimuthal asymmetry in electro-production of neutral pions in SIDIS, Authors: Efremov, A.V.; Goeke, K.; Schweitzer, P.

Within the framework of the first model, the author of the publication, a scientist, is given the opportunity to put into open access either the initial version of the article before its review (preprint), or the final version of the article published in the journal (postprint), but only after a certain period of time has elapsed. The temporary embargo allows publishers to protect their business without reducing the value of magazines, which consists in a high-quality selection of publications. In OAI terminology, journals working on such a model are called "green".

The second model implies the publisher's complete rejection of the standard paid subscription scheme: the materials of the so-called "golden" journals immediately fall into open access, and the publisher shifts its costs to the author of the article and/ or scientific organization.

After analyzing the work of 378 leading publishers, we found that only a third of publishers have not changed their policies at all to date; 10% allowed authors to openly post preprints and more than half (56%), having revised contracts with authors, allowed them to post preprints and/or postprints in open archives.

Figure 3. As an additional service Citebase.org It offers comparative analysis of the authors' publication activity and data on the demand for the article by visitors from different countries.If we talk about the market of scientific periodicals as a whole, the number of "green" journals, in one form or another allowing publication in open archives, is already approaching 23 thousand (91% of all journals), "gold" journals are significantly less — about a thousand (4%).

So, magazines, fearing to lose revenue, are rapidly "turning green".

The former harmonious system of circulation of scientific publications, where the rules of the game were determined by publishers, is giving way to a new one based on open access to research results. The key link of this new system is the scientist himself, and his motivation to publish the results of his research is its main driving force.

Domestic notesThe budgets allocated by Russian research organizations for subscriptions to the world's leading scientific journals are small and, as a rule, fixed.

At the same time, subscription prices for Russian scientific periodicals are among the highest in the world! Last year, Library Journal, a Reed Elsevier publication, conducted a study comparing the average prices for publications from different countries available in three main ISI databases — Arts and Humanities Citation Index, Social Sciences Citation Index, Science Citation Index. It turned out that Russian magazines occupy the second most expensive place in this list, which is not at all honorable. For comparison, 40 (!) times more world-class magazines are published in the USA, while an American magazine is on average four times cheaper than a Russian one (Table 2).

It turns out that scientific journals — the most important sources of relevant information — are becoming less accessible to Russian scientists every year, firstly, and, secondly, if we talk about publications in their native language, they are becoming less interesting. This, of course, is completely unacceptable.

Open Archives in Russia: first stepsThe movement towards open archives is very relevant for Russia, especially in the context of the widespread introduction of the system of indicators of scientific performance (PRND).

At the same time, open archives can be considered not only as a technological innovation that allows to reduce costs and accelerate the diffusion of knowledge, but also as an organizational and managerial one. Since the archive created on the basis of the institute represents the results of the research activities of the entire scientific organization and, in fact, reflects the effectiveness of its functioning, it means that it can also be used to calculate personal allowances.

The addition of scientometric and rating components to the open archive system may further encourage authors to deposit the results of scientific activity, says Sergey Parinov, Professor of the Department of Socio-Economic Systems and Social Policy at the Higher School of Economics, Chief Researcher at the Central Economic and Mathematical Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences.

Sergey Parinov is one of the leaders of the open archives movement in Russia. In 2006, he initiated the program "Open Access to Research Results", which involves the creation of a unified infrastructure for the rapid dissemination and use of research results. Today, Socionet, one of the first serious attempts to implement the idea of open archives in Russia, already unites the archives of 22 of the 29 institutes of the Department of Social Sciences of the Russian Academy of Sciences (UN RAS).

The institutes have created their own internal archives based on the open architecture of the Socionet, and one of them adopted a provision on mandatory electronic deposit of research results in the institute archive. The corresponding algorithms are "sewn" into the archive system, and all employees of the institute are well aware of the principles and metrics of accounting for their performance. Automation of the calculation of allowances using standard, unified procedures has become a big plus in itself. It is equally important that such a process guarantees the impartiality and impartiality of the evaluation of the work of scientists.

Portal "Eternal youth" www.vechnayamolodost.ru
26.03.2008