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Scientific Publications: Free for all?

: I do not assume that, but I assume that author pays is less likely to involve peer review than the current model. My concerns about the Select Committee's findings are both general and specific. Generally, I have enormous concern, as I have said, about the prospect of the Government suddenly coming up with a top-down model for the universities. That would be a completely wrong-headed way of going about it. For example, I do not know what the cost would be of the Committee's recommendation that we should have a central body to oversee the implementation of repositories. It strikes me as another bureaucratic organisation and another opportunity for the Government to run something when, at the moment, scientific publishing is being run perfectly well by commercial and not-for-profit organisations. The tone of the report also misrepresents the reason why libraries struggle to meet the cost of journals. What has filtered through to the non-peer-reviewed press, so to speak, is that the fault lies with profiteering publishers. In fact, as I shall explain, it is partly the fault of the huge boom in research. The feast that researchers are enjoying has also led, potentially, to the famine in access to research. I shall outline specific reasons why the author pays model will encounter problems, which should be ironed out over time, not in a headlong rush. First, on the author pays model, it is likely that wealthy authors or those based at wealthy institutions are the most likely to get published. It is far less likely that those at poor institutions, or in developing countries, will be published. Secondly, the author pays model could create a conflict of interest. At the moment the relationship is between the publisher and the reader. When the relationship is between the publisher and the author there will, to pick up on the intervention of the hon. Member for Oxford, West and Abingdon, be a conflict of interest, perhaps without such clear dividing lines. Thirdly, part of the title of the Select Committee report, ““Free for all?”” is highly misleading. Publishing scientific research is not free. Huge costs are involved for items such as peer review, proof reading and cross-referencing. At the moment it costs about $3,500 to publish the average scientific article. There is no evidence that those costs would decline and if they did I suspect it would lead to a reduction in the quality of the articles. The internet and digitisation provide a fantastically important new platform for the dissemination of research, but nothing can get us away from the fact that making that research ready for publication still involves significant upfront costs, which will not go away.