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Scientific Publications: Free for all?

: My hon. Friend is trying to get one up on me, because Nature is one of the highest-impact journals. I cannot compete with him. I shall change ““two MPs”” to ““three MPs”” in future. As the number of universities expanded in the UK post-Robbins, and worldwide as well, the number of publications in each subject increased logarithmically. The learned society journals sub-divided and became more specialist. The Journal of the Chemical Society was no exception—it fragmented, too. I started to publish in the Journal of the Chemical Society, Perkin Transactions I, which was named after Henry Perkin. He discovered mauveine, the first synthetic dye. As the number of publications increased, so the cost to libraries began to rise steeply. Unfortunately, the learned societies were not moving with the times, and long periods elapsed between submission of a paper and publication. The commercial publishing houses saw the chance and made available journals that not only published rapidly in camera-ready copy, but reduced publication times significantly. That was a huge attraction for scientists to start publishing in commercial rather than learned journals. That was a watershed in the field. Chemists began to publish in journals such as Tetrahedron and Tetrahedron Letters, which are today owned by Reed Elsevier. Library costs soared again. The commercial publishing houses had to make a profit, of course. The preparation of camera-ready copy was made easier for chemists by the introduction of computer packages that would draw complex molecular formulae and integrate them straight into the text so that the paper could be published direct almost without any alteration. Incidentally, Tetrahedron and Tetrahedron Letters started life at Oxford, at Headington Hill hall, and the gentleman who started those and many other scientific publications—the hon. Member for Wantage is ahead of me, and is smiling—was the great, late entrepreneur, Robert Maxwell. Pergamon press eventually came into the ownership of Reed Elsevier. A further factor was that the kudos and extra income from being the academic editor of a journal further multiplied the number of journals available from the commercial publishing houses. It seemed that every professor wanted a share of the profits to add to his academic salary because academic salaries were, and always have been, rather poor. In my opinion, academics partly created the problems that we are debating this afternoon. Each journal became more specialised in its coverage. It seemed at one time that there might be a journal for every element in the periodic classification. We had the journals of fluorine chemistry, selenium chemistry, phosphorus chemistry and sulphur chemistry, and it went on and on. Even developing countries started to publish. It became almost impossible for me and many other chemists to keep up with the chemical literature. We had to rely heavily on abstracting services, the most important of which is and was the manual search facility provided by the American Chemical Society in Ohio, Chemical Abstracts. The cost of Chemical Abstracts went through the ceiling. Members have already mentioned the soaring cost of journals. One source has told me that the cost of journals increased by 57 per cent. between 1998 and 2003, just five years. Along came the Conservative Government in 1979 and higher education, I am sad to say, was starved of money. I remember lists of journals being sent to me on an annual basis by the librarian of the university of Salford, where I worked, and him asking me to put the list in priority order. Every year, journals fell off the bottom of the list at an accelerating rate. That was a sad time. That is the background that has led to today's debate. One of the greatest changes is access to the world's literature on the worldwide web. It is no longer necessary to dive across the campus, search through the journals on the dusty shelves, find the one wanted and read the paper in often cluttered conditions. The papers can be read at home and at a desk in an office. What a boon that has been to scientists. Probably the most prolific scientific author of all time happens to be a friend of mine. He is called Professor Alan Katritzky, and he left the university of East Anglia many years ago for the university of Florida at Gainesville. He is such a prolific scientific publisher that his name is in the ““Guinness Book of Records””. Like me, he is an organic chemist; more specifically we are both heterocyclic organic chemists. In the year 2000, Alan launched a truly open access journal, ARKIVOC for short, or archive for organic chemistry. His motivation was"““to alleviate a number of adverse trends in the practise and publication of organic chemistry, which are particularly acute in countries of the second and third world””."