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Scientific Publications: Free for all?

: The hon. Gentleman is right, and I did not mean to imply anything untoward. The interests of those working in publishing go far wider than the open access debate, as he will acknowledge. The same applies to science. A large number of my constituents work in that world and in libraries. They have concerns about high costs and the demands on their budgets when it comes to purchasing journals. I have heard the debates about whether the costs per article downloaded and per article bought are going up or down. However, people who work in libraries tell me that they feel that they are being squeezed. It is important to recognise that. There is disagreement in the science world about whether open access is good or bad or something that does not matter to individuals. I shall explore that in a moment. Because commercial publishers make profits, that does not mean that they do not have a valid interest in ensuring that we have a healthy scientific publications world. The not-for-profit organisations that create surpluses that they reinvest should not claim too much of the moral high ground; they, too, have self interest. For the record, I do not consider that there is anything wrong with that, or with commercial publishers making profits out of publicly-funded research. I have greater disdain for some commercial enterprises, such as tobacco companies, and no such problem with publishing companies. There is a difference between making money by legitimate means and making money by peddling disease to developing countries. We should give a cheer for the healthy world of commercial publishing that we have in this country, led by innovative publishing organisations. The profiteering argument is not a good one. The second point made by the hon. Member for Wantage concerned the argument, which he was correct to query, that because something is publicly funded, it has to be publicly available free of charge regardless of the impact that that might have on the publishing world. It is not right to be so absolute. We can say that it would be a good thing for something that is publicly funded to be widely available, and for no charge to be made for access to it. However, it does not necessarily follow that it ought to be; that would have to be balanced against the viability of the publishing model and the continuing health of the UK publishing industry. Again, I agree with the hon. Gentleman. Where I began to depart from his point of view was on the important question of peer review. He said that an author pays model would result in journals that were less likely to be peer reviewed. Rightly, he did not say that open access or author pays means no peer review. However, it is fair to say that many in the field who promote open access and author pays are extremely sensitive about the allegation that just because the author pays model might seem to create a conflict of interest there is any evidence in established author pays, open access journals that peer review is any less strong. It is vital, as the Select Committee report made clear, that any move to open access should take with it the strongest possible element of peer review, and that a crystal clear distinction should be made between post-print, post-peer-reviewed work on institutional repositories and work that has not been peer reviewed. Neither I, as an individual, nor my party would have any truck with anything that took away from the importance of peer review. As the hon. Member for Norwich, North wisely said, however, there are problems with peer review. It is not perfect. Sometimes it does not work. We saw the example of the Wakefield paper in The Lancet. I am pleased to say that, although The Lancet is published by Elsevier, the separation that has to exist between editorial policy and publisher did exist in that case. I do not question that. It is absolutely right to cast no blame on the publisher for the fact that the paper was published in an inadequate form—I think that some of the authors were responsible for those problems—or for the fact that it has not been fully retracted. In my view, it should have been fully retracted, but I do not think that that has anything to do with the publisher. The same Chinese walls must exist in an open access or author pays model of publishing to ensure that there is no question of the requirements of peer review being reduced simply to attract authors, who are paying, to submit their papers. I do not think that any journal that wanted to be taken seriously and to ensure that it attracted good-quality research from responsible authors could afford, in commercial and reputational terms, to give any indication that the requirements for quality assurance were reduced in that model.