Early this month David Willetts, the UK's universities and science minister, announced an intention to make taxpayer-funded academic articles freely available. Both his commentary in the Guardian and his speech to publishers exhibited careful, nuanced thought about the benefits and challenges in this adoption of open access. In both, Willetts also mentioned the involvement of Wikipedia's Jimmy Wales—and that's what became the headline for Science magazine's brief print-edition blurb, "U.K. enlists Wikipedia founder for open-access policy."
In the US, the New York Times recently engaged scientific publishing's future. But as of midafternoon on 13 May, few US publications had reported on what Willetts called a "seismic shift for academic publishing" in the UK—which, he said, publishes 5000 of the world's 23 000 peer-reviewed journals. ( NYTimes.com does offer a link to an International Herald Tribune blurb that also spotlights Wales's involvement. In a blog posting, Jennifer Howard of the Chronicle of Higher Education reported Willetts's announcement.)
The announcement plainly matters for world science. In some cases, Willetts borrowed phrasing that conflates raw research manuscripts with academic publishing's peer-reviewed, edited, processed, indexed, and archived products, as when he wrote of making "publicly funded research accessible free of charge to readers." But his use of the phrase "taxpayer-funded academic articles" aligns with his emphasis on preserving "the value added by academic publishers." In his speech he declared, "I believe that academic publishing does add value, not least because peer review is at the heart of our system of determining and communicating high-quality research." He also said, "It would be deeply irresponsible to get rid of one business model and not put anything in its place."
Willetts summarized two approaches to open access: the gold ("funders of research covering the costs") and the green ("a closed period before wider release during which journals can earn revenues"). He praised the open-access policies in place at the Wellcome Trust, which "requires all the research it funds to be made freely available online," and at the US National Institutes of Health. But he also cited complexities:
There are clear trade-offs. If those funding research pay open-access journals in advance, where will this leave individual researchers who can't cover the cost? If we improve the world's access to British research, what might we get in response? Does a preference for open access mean different incentives for different disciplines?
Near the end of his Guardian piece, Willetts introduced the Wales news, complete with a vision for crowd-sourced postpublication peer review:
Twenty years ago it would have been impossible to imagine an encyclopedia written by millions, openly and freely collaborating via the internet. Today, Wikipedia is an important part of our lives and its co-founder, Jimmy Wales, will be advising us on the common standards that will have to be agreed and adopted for open access to be a success, and also helping to make sure that the new government-funded portal for accessing research really promotes collaboration and engagement. We want to harness new technologies to enable people to comment and rate published papers in ways that were not possible before, and we want to develop new online channels that enable researchers from around the world to collaborate and share data and build new research partnerships. With Jimmy Wales's help, I'm confident that we can achieve all this and much more.
Is Willetts wise to enlist Wales? Two dissents might merit appending here:
At the end of an online Times Literary Supplement posting that was mildly skeptical about open access, a member of a classics journal's editorial committee added this paragraph:
As for bringing in Jimmy Wales as special guru, words fail me. Sure, I quite often link to wiki articles on this blog (as I have just done), but that's because I trust you to recognise the unreliable information. But wiki is notoriously error-struck (how else could it be?) ... hard to see it as a model for any form of high quality academic dissemination.
And this online comment appeared at the end of the brief online-only piece linked from Science's print-edition blurb:
Turning to Jimmy Wales to help make it happen makes almost as little sense as turning to Rupert Murdoch. Wikipedia is based on the antithesis of peer review. Asking JW to help make sure peer-reviewed research is available to all is like asking McDonalds to help the UK Food Standards Agency make sure that wholesome food is available to all.
Steven T. Corneliussen, a media analyst for the American Institute of Physics, monitors three national newspapers, the weeklies Nature and Science, and occasionally other publications. He has published op-eds in the Washington Post and other newspapers, has written for NASA's history program, and is a science writer at a particle-accelerator laboratory.
