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Blood, 1 May 2004, Vol. 103, No. 9, pp. 3257.
EDITORIALS Open access, yes! Open excess, no!Blood A move to increase general access to scientific journal articles has figured prominently in the news lately, and it is important for all scientists and physicians, including our readership, to educate themselves on this issue. A goal of the open access movement is to provide unfettered, free public access to articles in scientific journals, including journals like Blood that focus on specialized topics in biology and medicine. At present, access to the full content of most biomedical journals requires a subscription paid for by individuals, departments, or institutional libraries. Rising subscription rates can be a source of pressure on subscribers, and a particularly unrelenting one in the case of libraries that try to purchase a limited number of subscriptions from certain large commercial publishing houses and are required to buy an entire set of journals at exceedingly high prices. Leading proponents of the open access movement would shift the burden of publishing costs to authors, who currently already pay variable page fees and often significant charges to subsidize the cost of color figures. One widely publicized open access model, that of the Public Library of Science, asks authors to pay $1500 per article (http://www.plos.org). However, this sum does not begin to pay for the cost of publication. For Blood, which is owned by the American Society of Hematology (http://www.hematology.org), the estimated cost of publishing a paper online and in print is $5100; and if the journal were to publish the article only online, the cost would still be $2700. Under the current Blood model, these costs are borne by a combination of sources, including authors, advertisers, and subscribers. Even if some authors or their granting agencies were able to pay these costs, other authors might not be able to do so. This could create an uneven playing field, a situation that is not in the best interests of science, but a potential unintended consequence of some open access models. Since rapid, facile, and complete communication of scientific advances benefits everyone, what journal, including Blood, would not want its pages purveyed by as many readers as possible? Given the financial realities, can some of the noble ideas and legitimate concerns of the open access movement be addressed but at the same time be dissociated from a currently unsustainable business model? At Blood, we believe the answer is yes. It is the goal of Blood to provide its content in the most unencumbered way and at the lowest possible cost to its readers and subscribers, without jeopardizing the journal's mandate to provide rigorous editorial review and to publish the most significant advances in hematology. Toward such a goal, Blood adheres to the recently annunciated Washington DC Principles For Free Access to Science: A Statement from Not-for-Profit Publishers (http://www.dcprinciples.org). In addition, ASH has developed its own statement on open access, which can be found at http://www.hematology.org/government/policy/open_access.cfm. Several recent and forthcoming policies of Blood are also relevant in this context:
Journals operated by learned scientific societies espouse various "degrees" of open access, consistent with their varied goals and business models. They serve readers and benefit the scientific process by providing an editorial filter with the assistance of expert reviewers. They must answer fiscally to interested stakeholders: the scientific societies. However, unlike commercial publishers, society journals do not have to answer to stockholders and bean counters. The future success of Blood will be gauged by a set of criteria that have far more to do with science, quality, and communicating translational breakthroughs than with money. One hard indicator that Blood has been largely meeting the needs of authors and readers is the unrelenting increase in manuscripts submitted: an average of 12% in each of the past five years, leading to a total of 4387 in 2003 alone. If this trend continues, the journal expects to be able to publish only about 25% of submitted manuscripts in 2004, a high bar indeed, but one that reflects both editorial responsibility and fiscal reality. New, viable models for scientific publishing are expected to evolve over the next several years. The editorial team at Blood is committed to evolve with them to maximize access and minimize excess.
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| Copyright © 2004 by American Society of Hematology Online ISSN: 1528-0020 | |||||||||
