A proposal for evaluating and rewarding the impact of research articles

Dear Sir,

For the benefit of the scientific community, complete Open Access to all primary scientific articles is clearly the only way to go. But to ensure the quality of the papers published, it is hard to conceive that scientific publishing could be carried out except by paid professionals. The only viable solution is therefore for publishing charges to be levied on authors. This is in fact very much the route followed by the pioneering enterprise launched as BioMed Central. On the whole, however, authors have been reluctant to publish first-rate papers in such journals because of negative perceptions and upfront charges for publication.

I believe, however, that it is possible to set up a system whereby papers would be evaluated for publication solely on their scientific soundness, whilst the best papers would be recognized and their authors rewarded for making important contributions. For example I would envisage that the amount charged for the publication of a manuscript would be inversely related to the scientific impact of that paper. The basis for this proposal is that papers would be rated retroactively, and this rating would provide the authors with a quotable evaluation of their publication that could be used on their CV or grant application.

Etienne Joly
CICT, Toulouse, France

Opening up intellectual property

A group of distinguished scientists, economists and lawyers have signed a letter to Kamil Idris, Director General of the World Intellectual Property Organisation (WIPO), calling for investigation of "new open collaborative development models" without patents.

The 7 July letter notes "in recent years there has been an explosion of open and collaborative projects to create public goods" and claims that these projects raise profound questions regarding intellectual property policies. "They also provide evidence that one can achieve a high level of innovation in some areas of the modern economy without intellectual property protection," says the letter, adding "excessive, unbalanced or poorly designed intellectual property protections may be counter-productive".

The letter calls on WIPO to convene a meeting next year to discuss new open models. The letter is signed by over sixty individuals, including prominent academics and lawyers. These include Sir John Sulston, former director of the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute, near Cambridge, UK, who won the 2002 Nobel Prize for Medicine. Other signatories are Open Access publishing advocate Peter Suber, Professor of Philosophy at Earlham College, USA, and Berkeley biologist Michael Eisen, a founder of the Public Library of Science (PLoS). Another signatory is Tim Hubbard, Head of the Human Genome Analysis group at the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute. Hubbard believes that current intellectual property practises are responsible for high drug prices and unequal access to life-saving medication.

An appendix to the letter lists seven examples of open collaborative projects that have had a major impact. These include the development of free and open software and the world wide web. The appendix also emphasizes the importance of sharing information in the success of the Human Genome Project and the SNP Consortium. Open Access scientific publishing gets a special mention, and reference is made to PLoS and BioMed Central.

Francis Gurry, an assistant-director at the WIPO, has been reported as saying "the Director General looks forward with enthusiasm to taking up the invitation to organize a conference to explore the scope and application of these models."

Funding bodies should make Open Access a condition of awarding grants

Dear Sir,

As a researcher who has been funded for many years by public sources (primarily from CDC and NIH), it is my belief that the benefits of publicly funded research should be available to the public. They should not have to pay for it twice.

Public health research is not a private enterprise, but a public one by its very nature. Moreover public health is a global enterprise and must be freely available to everyone, including the developing world. None of us is safe until we are all safe. Freedom from requiring permission to read, copy and use research literature is also freedom of access.

Scientific information, at least in public health, is not private property, but most especially when it is financed with public funds. Government publications (such as Environmental Health Perspectives, one of the leading journals in my field) are already copyright-free, because they are government documents. That has not stopped any of us from trying to publish there.

I am co-Editor-in-Chief of an Open Access journal (Environmental Health, a BioMed Central specialty journal available at http://www.ehjournal.net). I started the journal with one of my colleagues because I believe in Open Access and was appalled at the behavior of some of the commercial publishers who were slowly monopolizing the market, a trend that in itself I saw as a danger.

Dave Ozonoff
Boston University School of Public Health,
Boston, MA, USA

Send your letters to:
openaccess@biomedcentral.com

Ross Upshur, Sunnybrook and Women's College Health Sciences Centre

Ross Upshur is the director of the Primary Care Research Unit at the Sunnybrook Campus of the Sunnybrook and Women's College Health Sciences Centre. He has published nine articles in BMC journals.

I was excited by the promise of rapid peer review and publication. I was also impressed by the direct links to PubMed.

I find BioMed Central a superb publisher to work with. It has, perhaps, the most flawless electronic submission process I have experienced with very few glitches and crashes. Peer review is prompt and has been, for the most part, constructive and led to improvements in the papers submitted. The other chief virtue of BMC journals is their speed of review and very little lag time for publication. This reduces the wait for papers to appear in the literature. Indeed, one of our papers was cited by another BMC paper three days after it was posted, a timespan inconceivable in print-based journals.

I believe an online Open Access journal extends the range of readership beyond the confines of libraries and subscriptions and truly opens up global communication of scientific ideas.

WHAT, WHO and WHY?

A short guide to the players, stakeholders and technical terms relevant to Open Access publishing, "WHAT, WHO and WHY?" keeps readers informed about the world of Open Access.

What is SPARC?
The Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition, commonly known as SPARC, describes itself as a "catalyst for action". A nonprofit organization, its overall mission is to make scholarly journals affordable. SPARC primarily operates in the science, technology and medicine (STM) arena. The European arm, SPARC Europe, is directly affiliated with SPARC but has a European remit and focus.

SPARC currently operates three main programs. The Alternatives Program provides lower cost, direct competitors to highly priced journals. The Leading Edge Program sponsors projects developing technological use or innovative business models. And the Scientific Communities Program supports the development of portals for distinct academic communities.

SPARC is also heavily involved in encouraging action from librarians and researchers. The Create Change campaign encourages advocacy, while Declaring Independence provides a guide to running academic journals that are controlled by the community, rather than by commercial publishers.

Who is behind SPARC?
SPARC was created with the support of the US-based Association of Research Libraries (ARL). SPARC is open to institutions from the US, as well as the international academic and research community, and currently has about 200 members in North America, Europe, Asia, and Australia. SPARC members - primarily universities and libraries - support SPARC through annual membership fees.

The umbrella organization for SPARC Europe is the Ligue des Bibliothèques Européennes de Recherche (LIBER), with additional support from organizations including JISC, a joint committee of UK further and higher education funding bodies.

Why does SPARC exist?
SPARC was launched in June 1998 by a group of libraries frustrated at high journal prices and the rapid rises in subscription costs. The founders established SPARC to promote competition in the scholarly publishing marketplace. The idea was to use libraries’ combined buying power to aid the creation and growth of high quality, low-priced peer-reviewed journals.

SPARC publishes the monthly Open Access Newsletter, edited by Peter Suber, which includes news and analysis about the Open Access movement. SPARC also hosts the Open Access Forum, an online discussion forum.