Open Access in Environmental and Earth Sciences

A simple question: If you wanted to see the scientific papers on the state of Global Warming, or the cutting-edge papers directly addressing how society should respond (note: I can't believe this paper isn't open access, try it, follow the link), couldn't you just google scholar them and read them? Without a University or individual subscription, the answer is shockingly: no.

There is a movement afoot called the "Open Access" movement to allow the scientific literature to be accessible to anyone without subscription fees. The notion is simple: research is most often typically paid for by the tax dollars of nations of the world. That research should be freely available to the citizens who paid for it. Instead, much of that research is written in scholarly manuscripts published by private publishers who own the copyright (Note: the publishers own the copyright, not the authors) and is sold on a subscription basis to scientific libraries and interested individuals.

All that seems fine at first glance, and has largely been the business model for many decades. However, what about the parents of a sick child who want to examine the research papers themselves? Should they have to pay $30 for every article to a private (for profit) publisher? You can see the problem. This has been exacerbated by the increasing availability of the internet: many journals are becoming electronic only, or combination electronic/paper delivery. The electronic component is leased annually as long as subscription dues are paid. Unsubscribe, and the library typically loses electronic access to all the years it was a subscriber.

There's been a real tussle over this, and the Open Access movement has risen similar to the open source movement in computing (e.g. Linux), but with differences too, in particular, real editorial costs associated with publishing a scientific journal that make up the fixed costs that need to be considered. Public Library of Science (PLOS.org) is the flagship of this movement.

Earth sciences has lagged behind considerably. Our most exciting papers most often come out in Nature or Science (both are not open access, the former is For-Profit), and most of our smaller specialized journals are either Elsevier (for profit company that owns much of the scientific literature), or by the American Geophysical Union that has not adopted open access. There is Biogeosciences that has real open access, and Limnology and Oceanography, my favorite journal by far, that has pay-extra open access as an option.

The debate is starting to come to Earth and Ocean sciences. Pete Jumars, former editor of Limnology and Oceanography, wrote a truly excellent Limnology and Oceanography Bulletin piece about this recently. And interestingly, he seemed to be interacting with bloggers about it in the years before likely while formulating ideas. He seems to have come around in the intervening years between writing bloggers and writing his article. But many of my colleagues express reservations about open access, arguing that if the costs are moved to the author (e.g. $2500 author charges to publish in PLOS) then only researchers at major Universities with research grants will be able to publish (and similarly creating a problem for colleagues in third world nations). It is true the economics of open access are fundamentally different and challenging.

Yet, no matter how you view it public access to tax-dollar funded scientific research is clearly the right thing to do. Do we avoid doing something that is right because it is different and challenging? No. It will be interesting to see how this evolves in the coming years.