Rhodri J Walters writes “Cell Science has become the first scientific Journal to introduce the payment of royalties to scientific authors. As part of the emerging wave of open access online Journals, Cell Science aims to increase the availability of scientific research. Accordingly, Cell Science has marked its 2nd anniversary with the launch of a micropayment system which aims to make scientific research more affordable and accessible to the global community, charging only 50 per published article. A recent arrival within a global Scientific, Technical & Medical (STM) publishing market worth an estimated $11bn in 2004, Cell Science seeks to transform the way in which scientific journals are funded by enfranchising authors and reducing the cost burden to consumers.
Rhodri J Walters writes “Cell Science has become the first scientific Journal to introduce the payment of royalties to scientific authors. As part of the emerging wave of open access online Journals, Cell Science aims to increase the availability of scientific research. Accordingly, Cell Science has marked its 2nd anniversary with the launch of a micropayment system which aims to make scientific research more affordable and accessible to the global community, charging only 50 per published article. A recent arrival within a global Scientific, Technical & Medical (STM) publishing market worth an estimated $11bn in 2004, Cell Science seeks to transform the way in which scientific journals are funded by enfranchising authors and reducing the cost burden to consumers.
Currently few but the very wealthiest institutions are able to subscribe to the full range of scientific literature available. An estimated 2,000 international publishers presently print over a million articles a year in more than 16,000 journals. Given that a subscription to a single minor publication such as Brain Research can cost $23,622 a year, it is no surprise that UK libraries alone have seen subscription costs spiral by more than 200% over the past ten years.
The advent of the Internet has driven an explosive growth in open access publishing, although this has not yet significantly impacted upon the cost of journal subscriptions. This is simply because each individual journal owns an effective copyright monopoly on the information it publishes. Although open access publishers such as PLoS and BioMedCentral allow access to their articles without cost, this is achieved by charging authors up to $1,500 to offset the handling and printing costs for each article they publish, in effect making scientific publishing a form of advertising. Consequently career researchers are trapped between the clashing rocks of â?~pay-to-publishâ?T and â?~publish-or-perishâ?T, or more simply â?~pay-or-perishâ?T. The horns of the dilemma are how to encourage open access publishing without holding scientific authors to ransom.
The open-access debate is more than merely a question of economics – it is an issue of unrestricted access to publicly funded information. Indeed, open access has become a byword for the freedom of scientific information. Within a Utopian system, scientific knowledge should be free and widely available to everyone, although scientific findings are no more free to publish than they are to produce. Even open access Internet journals need to find significant sums to cover the costs of high bandwidth hosting, content preparation, and web programming.
There is however a viable alternative to both the existing subscription-based and open access â?~pay-to-publishâ?T models. The solution, first instituted by Cell Science, is a micropayment model, where small revenues are generated every time an article or edition is accessed by the reader. In sufficient volumes micropayments would cover not only publication costs, but also allow the payment of royalties to authors as well as third party processing fees. Journals may now rise and fall according to fairer market principles, with more popular Journals collecting higher revenues and paying out more in royalties to the most successful authors. Leading authors would in turn be drawn to the most prolific and highest paying journals, creating a fairer open market structure within STM publishing.
Whilst US Government funded PubMed, presently the worldâ?Ts most important search engine for accessing medical articles, has recently been criticised for excluding many non-American titles from its database, the same cannot be held to be true for Googleâ?Ts new entry into the world of academic publishing, Google Scholar. As the indexing of scientific articles within global databases is essential for driving interest towards journals, Google Scholar promises true open access to a full range of scientific literature, promising to make Google a global player within the world of academic publishing in less than a year.
Funded by advertising and micropayments, Cell Science is unconstrained by the spatial limitations of printed matter. Authors will now be paid to publish with the option of having their manuscripts illustrated by Cellscience without incurring colour printing costs or handling charges. Authors are actively encouraged to innovate through the use of real-time movie clips and other state-of-the-art audiovisual media. It will be interesting to see how Cell Science fares within an intensely competitive STM market, and whether it will successfully lead the crest of the wave of economic change within the well-heeled and comfortable enclave of scientific publishing.
For a more in depth explanation of these issues please see http://www.cellscience.com/STM.html:
Cell Science Journal
http://www.cellscience.com/journal/journalindex.as p
Contact: Rhodri J. Walters Ph.D.
Director
+44 (0) 7980 748526″
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