IDWeek 2013: Media, Social Media, and Open Access

One of the great things about sitting on the planning committee of a national meeting is the ability to put together sessions that are a bit "outside the box" if you will.  During the planning of IDWeek 2013, I had the opportunity to attend the ScienceOnline2013 Conference in Raleigh where I reconnected with Maryn McKenna and met Jonathan Eisen. I thought that many of the concepts that the science journalists (McKenna) and scientists (Eisen and Smith) discussed at ScienceOnline were directly applicable and perhaps urgently needed by the public health community that attends IDWeek. Specifically, I felt that public health was a little too heavy on the "health" and a little too light on the "public." So I worked with my colleagues on the planning committee, including Scott Fridkin and Dan Diekema, to craft a session that focused on three major methods for selling public health science to the public.

The first important topic was open-access publication. If the public and journalists don't have access to your science because it's buried behind a paywall, then it doesn't even exist.  The second topic was social media, which is a method by which scientists and public health practitioners can communicate their science or policies directly to the public including science journalists. Finally, we needed a speaker to help explain how best to interact with journalists to communicate our science and messages. So, we were very lucky to have Jonathan Eisen, Tara Smith and Maryn McKenna speak at our session at IDWeek earlier this month in San Francisco.

There are several sources available for those of you interested in the session's content:

Jonathan Eisen wrote a nice post describing the entire session and also created a Storify (a collection of live tweets associated with the session) covering all three talks, both of which you can read here at one of his blogs. He's also posted his slides on slideshare.

Tara Smith posted her slides on social media at Figshare. She also posted the slides from her excellent S. aureus in animals talk, which you can access through her blog.

Open access: the train has left the station

More and more scientific research is freely accessible via the Internet. In this guest post, Microbiologist Willem van Schaik welcomes this change.

Earlier this month the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences hosted a meeting in the stately Trippenhuis building on recent developments in the field of open access publishing. In this form of publishing, scientific articles are published online, and can be read at no extra cost by anyone with an Internet connection. How much has the scientific world really been changed by open access?

Until recently, the process of publishing scientific articles followed a well-trodden path. Scientists would write a manuscript describing their finding and then would send this to a journal for publication. This journal then arranged for other scientists to complete peer review of the manuscript and if everything appeared satisfactory, the article was published in the journal. The authors then had to hand away their copyright to the publisher of the journal and finally the publisher only allowed access to the article to institutions that had paid a subscription fee.

This is a particularly successful business model for scientific publishers such as Elsevier, Springer, John Wiley & Sons, Nature Publishing Group and many others. These traditional publishers have profit margins well above 30% and earn approximately $ 2 billion per year.

This situation is clearly unsustainable. Because scientific research is mostly funded by governments (ergo the taxpayers), all over the world, tax revenues are funneled into the pockets of the shareholders of major publishers. To make matters worse, the same taxpayers are not given free access to the results of the research that they helped to fund. This is highly relevant in medical fields where doctors and patients are cut off from important scientific information.

In open access publishing the peer review process is the same as in traditional journals, but the authors of the article have to pay a fee for it to be published; however, upon on-line publication, the article is immediately accessible to everyone. In 2011, 12 percent of scientific articles were published under an open access license and this number continues to increase, especially as governments (in the European Union through the Horizon 2020 program, for example) make it a requirement that the scientific articles that have been funded by public money be made freely accessible to everyone.

Ultimately, almost everyone agrees with the principles of open access, but its interpretation and implementation is not always so easy. First, the cost of a publication in some open access journals can be remarkably high. This is especially true for open-access journals published by for-profit publishers. For example, the journal Cell Reports (published by Elsevier) charges $ 5,000 per published article. Particularly in the social sciences and humanities this much money can be difficult to cough up and this may be one of the reasons why in these fields the number of articles published under open access licenses remains fairly limited.

Some traditional (closed access) journals, allow the authors to pay a fee to make their individual article openly accessible, but in this type of hybrid open access, the researcher actually pays twice: once through the university library fees and once from their own research budget.

Besides commercial publishers, there are also non-profit open-access publishers. Here the publication costs can be significantly lower and can often be waived if the authors do not have sufficient funds to pay for the publication.

The best-known non-profit publisher of scientific articles, the Public Library of Science (PLOS), mainly focuses on the biological and biomedical sciences. PLOS ONE, the largest journal in the PLOS-stable, also publishes articles from other fields, but at relatively low numbers. It seems that open-access train has long since left the station in biomedicine, but in other areas the train is still waiting for passengers! Two exciting recent initiatives are the Open Library of Humanities (a non-profit open access initiative in the social sciences) and PeerJ, which has a revolutionary new publishing model.

But are there still obstacles on the open access train’s tracks? One problem is the explosive growth of so-called predatory open access journals. These journals target gullible scientists with the aim to have them pay their article processing fee with the promise of fast (read: non-existent) peer review. Researchers receive spam from these “journals” on a daily basis. Besides being annoying, the dangers of predatory open access journals should not be overestimated, even if they are almost always easy to recognize as scams. In fact, these journals are not unlike the infamous 419 email scams in which a Nigerian prince promises to park millions of dollars in your bank account. With a healthy dose of skepticism (a trait that should be natural to all scientists), predatory open access journals, just like these email scams, should not be successful.

Some claim that the quality of open access journals is lower than that of traditional journals, because the publisher has a financial interest in publishing as many articles as possible. This is not a valid argument: bona-fide journals (both open and closed access) cannot publish everything that is being sent to them, since these journals would quickly become known as a dumping ground of articles of highly dubious quality, in which no reputable scientist would want to publish. Indeed, several open access journals (eg BMJ, PLOS Biology and eLife) are already seen as ranking at or near the top of their fields.

The general expectation during the symposium of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences was that in the coming years, more and more science will be available through open access, because of new regulations by governments and an increased desire of scientists to have their work read by the widest possible audience. In many cases when researchers publish their work in closed access journals, they can already post their manuscripts in freely accessible public databases, like PubMedCentral, arXiv or Figshare. In the end, the open access publishing model for the dissemination of scientific knowledge will reduce costs and be more efficient than traditional publishing models, benefiting us all, as scientists and as taxpayers.

Willem van Schaik is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Medical Microbiology of the University Medical Center Utrecht (Utrecht, The Netherlands). His research focuses on the genomics of antibiotic-resistant opportunistic bacteria and the evolution of drug resistance. Willem is an Academic Editor for PLOS ONE. His Google Scholar profile can be found here and his Twitter here.

PeerJ and Why Giraffes Have Short Necks

Sometimes in life you need a new perspective. In the entirety of my existence, I've always thought of giraffes as having long necks, and I bet many of you did too. But then PeerJ went live today and suddenly my view of giraffes changed.  Instead of long necks, they're more of a medium neck creature. You see, today I discovered that sauropod dinosaurs had necks 15 meters in length or 6x longer than the world record for giraffes.** And as an aside, I learned what anatomic features enabled them to have such long necks.

And it's not just my perspective on neck length that changed today, it's my perspective on open-access publishing.  Until today, if you wanted to publish in an open-access journal, it would be a high-cost affair. For example, publishing in BMC-Infectious Diseases might cost you $2055/article and publishing in PLoS One might cost you $1350/article. Starting today, you can publish your hard-earned research findings in an open-access, advertising free peer-reviewed journal for .... $99.  And that one-time only $99 "membership" will allow you to publish one article a year.  Of course there's a slight catch. Each author has to pay the $99, so if you have 5 authors, it'll cost you $495. If you usually publish with the same author group, that will be a one-time cost.

We've written frequently about the benefits of open-access publishing including increased readership of your papers and the societal benefits of free access to research findings for our tax-paying funders (thank you tax payers!). There are many perceived barriers to open-access, particularly legacy promotion/tenure committees at universities, but these can be overcome. One real barrier has always been cost, but at $99 or even $495 that barrier is slowly going away. What a nice change in perspective!

For more info see Mike Taylor's post in the Guardian Feb 12, 2013

Image source: wikipedia

COI acknowledgement: I'm an Academic Editor at PeerJ (as is Dan). I'm also a section editor at the open-access journal Antimicrobial Resistance and Infection Control, and was recently named Section Editor for SHEA's journal Infection Control and Hospital Epidemiology.

**Yes, I've seen a sauropod skeleton before but I've never thought of giraffes as having short necks. It's the juxtaposition that was refreshing, like open-access next to $99.

Rise of Predatory Open-Access Publishers: Authors Beware!

One of my mentees was recently asked to join the editorial board of a journal we've never heard of and others have been asked to submit papers and become editors for special issues for brand new journals. My advice is always to steer clear of these journals. It seems our experience is not unique.  In a recent Q&A for the Chronicle of Higher Education, Carl Elliot describes the rise of predatory publishers, how they are interfering with promotion and tenure and why we must protect junior faculty from them. Definitely worth a read...

image source: wikipedia (NJR ZA)

Good riddance...

...to the Research Works Act, a bill which would have prohibited the federal government from requiring open access to research funded by the federal government. You read that correctly: you, dear taxpayer, get to pay for the research; then, when you want to read the results, you'll have to pay again!

A Slate commentary on this, here. As we've documented over the past month or so on this blog, the winds of open access seem to be picking up....

The Parable of Free Food and #OpenAccess

One day a wizard made an amazing Food Teleporting Duplicator. Free food for all.  What could go wrong?  The Guardian (Mike Taylor) posted this amazing story of farmers and distributors and people. There are some important lessons for open access academic publishing.  Enjoy.

Source: Mike Taylor, The Guardian, 10 Feb 2012: "The parable of the farmers and the Teleporting Duplicator" 

h/t Michael Eisen

@eliowa

Don't mess with mathematicians!

Today's New York Times has a piece on a movement organized by mathematicians to boycott Elsevier, the behemoth publisher of academic journals. Nearly 6,000 researchers have joined the boycott of publishing in, peer reviewing for, or serving on the editorial boards of Elsevier journals. The tipping point was apparently the movement by Elsevier and other publishers to attempt to undo the NIH rule requiring studies funded by taxpayers to be made freely available to readers without subscription fees. In this document, the organizers nicely lay out their arguments on how for-profit publishers are exploiting academicians and academic libraries. I wish the mathematicians an eternal supply of sharpened pencils and much success in battling Goliath.

Graphic: Justin Ketterer

A New #OpenAccess Platform

F1000 Research is a new platform for immediate publication along with open, post-publication peer review and a site for raw data repository. The open review is described as a "simple formal check by invited reviewers confirming that the work is scientifically sound, with commenting optional... at any stage...any registered reader can also comment on the work and authors can respond."  Importantly, the default standard is to use the Creative Commons, CC-BY for  licenses for articles and CC0 for data.  The platform targets biology and medical studies.

The final platform model is not yet open.  It appears they are still seeking input on questions such as:

1. How much formal refereeing is required?
2. What is an article amendment versus an update?
3. What incentives are required to encourage post-publication refereeing, author response and revisions, and sharing of raw but template data?
4. What author fees are appropriate for the different types of content?

I suspect that Mike might have a comment on the last couple of questions.

F1000 Research (for Faculty of 1000)

New #OpenAccess Antimicrobial Resistance and Infection Control (ARIC) Journal Publishes First Papers

Andreas Voss, Jan Kluytmans and Didier Pittet have successfully started a new international, open-access journal called Antimicrobial Resistance and Infection Control (ARIC). The first batch of papers were just posted today to the ARIC website.  This event is a significant for several reasons.

The first, as I've mentioned before, is that as an open-access journal, ARIC will allow unaffiliated scientists, the general public and otherwise interested parties free full access immediately upon publication without having to wait years or pay high fees. In an editorial, accompanying the first publications, the editors highlight their views of open access including how they hope to respond to the high initial costs for authors.

They write: "ARIC's choice of "open-access" is a logical step towards its goal to be truly international and to allow the transfer of knowledge and best practices to even remote places that cannot afford printed journals. We realize that open access has financial consequence for some authors and that the standard BioMed Central rules to waive article-processing charges may not be enough. BioMed Central provides an automatic waiver to authors based in any country classified by the World Bank as low-income or lower-middle-income economies, but we intend to find solutions in the near future that will allow us to support authors from upper-middle income countries and young investigators" 

The second and I think equally important reason that ARIC's emergence is important is that we've never had an international voice in infection control. As the 1200 attendees from 84 countries at last summers ICPIC meeting can attest, international collaboration will be the key for controlling antimicrobial-resistant bacterial pathogens (think NDM-1) in the future.


I wish the editors and the ARIC journal much luck and future success!

@eliowa

Does #OpenAccess increase readership?

From the "I Wish I Did This Study" department.  Philip Davis and the American Physiological Society completed an RCT of the open-access publication model. All articles published in 11 APS journals between January and April 2007 were randomized into immediate free access (n=247) or normal subscription-only access for the first 12 months (n=1372). So did it work? Yes - far more downloads, same number of citations.

Article downloads: One-year after publication, open access articles received twice the number of full-text downloads and 61% more PDF downloads with more unique visitors. Fewer looked at the abstract with open-access, but why would they when they can read the whole thing? (see figure below)

Citations: Open-access articles were cited in similar numbers.  During the first year, 71% of open-access and 74% of subscription articles were cited at least once. At three years, citations averaged 10.6 per open-access and 10.7 per subscription-based article.

My only question. Why was this published in a newsletter and not a peer-reviewed journal?

Reference: PM Davis. Physiologist. 2010 Dec;53(6):197, 200-1.

Yes, I know this discussion isn't specific to infection prevention, but it is a "controversy" so I'm at least partially sticking to our mission. (insert emoticon)

#openAccess Costs Less: Think about it.

There are a few good examples as to why we continue to submit papers to non-open access journals. Sure open-access publication costs are high, but many researchers, even the under-funded hospital epidemiologist, should be able to gather up Departmental, Divisional or other resources to pay the publication costs. I think it's a matter of choice. Importantly, even if the research is called "unfunded", it is likely receiving hidden funding through paying of fellows' salaries or the opportunity-costs of less time spent actually doing "infection control." That is to say, someone is paying for the research.

"An implicit although obvious subtheme of Moneyball is that resistance to innovation is driven by job insecurity" - Nate Silver 

There is a new article in the Atlantic by Laura McKenna that further describes the situation, and I think it's worth a close read.  She describes the status quo very accurately:

1) Academic research is funded by national grants and/or subsidized through the university or hospital and the scientist is given "release time" to conduct the research.

2) The paper is then submitted to an academic (non-open access) journal.

3) These journals are housed and subsidized by universities (think ICHE and University of Michigan or AJIC and Columbia).

4) Journals are then edited by faculty members, who spend subsidized time editing the journal for not enough $$ to cover their time.

5) The "home" university provides offices for the editorial faculty and staff.

6) Papers selected for review are sent to faculty at other universities and are thus subsidized by these other universities, who support their peer-review activities.

7) If accepted, the manuscript is further reviewed by the editor and sent to the journal for publication

8) The publisher, to cover printing costs, sells the rights to JSTOR or other services and makes a tidy profit.

9) JSTOR then sells the papers back to university libraries for huge fees; said to be $45,000 initially and $8500/year just for the arts and sciences collection at JSTOR. If the general public (or non-university affiliated ICP) wants to read the article, they have to pay perhaps $38 to read it.

I will directly quote from her conclusion: "Step back and think about this picture. Universities that created this academic content for free must pay to read it. Step back even further. The public -- which has indirectly funded this research with federal and state taxes that support our higher education system -- has virtually no access to this material, since neighborhood libraries cannot afford to pay those subscription costs."

I would say that ALL of these costs, both visible and hidden, dwarf the one-time publication fee and would suggest that the reason we publish is to communicate our important findings with a wide audience.  If universities can't support open-access publication fees to the extent that they already silently fund closed journals, and I would suggest if they did, the pub costs would drastically decline, then I wonder if the research is even worth doing.  We easily spend 10 times more time (and money) collecting and analyzing the data, but can't cover the publication fee?  Hogwash.

Support open access!

There is an excellent OpEd piece in today's New York Times by Michael Eisen, one of the founders of the Public Library of Science. A few years ago, the NIH mandated that any studies performed that were federally funded must be made available free of charge to citizens since they had paid for the research through their tax dollars. This obviously had an impact on journals that use the traditional business model of publishing, wherein the reader bears the cost of publication via subscription, either individually or through a library. Several years ago, the open access model of publishing emerged. In this business model, the cost of publication is borne by the author, often via funds from the research sponsor. However, papers published in this model are free to the reader.

The OpEd piece today points out that some notable journals in the traditional publishing model, including the New England Journal of Medicine, are now lobbying Congress to pass a law reversing the NIH rule so that they would no longer be required to make the papers available at no cost to readers. In response, Dr. Eisen calls on researchers to publish their studies only in open access journals and for libraries to cancel their subscriptions to journals that are not open access. The greed demonstrated by journals that are financially healthy is unpalatable. However, open access is a problem for investigators who publish papers that do not have a funding source, since the publication fees are often in excess of $1000 per paper. This is particularly a problem for hospital epidemiology, a field in which much research is unfunded, and is likely one of the reasons that the open access journal Antimicrobial Resistance and Infection Control has had a slow start. Open access is clearly a great concept and it should be maintained for studies that are federally funded. And for those of us who believe that medical and scientific research is a public good, further expanding open access by reducing or eliminating authors' fees via novel approaches is a worthy goal.