Etienne Joly, CR1 INSERM,

Equipe de Neuro-Immuno-Génétique Moléculaire

IPBS, Toulouse

Long standing advocate of Open Access- A proposal for evaluating and rewarding the impact of research articles,

E. Joly (2003) Open Access Now

- Further advantages of an AUIN, E. Joly (2006) PLoS Medicine

- 5 papers published in BMC journals (2001, 2003, 2004, 2006x2)

-Member of Biology Direct and Plosone Editorial Boards

Colloque de l’Académie des sciences "Évolution des publications scientifiques - Le regard des chercheurs" des 14-15 mai 2007

towards Open Access

A researcher's lookoutA researcher's lookout

• Maximum impact for authors

• Free access makes full-text searching and global data mining possible.

• Accessible not only by all scientists worldwide, including the third world, but also educators, doctors, the public …

Why would any scientist not want their papers to be open access ?

Open access

Subscription-based

1. They have to pay to publish2. The Impact Factor

Why would any scientist not want their papers to be open access?

The reasons :

Scientific Publishing today:

• Relies mostly on traditional journals produced by well established publishers

• The science publication industry has a global budget of 5 to 9 billion $ / year

• ~1 million scientific papers published / year• The average cost of a scientific paper is

therefore around 5000 and 9000 $ • This money comes mostly from library

subscriptions, i.e. from funds allocated to academic research.

• Scientific publising is highly profitable (profit margins around 30% )

Researcher

Publisher

Reader

Pay-per-view

AdvertisingLibrary

Subscription journals

€€

€€€

Subscription

Open Accessjournals

€€

€

Most publishers already apply page charges

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Researcher

Publisher

Reader

Pay-per-view

AdvertisingLibrary

Subscription journals

€€

€€€

Subscription

Open Accessjournals

€€

€

Why would any scientist not want their papers to be open access?

The reasons:

1. They have to pay

2. The Impact Factor

Traditional publishers absolutely want to hold on to the impact factor, which contributes to

- Ensure the survival of existing journals

- Prevents the arisal of new titles

- The maintenance of the restricted access mode.

The evaluation of research scientists

relies more on the impact factor of

the journals they publish in than the

actual quality and impact of the

individual papers themselves

How can we convince scientists to

give up on their veneration for the

impact factor of journals ?

• What is most needed now is a shift towards considering the impact of individual papers: - ISI ($$) , Google Scholar, - number of clicks (BMC ‘highly accessed’ label)- Faculty of 1000, highlights, reviews …

• Need for simple scoring system based on the impact of individual papers (H index )

• Meta analyses would be greatly facilitated by an Author Identification Number ( AIN )

With a broadly used

AIN (author identification number)

or SLIP ( Scientist LIcence Plate)

• One could instantly track all publications of a given scientist (including those not referenced in pubmed…)• One could get hold of their current email address (and hence ask them directly for reprints of their papers)• Citation indexes could take auto citations into account• Various indexes could be devised that would very advantageously replace the Impact factor :-)

JOLY-E-89-01

UtopiaIf most journals were Open Access…

• It would be the same people paying and receiving the service : much healthier economics, bringing down the price to publish, and the quality of service up.

• Less money would be spent on publishing, so more money could be spent on research

• In an author-pays model with more emphasis on the individual impact of papers, fewer papers would probably be published:

Less difficult to keep abreast of the literature, and hence further savings in time and money

More time and money to do research :-)