Cameron Neylon

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[Nature Publishing
Group](http://www.nature.com/npg "Nature Publishing Group"){.zem_slink
rel="homepage"} yesterday [announced a new
venture](http://www.nature.com/press_releases/scientificreports.html),
very closely modelled on the success of [PLoS ONE](http://plosone.org),
titled Scientific Reports. Others have started to cover the
[details](http://feeds.plos.org/~r/plos/blogs/mfenner/~3/2i-WWgV5B3E/)
and [some
implication](http://pbeltrao.blogspot.com/2011/01/why-would-you-publish-in-scientific.html)s
so I won't do that here. I think there are three big issues here. What
does this tell us about the state of [Open
Access](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_access_%28publishing%29 "Open access (publishing)"){.zem_slink
rel="wikipedia"}? What are the risks and possibilities for NPG? And why
oh why does NPG [keep insisting on a non-commercial
licence](http://cameronneylon.net/blog/why-i-am-disappointed-with-nature-communications/)?
I think those merit separate posts so here I'm just going to deal with
the big issue. And I think this is really big.

\[I know it bores people, hell it bores me, but the non-commercial
licence is a big issue. It is an even bigger issue here because this
launch may define the ground rules for future scholarly
communication.Â Open Access with a non-commercial licence actually
achieves very little either for the community, or indeed for NPG, except
perhaps as a cynical gesture.Â The following discussion really assumes
that we can win the argument with NPG to change those terms. If we can
the future is very interesting indeed.\]

The Open Access movement has really been defined by two strands of
approach. The "[Green
Road](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-archiving)" involves self
archiving of pre-prints or published articles in subscription journals
as a means of providing access. It has had its successes, perhaps more
so in the humanities, with deposition mandates becoming increasingly
common both at the institutional level and the level of funders. The
other approach, the "[Gold
Road](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_access_publishing)" is for most
intents and purposes defined by commercial and non-profit publishers
based on a business model of article processing charges (APCs) to
authors and making the published articles freely available at a
publisher website. There is a thriving community of "shoe-string
business model" journals publishing small numbers of articles without
processing charges but in terms of articles published OA publishing is
dominated byÂ [BioMedCentral](http://biomedcentral.com), the pioneers in
this area, now owned by Springer, [Public Library of
Science](http://www.plos.org/ "Public Library of Science"){.zem_slink
rel="homepage"}, and on a smaller scale
[Hindawi](http://www.hindawi.com/). This approach has gained more
traction in the sciences, particularly the biological sciences.

From my perspective yesterday's announcement means that for the
sciences, the argument for Gold Open Access as the default publication
mechanism has effectively been settled. Furthermore the future of most
scholarly publishing will be inÂ publication venues that place no value
on a subjective assessment of "importance".Â Those are big claim, but
NPG have played a bold and possibly decisive move, in an environment
where PLoS ONE was already starting to dominate some fields of science.

PLoS ONE was already becoming a default publication venue. A standard
path for getting a paper published is, have a punt at
Cell/Nature/Science, maybe a go at one of the "nearly top tier"
journals, and then head straight for PLoS ONE, in some cases with the
technical assessments already in hand. However in some fields,
particularly chemistry, the PLoS brand wasn't enough to be attractive
against the strong traditional pull of [American Chemical
Society](http://www.acs.org/ "American Chemical Society"){.zem_slink
rel="homepage"} or [Royal Society of Chemistry](http://www.rsc.org/)
journals and *[Angewandte
Chemie](http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/journal/10.1002/(ISSN)1521-3773)*.
Scientific Reports changes this because of the association with the
Nature brand. If I were the ACS I'd be very worried this morning.

The announcement will also be scaring the hell out of those publishers
who have a lot of separate, lower tier journals.Â The problem for
publication business models has never been with the top tier, that can
be made to work because people want to pay for prestige (whether we can
afford it in the long term is a separate question). The problem has been
the volume end of the market. I back [Dorothea Salo's
prediction](http://scientopia.org/blogs/bookoftrogool/2010/05/04/no-more-can-kicking/)
\[[and
again](http://scientopia.org/blogs/bookoftrogool/2010/12/02/zero-sum-journal-publishing-game/)\]
that 2011/12 would see the big publishers looking very closely at their
catalogue of 100s or 1000s of low yield, low volume, low prestige
journals and see the beginning of mass closures, simply to keep down
subscription increases that academic libraries can no longer pay for.
Aggregated large scale journals with streamlined operating and peer
review procedures, simplified and more objective selection criteria, and
APC supported business models make a lot of sense in this market.
Elsevier, Wiley, Springer (and to a certain extent BMC) have just lost
the start in the race to dominate what may become the only viable market
in the medium term.

With two big players now in this market there will be real competition.
Others [have
suggested](http://friendfeed.com/pedrobeltrao/192dbb6f/why-would-you-publish-in-scientific-reports)
\[see [Jason Priem](http://jasonpriem.com/)'s comment\] this will be on
the basis of services and information. This might be true in the longer
term but in the short to medium term it will be on two issues: brand,
and price.Â The choice of name is a risk for NPG, the Nature brand is
crucial to success of the venture, but there's a risk of dilution of the
brand which is NPG's major asset.Â That the APC for Science Reports has
been set identically to PLoS ONE is instructive. [I have previously
argued](http://cameronneylon.net/blog/in-defence-of-author-pays-business-models/)
that APC driven business models will be the most effective way of
forcing down publication costs and I would expect to see competition
develop here. I hope we might soon see a third player in this space to
drive effective competition.

At the end of the day what this means is that there are now seriously
credible options for publishing in Open Access venues (assuming we win
the licensing argument) across the sciences, that funders now support
Article Processing Charges, and that there is really no longer any
reason to publish in that obscure subscription journal that no-one
actually read anyway. The dream of a universal database of freely
accessible research outputs is that much closer to our reach.

Above all, this means that PLoS in particular has succeeded in its aim
of making Gold Open Access publication a credible default option. The
founders and team at PLoS set out with the aim of changing the
publication landscape. PLoS ONE was a radical and daring step at the
time which they pulled off. The other people who experimented in this
space also deserve credit but it was PLoS ONE in particular that found
the sweet spot between credibility and pushing the envelope. I hope that
those in office are cracking open some bubbly today. But not too much.
For the first time there is now some serious competition and its going
to be tough to keep up. There remains a lot more work to be done
(assuming we can sort out the licence).

*Full disclosure: I am an academic editor for PLoS ONE, editor in chief
of the BioMedCentral journal Open Research Computation, and have advised
PLoS, BMC, and NPG in a non-paid capacity on a variety of issues that
relate closely to this post.*

###### Related articles {#related-articles .zemanta-related-title}

- [Nature Publishing Group Announces New Open Access Journal and Support
  for CC!](http://creativecommons.org/weblog/entry/25925)
  (creativecommons.org)
- [The Library: Three Jeremiads by Robert Darnton \| The New York Review
  of
  Books](http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2010/dec/23/library-three-jeremiads/?pagination=false)
  (nybooks.com)
- [For Open Access Journals, Size Does
  Matter](http://scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/2010/12/16/for-open-access-journals-size-does-matter/)
  (scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org)

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Image via Wikipedia  Nature Publishing Group yesterday announced a new venture, very closely modelled on the success of PLoS ONE, titled Scientific Reports. Others have started to cover the details and some implications so I won’t do that here. I think there are three big issues here. What does this tell us about the state of Open Access? What are the risks and possibilities for NPG?

Messaggi di Rogue Scholar

PLoS (and NPG) redefine the scholarly publishing landscape