We'd like to introduce a new regular feature here at WiSci that we're calling, The Foundations of Science (FOS). These posts will scrutinize organizations that claim the mantle of science but may or may not be scientific at all. We'll provide you with information about who funds these groups, their biases, and why they were founded to help you evaluate the claims that these thinktank-like outfits make each day in the media.
Up first is the Partnership for Research Integrity in Science & Medicine (PRISM). During the past week, we've been covering the PR
war between traditional science publishers and their open access counterparts. Traditional publishers created PRISM in response to potential government legislation that they think could impact their bottom-lines.
Organization:
Partnership for Research Integrity in Science & Medicine
Acronym: PRISM
The Wired Take: As a contribution to the debate about open access, PRISM is not a good resource.
While it represents the polemics of one side of the debate well, it does not answer the real question we're all asking publishers: why should their traditional subscription model for scientific journals be the dominant avenue for dissemination of peer reviewed scientific research?
Funded By: The Executive Council of the
Professional & Scholarly Publishing Division of the Association of
American Publishers (AAP)
Council Chair: Brian D. Crawford, Senior VP, Journals Publishing Group,
Publications Division, American Chemical Society
Council Vice Chair: Michael Hays, Managing Director, Global Publishing McGraw-Hill Higher
Education Primary Purpose: Governmental lobbying, public relations
Statement to Wired: “At this time, anything we have to say is contained on the website.” Sara Firestone, Director,
Professional & Scholarly Publishing Division
The organization's name is misleading. The group's primary purpose is not "research integrity," even according to the group's own website. The site's stated mission is to "educate policy makers and the American people about the risks posed by government intervention in scholarly publishing." It takes several logical steps, and maybe some leaps, to link that mission to research integrity.
One instantiation of the government intervention the statement references is the Federal
Research Public Access Act, co-sponsored by Senators Cornyn (R-TX) and Joe
Lieberman (I-CT). The bill, bogged down in the Senate, would mandate that publicly-funded research papers be made publicly-available on the Internet within 6 months of publication. This would replace the voluntary procedure that the National Institutes of Health currently has in place, archived at PubMed Central.
The House passed a similar bill with a 12 month window in July.
A longer version of the group's mission spells out their objection to bills like FRPPA:
Traditional journals have relied on subscriptions from libraries and institutions "for sufficient and sustainable financial support." To be fair, a free public archive of papers could very well hurt the academic journals’ business. One would expect traditional publishers to fight a measure that allows the public free access to what they consider their content. However, given that many physics and life sciences papers are already freely available and thriving journals still exist in those disciplines, it is not clear that their businesses would fail. Still, this part of PRISM’s argument seems fair, if obviously self-interested.
PRISM’s bigger argument is that mandating open-access would hurt science itself by dismantling the peer review process.
Some worry that the law would, as one
Wired commenter put it, "weaken the peer-review journals; mak[ing]
them vulnerable financially by curtailing their revenue streams. Who wins?
Cooked science." This reasoning conflates the survival of traditional publishers’ current business with the survival of peer-review itself. This can’t really be supported by the facts. While traditional journals are the dominant practitioners of peer review, some open access journals are also peer reviewed.
If we believe in markets, it also stands to reason that there is significant money to be made in peer-reviewed scientific literature, and that some entrepreneur (social or traditional) would find a workable model.
What’s interesting is that PRISM's real targets are not open access journals themselves, but its own customers, i.e., libraries. Take a look at who is behind the public website promoting FRPPA: the Alliance for Taxpayer Access, which is run by "an initiative" of the Association of
Research Libraries. We assume that at least one reason they support OA is that it would allow them to cut their journal costs, which PRISM would call its publishers' revenue.
So, it's not just disinterested angels of pure science on the open access side versus evil corporate hacks on the traditional side. All parties are looking out for their own interests and pushing the business model that works best for them. Of course, research libraries, with their good-looking if a bit bookish librarians and more limited budgets, cut slightly more sympathetic figures than Elsevier or McGraw Hill.
Yale’s Associate University Librarian, Ann Okerson, summarized the open access dispute in a 2004 article:
As a contribution to this real debate, PRISM is not a good resource. Its orientation is polemic, not scientific.
See Also
Mandated Open Access Bill Stalled in Senate Traditional
Journal Publishers' Anti-Open-Access PR Plan Revealed
Open Access
Launches Journal Wars
