Open Access – Close Read

An odd paper about India’s gold OA fees

A paper about open-access fees in India published recently in the journal Current Science has repeatedly surfaced in my networks over some problems with it. The paper is entitled ‘Publications in gold open access and article processing charge expenditure: evidence from Indian scholarly output’ and is authored by Raj Kishor Kampa, Manoj Kumar Sa, and Mallikarjun Dora of Berhampur University, the Indian Maritime University, and IIM Ahmedabad respectively. This is the paper’s abstract:

Article processing charges (APCs) ensure the financial viability of open access (OA) scholarly journals.The present study analyses the number of gold OA articles published in the Web of Science (WoS)-indexed journals by Indian researchers during 2020, including subject categories that account for the highest APC in India. Besides, it evaluates the amount of APC expenditure incurred in India. The findings of this study reveal that Indian researchers published 26,127 gold OA articles across all subjects in WoS-indexed journals in 2020. Researchers in the field of health and medical sciences paid the highest APC, amounting to $7 million, followed by life and earth sciences ($6.9 million), multidisciplinary ($4.9 million), and chemistry and materials science ($4.8 million). The study also reveals that Indian researchers paid an estimated $17 million as APC in 2020. Furthermore, 81% of APCs went to commercial publishers, viz. MDPI, Springer-Nature, Elsevier and Frontier Media. As there is a growing number of OA publications from India, we suggest having a central and state-level single-window option for funding in OA journals and backing the Plan S initiative for OA publishing in India.

It’s unclear what the point of the study is. First, it seems to have attempted a value-neutral assessment of how much scientists in India are paying as article processing charges (APCs) to have their papers published in gold OA journals. It concludes with some large, and frankly off-putting, numbers – a significant drain on the resources India has availed its scholars to conduct research – yet it proceeds to “suggest having a central and state-level single-window system” so scientists can continue to pay these fees with less hassle, and for the Indian government (presumably) to back the Plan S initiative.

As far as I know, India has declined to join the Plan S initiative; this is a good thing for the reasons enumerated here (written when India was considering joining the initiative), one of which is that it enabled the same thing the authors of the paper have asked for but on an international scale: allowing gold OA journals to hike their APCs knowing that (often tax-funded) research funders will pay the bills. This paper also marks the first time I’ve known anyone to try to estimate the APCs paid by Indian scientists and, once estimated, deem the figures not worthy of condemnation.

Funnily enough, while the paper doesn’t concern itself with taking a position on gold OA in its abstract or in the bulk of its arguments, it does contain the following statements:

“Although there is constant growth in OA publications, there is also a barrier to publishing in quality OA journals, especially the Gold and Hybrid OA, which levies APC for publications.”

“However, the high APC charges have been an issue for low-income and underdeveloped countries. In the global south, the APC is a real obstacle to publishing in high-quality OA journals”

“Extant literature reveals a constant increase in APC by most publishers like BioMed Central (BMC), Frontiers Media, Multidisciplinary Digital Publishing Institute (MDPI), and Hindawi”

“One of the ideas of open access was to make equitable access and check the rampant commercialization of scholarly publications. Still, surprisingly, many established publishers have positioned themselves in the OA landscape.”

“formulation of national-level OA policies in India is the need of the hours since OA is inevitable as everyone focuses on equity and access to scholarly communications.”

But these statements only render the paper’s conclusion all the more odd.

Of course, this is my view and the views of some scholars in India’s OA advocacy community and the authors of the Current Science paper are free to disagree. The second issue is objectively frustrating.

Unlike the products of science communication and science journalism, a scientific paper may simply present a survey of some numbers of interest to a part of the research community, but the Current Science paper falls short on this count as well. Specifically, not once does its body mention the words “discount” and “waiver” (or their variations), which is strange because OA journals regularly specify discounted APCs – or waive them altogether – if certain conditions are met (including, in the case of some journals, if a paper’s authors are from a low- and middle-income country). Accounting for discounts, researchers Moumita Koley (IISc Bengaluru) and Achal Agrawal (independent) estimated the authors could have overestimated Indian scientists’ APC expenses by 47.7% – ranging from 4.8% when submitting manuscripts to the PLoS journals to 428.3% when submitting to journals of the American Chemical Society.

Gold OA’s publishing fees are not in proportion to the amount of work and resources required to make a published paper open-access, and often extortionate, and that while discounts and waivers are available, they don’t spare research-funders in other parts of the world the expense, continue to maintain large profit margins at the expense of governments’ allocations for research, and – has scientist Karishma Kaushik wrote for The Hindu – the process of availing these concessions can be embarrassing to researchers.

Issue #1: the Current Science paper erects a flawed argument both in favour of and in opposition to APCs by potentially overestimating them! Issue #2: In their correspondence, Koley and Agrawal write:

“A possible reason for their error could be that DOAJ, which forms their primary source, does not mention discounts usually given to authors from lower-income countries. Another important error is that while the authors claim that they filtered the articles. Page 1058: ‘Extant literature suggests that the corresponding author most likely pays the APCs’. Following the corresponding author criterion, APC expenditure incurred by Indian researchers was estimated; they have not actually done so. Table 2 shows the discrepancy if one applies the filter. Also, Table 1 shows the estimated error in calculation if this criterion is included in calculation.”

To this, the authors of the Current Science paper responded thus:

“We wish to clarify any misunderstanding that may have arisen. We analysed the APC expenditure incurred in India without calculating the discounts or waivers received by authors as there is no specific single source to find all discounts, for example, an author-level or institute-level discount; hence, it would be difficult to provide an actual amount that Indian researchers spent on APC. Additionally, discounts or any publisher-provided waivers are recent developments, and discounts/waivers given to authors from LMIC countries were not mentioned in DOAJ, which is the primary source of the present study. Hence, it was not analysed in the current study. These factors may be considered as limitations of the study.”

This is such a blah exchange. To the accusation that the authors failed to account for discounts and waivers, the authors admit – not in their paper but in their response to a rebuttal – they didn’t, and that it’s a shortcoming. The authors also write that four publishers they identified as receiving 53% of APCs out of India – MDPI, Springer-Nature, Elsevier, and Frontiers Media – don’t offer “country-level discounts/waivers to authors” from LMICs and that this invalidates the concerns of Koley and Agrawal that APCs have been overestimated too much. However, they don’t address the following possibilities:

The identification of these four publishers itself was founded on APC estimates that have been called into question;
“Country-level” concessions aren’t the only kind of concessions; and
The decision to downplay the extent of overestimation doesn’t account for the publishers that received the other 47% of the APCs.

It’s not clear, in sum, what value the Current Science paper claims to have, and perhaps this is a question better directed at Current Science itself, which published the original paper, two rebuttals – the second by Jitendra Narayan Dash of NISER Bhubaneswar – the authors’ unsatisfactory replies to them, and, since we’re on the topic, doesn’t seem to have edited the first correspondence before publishing it.

News coverage in India of open access papers

In a study published in November 2021, Teresa Schultz, of the University of Nevada, Reno, reported that gold, green and hybrid open-access (OA) modes of publishing of scientific papers were correlated with more mentions in the news.

Gold OA refers to scientists publishing their paper in an OA journal, and green is when scientists publish their paper in a journal and then self-archives a copy on an openly accessible website or in a repository. A hybrid OA journal is one that allows for some papers to be published OA (or gold) and for the others to stay behind a paywall.

Schultz didn’t check if there was a causative relationship between a paper’s OA status and the likelihood of it being covered in the press, but found a significant correlation. It’s a heartening result – but I think it might be useful to qualify this finding with a perspective from India, a country whose scientific-publishing literacy is likely to be lower than the global average, and certainly lower than that in the richest nations, which also have some of the world’s more mature science-journalism enterprises. (To be sure, and lest we forget, science journalism is more than just coverage of the pandemic.)

An Indian perspective might also help to understand that a paper’s coverage in the news media is as much about whether it’s OA as about whether journalists know what OA is.

Schultz has found that the contents of a green/gold/hybrid OA paper are more likely to be covered in the news than those of a non-OA paper – but didn’t check for a causative relationship. One way to interpret the latter is that she didn’t check if a journalist determined to report on a paper because it was OA. Now, a journalist making this decision requires automatically that she be aware of what OA publishing is, its merits (and demerits if possible) and the ins/outs of displaying a preference – as a journalist – for OA versus non-OA papers.

Such awareness exists among Indian media-persons but it is sharply confined to some small pockets. And when awareness of OA, at least in opposition to non-OA, is so limited, the question of whether to cover a paper based on whether it has been published in an OA journal is relegated to the bottom of the priority list – if it finds mention at all.

In India, it is likelier for the average journalist who has been tasked with covering a scientific finding – rather than a science journalist per se, because the former are at least one order of magnitude more common – to consider whether the paper was published in a journal at all; whether, in keeping with the dominant view in the Indian scientific community, that paper was peer-reviewed; and whether it was published in a prestigious journal. Otherwise, the journalist may not even discover that paper.

When I was at The Hindu, I received a lot of emails from scientists requesting coverage of their paper, and 90% of the time, they would add with pride that the papers had been published in the peer-reviewed [insert name of legacy journal here] journal; I receive fewer such emails at The Wire Science but still around half-dozen a day.

This is just to say that the way the average journalist in India discovers papers is skewed in favour of non-OA, paywalled journals, typically one of Nature, Science, The Lancet, etc. (In a roundabout way, the popular support for Sci-Hub in India might attest to this reality: we need Sci-Hub because we need to access papers behind paywalls.)

Another factor in India that skews the discoverability of papers, albeit to a lesser extent, is journal outreach. The Nature Publishing Group, PLOS and Science are all prolific outreachers (the last through the EurekAlert! service) and the papers that are covered most often by Indian mainstream media outlets have likelier than not been published in one of these journals. In fact, this together with scientists flagging their own papers to journalists would cover almost all papers published in the mainstream Indian press.

So as such, a shift in favour of OA papers isn’t likely to arise from the quarter of journalists covering science in India – at least not without significant efforts to improve their awareness of the principles of OA. Note that this post is based on my personal experiences in the Indian news media space since 2012; if you have evidence to the contrary, please share. I’d be happy to be wrong on this front.

Are preprints reliable?

To quote from a paper published yesterday in PLOS Biology:

Does the information shared in preprints typically withstand the scrutiny of peer review, or are conclusions likely to change in the version of record? We assessed preprints from bioRxiv and medRxiv that had been posted and subsequently published in a journal through April 30, 2020, representing the initial phase of the pandemic response. We utilised a combination of automatic and manual annotations to quantify how an article changed between the preprinted and published version. We found that the total number of figure panels and tables changed little between preprint and published articles. Moreover, the conclusions of 7.2% of non-COVID-19-related and 17.2% of COVID-19-related abstracts undergo a discrete change by the time of publication, but the majority of these changes do not qualitatively change the conclusions of the paper.

Later: “A major concern with expedited publishing is that it may impede the rigour of the peer review process.”

So far, according to this and one other paper published by PLOS Biology, it seems reasonable to ask not whether preprints are reliable but what peer-review brings to the table. (By this I mean the conventional/legacy variety of closed pre-publication review).

To the uninitiated: paralleling the growing popularity and usefulness of open-access publishing, particularly in the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic, some “selective” journals – to use wording from the PLOS Biology paper – and their hordes of scientist-supporters have sought to stress the importance of peer-review in language both familiar and based on an increasingly outdated outlook: that peer-review is important to prevent misinformation. I’ve found a subset of this argument, that peer-review is important for papers whose findings could save/end lives, to be more reasonable, and the rest just unreasonable and self-serving.

Funnily enough, two famously “selective” journals, The Lancet and the New England Journal of Medicine, retracted two papers related to COVID-19 care in the thick of the pandemic – invalidating their broader argument in favour of peer-review as well as the efficiency of their own peer-review processes vis-à-vis the subset argument.

Arguments in favour of peer-review are self-serving because it has more efficient, more transparent and more workable alternatives, yet many journals have failed to adopt them, and have instead used this repeatedly invalidated mode of reviewing papers to maintain their opaque style of functioning, which in turn – and together with the purported cost of printing papers on physical paper – they use to justify the exorbitant prices they charge readers (here’s one ludicrous example).

For example, one alternative is pre-publication peer-review, in which scientists upload their paper to a preprint server, like arXiv, bioRxiv or medRxiv, and share the link with their peers and, say, on social media platforms. There, independent experts review the paper’s contents and share their comments. The paper’s authors can incorporate the necessary changes, with credit, as separate versions of the same paper on the server.

Further, and unlike ‘conventional’ journals’ laughable expectation of journalists to write about the papers they publish without fear of being wrong, journalists subject preprint papers to the same treatment that is due the average peer-reviewed paper as well: with reasonable and courteous scepticism, and to qualify its claims and findings with comments from independent experts – with an added caveat, though I personally think it unnecessary, that their subject is a preprint paper.

(Some of you might remember that in 2018, Tom Sheldon argued in a Nature News & Views article that peer-review facilitates good journalism. I haven’t come across an argument more objectionable in favour of conventional peer-review.)

However, making this mode of reviewing and publishing more acceptable has been very hard, especially for the demand to repeatedly push back against scientists whose academic reputation depends on having published and being able to publish in “selective” journals and the scientometric culture they uphold, and their hollow arguments about the virtues of conventional, opaque peer-review. (Making peer-review transparent could also help deal with reviewers who use the opportunity anonymity affords them to be sexist and racist.)

But with the two new PLOS Biology papers, we have an opportunity to flip these scientists’ and journals’ demand that preprint papers ‘prove’ or ‘improve’ themselves around to ask what the legacy modes bring to the table. From the abstract of the second paper (emphasis added):

We sought to compare the and contrast linguistic features within bioRxiv preprints to published biomedical test as a while as this is an excellent opportunity to examine how peer review changes these documents. The most prevalent features that changed appear to be associated with typesetting and mentions of supporting information sections or additional files. In addition to text comparison, we created document embeddings derived from a preprint-trained word2vec model. We found that these embeddings are able to parse out different scientific approaches and concepts, link unannotated preprint-peer-reviewed article pairs, and identify journals that publish linguistically similar papers to a given preprint. We also used these embeddings to examine factors associated with the time elapsed between the posting of a first preprint and the appearance of a peer-reviewed publication. We found that preprints with more versions posted and more textual changes took longer to publish.

It seems to me to be reasonable to ask about the rigour to which supporters of conventional peer-review have staked claim when few papers appear to benefit from it. The process may be justified in those few cases where a paper is corrected in a significant way, and that it may be difficult to identify those papers without peer-review – but pre-publication peer-review has an equal chance of identifying the same errors (esp. if we increase the discoverability of preprints the way journal editors identify eminent experts in the same field to review papers, instead of relying solely on social-media interactions that less internet-savvy scientists may not be able to initiate).

In addition, it appears that in most cases in which preprints were uploaded to bioRxiv first and were then peer-reviewed and published by a journal, the papers’ authors clearly didn’t submit papers that required significant quality improvements – certainly not to the extent to which conventional peer-review’s supporters have alluded to in an effort to make such review necessary.

So, why must conventional peer-review, in the broader sense, persist?

Citations and media coverage

According to a press release accompanying a just-published study in PLOS ONE:

Highly cited papers also tend to receive more media attention, although the cause of the association is unclear.

One reason I can think of is a confounding factor that serves as the hidden cause of both phenomena. Discoverability matters just as much as the quality of a paper, and conventional journals implicated in the sustenance of notions like ‘prestige’ (Nature, Science, Cell, The Lancet, etc.) have been known to prefer more sensational positive results. And among researchers that still value publishing in these journals, these papers are more noticed, which leads to a ‘buzz’ that a reporter can pick up on.

Second, sensational results also easily lend themselves to sensational stories in the press, which has often been addicted to the same ‘positivity bias’ that the scientific literature harboured for many decades. In effect, highly cited papers are simply highly visible, and highly visibilised, papers – both to other scientists and journalists.

The press release continues:

The authors add: “Results from this study confirm the idea that media attention given to scientific research is strongly related to scientific citations for that same research. These results can inform scientists who are considering using popular media to increase awareness concerning their work, both within and outside the scientific community.”

I’m not sure what this comment means (I haven’t gone through the paper and it’s possible the paper’s authors discuss this in more detail), but there is already evidence that studies for which preprints are available receive more citations than those published behind a paywall. So perhaps scientists expecting more media coverage of their work should simply make their research more accessible. (It’s also a testament to the extent to which the methods of ‘conventional’ publishers – including concepts like ‘reader pays’ and the journal impact factor, accentuated by notions like ‘prestige’ – have become entrenched that this common-sensical solution is not so common sense.)

On the flip side, journalists also need to be weaned away from ‘top’ journals – I receive a significantly higher number of pitches offering to cover papers published in Nature journals – and retrained to spot interesting results published in less well-known journals as well as, on a slightly separate note, to situate the results of one study in a larger context instead of hyper-focusing on one context-limited set of results.

The work seems interesting, perhaps one of you will like to give it a comb.

Preference for OA research by income group

Two researchers from Rwanda performed a “systematic computational analysis of the biomedical literature” and concluded in their paper that:

… papers with authors based in sub-Saharan Africa, papers with authors based in low income countries, and papers resulting from international collaboration are all much more likely to be made openly accessible than papers that don’t have these properties.

They analysed 547,404 papers indexed in PubMed, which is:

… a free resource developed and maintained by the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) at the National Library of Medicine (NLM). PubMed PubMed provides free access to MEDLINE, NLM’s database of citations and abstracts in the fields of medicine, nursing, dentistry, veterinary medicine, health care systems, and preclinical sciences.
Source

The researchers also found that after scientists from low-income countries, those in high-income countries exhibited the next highest preference for publishing in open-access (OA) journals and that scientists from lower and upper middle-income countries – such as India – came last. It is important to acknowledge here that while there exists a marked (inverse) correlation between GDP per capita and number of publications in OA journals, a causation might be harder to pin down because GDP figures are influenced by a large array of factors.

At the same time, given the strength of the correlation, their conclusion – about scientists from middle-income countries being associated with the fewest OA papers in their sample – seems curious. The article processing charge (APC) levied by some journals to make a paper openly accessible immediately after publishing is only marginally more affordable in middle-income countries than it is in low-income countries. However, the effects of technology and initiative seem to allay some of this confusion.

There are two popular ways, or routes, to publish OA papers. In the ‘gold’ route, the authors of a paper pay the APC to the journal, which in turn makes the paper openly accessible once it is published. A common example is PLOS One, whose APC is at the lower end, $1,595 (Rs 1.13 lakh). On the other hand Nature Communications charges a stunning EUR 4,290 (Rs 3.4 lakh) per paper for submissions from India. In the ‘green route’, the authors or publishers upload the paper to a publicly accessible repository apart from formally publishing it; common example: the arXiv preprints server, which is moderated by volunteers.

There is also ‘hybrid’ OA, whereby a part of the journal’s contents are openly available and the rest is behind a paywall. In one review published in February 2018, researchers also pointed out a ‘bronze’ route: “articles made free-to-read on the publisher website” but “without an explicit [OA] license”.

The authors of the current paper reason that researchers from high-income countries might be ranking higher in their preference for OA papers because the “‘green’ route of OA has been encouraged by an enormous growth in the number of OA repositories, particularly in Europe and North America”; they also note that Africa was home to only 4% of such repositories in 2018. In the same vein, they continue, “the vast majority of funding organizations with OA policies as of 2018 were based in Europe and North America, with less than 3% of total OA policies originating from organizations based in Africa”.

Additionally, many journals frequently waive APCs for submissions from authors in low-income countries, whereas those from lower- and upper-middle income countries – again, including India – do not qualify as frequently to have their papers published without a fee. A very conservative, back-of-the-envelope estimate suggests India spends at least Rs 600 crore every year as APCs.

It was to reduce this burden that K. VijayRaghavan, the principal scientific adviser to the Government of India, announced earlier this year that India was joining the Plan S coalition of research-funders, which aims to have all research funded by them openly accessible to the public by 2021. As a result, researchers funded by Plan S members will have to submit to journals that offer gold/green routes and/or journals will have to make exceptions for publishing research funded by Plan S members.

This is going to take a bit of hammering out because the Plan S concept has many problems. Perhaps the most frustrating among them is its Eurocentric priorities. Other commentators have acknowledged that this limits Plan S’s ability to serve meaningfully the interests of researchers from South/Southeast Asia, Africa and Latin America. In July, two Argentinian researchers lambasted just this aspect and accused Plan S of ignoring “the reality of Latin America”. They wrote that Plan S views “scientific publishing and scholarly publications … as a commodity prone to commercialization” whereas in Latin America, they “are conceived as the community sharing of public goods”.

The latter is more in line with the interests of the developing world as well as with the spirit of knowledge-sharing more generally. At present, a little over 50% of research articles are not openly accessible, although this is changing thanks to the increasing recognition of OA’s merits, including the debatable citation advantage. Research-funders devised Plan S to “accelerate this transition”, as Jon Tennant wrote, but its implementation guidelines need tweaking.

Another problem with Plan S is that it keeps the focus on the ‘gold’ OA route and does little to address many researchers’ bias against less prestigious, but no less credible, journals. For example, while Plan S specifies that it will have gold-OA journals cap their APCs, scientists have said that this would be unenforceable. So, as I wrote in February:

… if Plan S has to work, researcher-funders also have to help reform scientists’ and administrators’ attitude towards notions like prestige. A top-down mandate to publish only in certain journals won’t work if the institutions aren’t equipped, for example, to evaluate research based on factors other than ‘prestige’.

To this end, the study by the researchers in Rwanda offers a useful suggestion: that the presence or absence of policies might not be the real problem.

There was no clear relationship between the number of open access policies in a region and the percentage of open access publications in that region. … The finding that open access publication rates are highest in sub-Saharan Africa and low income countries suggests that factors other than open access policy strongly influence authors’ decisions to make their work openly accessible.

On that Poynter debate about stock images and ethical visual journalism

Response to Mark Johnson, Article about free images ‘contradicts everything I hold true about journalism’, Poynter, February 9, 2018. ∞

Let’s get the caveats out of the way:

The article to which Johnson is responding did get some of its messaging wrong. As Johnson wrote, it suggested the following: “We don’t think about visuals BUT visuals are critically important. The solutions offered amount to scouring the web for royalty-free and (hopefully) copyright-released stock images.”
In doing so, the original article may have further diminished prospects for visual journalists in newsrooms around the country (whether the US or India), especially since Poynter is such a well-regarded publisher among editors and since there already aren’t enough jobs available on the visual journalism front.
I think visual journalists are important in any newsroom that includes a visual presentation component because they’re particularly qualified to interrogate how journalism can be adapted to multimedia forms and in what circumstances such adaptations can strain or liberate its participants’ moral and ethical positions.

That said, IMO Johnson himself may have missed a bit of the nuances of this issue. Before we go ahead: I’m going to shorten “royalty-free and/or copyright-released” to CC0, which is short for the Creative Commons ‘No Rights Reserved’ license. It allows “scientists, educators, artists and other creators and owners of copyright- or database-protected content to waive those interests in their works and thereby place them as completely as possible in the public domain, so that others may freely build upon, enhance and reuse the works for any purposes without restriction under copyright or database law.” However, what I’m going to say should be true for most other CC licenses (including BY, BY-SA, BY-SA-NC, BY-SA-ND and BY-SA-NC-ND).

By providing an option for publishers to look for CC0 images, the authors of the original piece may have missed an important nuance: publishers come in varying sizes; the bigger the publisher is, the less excusable it is for it to not have a visual journalism department in-house. For smaller (and the smallest) publishers, however, having access to CC0 images is important because (a) producing original images and videos can invoke prohibitive costs and (b) distribution channels of choice such as Facebook and Twitter penalise the absence of images on links shared on these platforms.

Bigger publishers have an option and should, to the extent possible, exercise that option to hire illustrators, designers, video producers and reporters, podcasters, etc. To not do so would be to abdicate professional responsibilities. However, in the interest of leveraging the possibilities afforded by the internet as well as of keeping our news professional but also democratic, it’s not fair to assume that it’s okay to penalise smaller publishers simply because they’re resorting to using CC0 images. A penalty it will be if they don’t: Facebook, for example, will deprioritise their content on people’s feeds. So the message that needs to be broadcast is that it’s okay for smaller publishers to use CC0 images but also that it’s important for them to break away from the practice as they grow.

Second: Johnson writes,

Choosing stock images for news stories is an ethically questionable choice — you don’t know the provenance of the image, you don’t know the conditions under which it was created and you don’t know where else it has been used. It degrades the journalistic integrity of the site. Flip it around — what if there were generic quotes inserted into a story? They wouldn’t advance the narrative at all, they would just act as filler.

He’s absolutely right to equate text and images: they both help tell a story and they should both be treated with equal respect and consequence. (Later in his article, Johnson goes on to suggest visuals may in fact be more consequential because people tend to remember them better.) However, characterising stock images as the journalistic equivalent of blood diamonds is unfair.

For example, it’s not clear what Johnson means by “generic quotes”. Sometimes, some quotes are statements that need to be printed to reflect its author’s official position (or lack thereof). For another, stock images may not be completely specific to a story but they could fit its broader theme, for example, in a quasi-specific way (after all, there are millions of CC0 images to pick from).

But most importantly, the allegations drub the possibilities of the Open Access (OA) movement in the realms of digital knowledge-production and publishing. By saying, “Choosing stock images for news stories is an ethically questionable choice”, Johnson risks offending those who create visual assets and share it with a CC0 license expressly to inject it into the public domain – a process by which those who are starved of resources in one part of the world are not also starved of information produced in another. Journalism shouldn’t – can’t – be free because it includes some well-defined value-adds that need to be paid for. But information (and sometimes knowledge) can be free, especially if those generating them are willing to waive being paid for them.

My go-to example has been The Conversation. Its articles are written by experts with PhDs in the subjects they’re writing about (and are affiliated with reputable institutions). The website is funded by contributions from universities and labs. The affiliations of its contributors and their conflicts of interest, if any, are acknowledged with every article. Best of all, its articles are all available to republish for free under at least a CC BY license. Their content is not of the ‘stock’ variety; their sentences and ideas are not generic. Reusing their articles may not advance the narrative inherent in them but would I say it hurts journalists? No.

Royalty-free and copyright-released images and videos free visual journalists from being involved every step of the way. This is sadly but definitely necessary in circumstances where they might not get paid, where there might not be the room, inclination or expertise necessary to manage and/or work with them, where an audience might not exist that values their work and time.

This is where having, using and contributing to a digital commons can help. Engaging with it is a choice, not a burden. Ignoring those who make this choice to argue that every editor must carefully consider the visual elements of a story together with experts and technicians hired just for this purpose is akin to suggesting that proponents of OA/CC0 content are jeopardising opportunities for visual journalists to leave their mark. This is silly, mostly because it leaves the central agent out of the picture: the publisher.

It’s a publisher’s call to tell a story through just text, just visuals or both. Not stopping to chide those who can hire visual journalists but don’t while insisting “it’s a big part of what we do” doesn’t make sense. Not stopping to help those who opt for text-only because that’s what they can afford doesn’t make sense either.

Featured image credit: StockSnap/pixabay.

Are the papers behind this year’s Nobel Prizes in the public domain?

Note: One of my editors thought this post would work for The Wire as well, so it’s been republished there.

“… for the greatest benefit of mankind” – these words are scrawled across a banner that adorns the Nobel Prize’s homepage. They are the words of Alfred Nobel, who instituted the prizes and bequeathed his fortunes to run the foundation that awards them. The words were chosen by the prize’s awarders to denote the significance of their awardees’ accomplishments.

However, the scientific papers that first described these accomplishments in the technical literature are often not available in the public domain. They languish behind paywalls erected by the journals that publish them, that seek to cash in on their importance to the advancement of science. Many of these papers are also funded by public money, but that hasn’t deterred journals and their publishers from keeping the papers out of public reach. How then can they be for the greatest benefit of mankind?

I’ve listed some of the more important papers published by this year’s laureates; they describe work that earned them their respective prizes. Please remember that my choice of papers is selective; where I have found other papers that are fully accessible – or otherwise – I have provided a note. This said, I picked the papers from the scientific background document first and then checked if they were accessible, not the other way round. (If you, whoever you are, are interested in replicating my analysis but more thoroughly, be my guest; I will help you in any way I can.)

A laureate may have published many papers collectively for which he was awarded (this year’s science laureates are all male). I’ve picked the papers most proximate to their citation from the references listed in the ‘advanced scientific background’ section available for each prize on the Nobel Prize website. Among publishers, the worst offender appears – to no one’s surprise – to be Elsevier.

A paper title in green indicates it’s in the public domain; red indicates it isn’t – both on the pages of the journal itself. Some titles in red maybe available in full elsewhere, such as in university archives. The names of laureates in the papers’ citations are underlined.

Physiology/medicine

“for their discoveries of molecular mechanisms controlling the circadian rhythm”

The paywall for papers by Young and Rosbash published in Nature were lifted by the journal on the day their joint Nobel Prize was announced. Until then, they’d been inaccessible to the general public. Interestingly, both papers acknowledge funding grants from the US National Institutes of Health, a tax-funded body of the US government.

Michael Young

Restoration of circadian behavioural rhythms by gene transfer in Drosophila – Nature 312, 752 – 754 (20 December 1984); doi:10.1038/312752a0 link

Isolation of timeless by PER protein interaction: defective interaction between timeless protein and long-period mutant PERL – Gekakis, N., Saez, L., Delahaye-Brown, A.M., Myers, M.P., Sehgal, A., Young, M.W., and Weitz, C.J. (1995). Science 270, 811–815. link

Michael Rosbash

Feedback of the Drosophila period gene product on circadian cycling of its messenger RNA levels – Nature 343, 536 – 540 (08 February 1990); doi:10.1038/343536a0 link

The period gene encodes a predominantly nuclear protein in adult Drosophila – Liu, X., Zwiebel, L.J., Hinton, D., Benzer, S., Hall, J.C., and Rosbash, M. (1992). J Neurosci 12, 2735–2744. link

Jeffrey Hall

Molecular analysis of the period locus in Drosophila melanogaster and identification of a transcript involved in biological rhythms – Reddy, P., Zehring, W.A., Wheeler, D.A., Pirrotta, V., Hadfield, C., Hall, J.C., and Rosbash, M. (1984). Cell 38, 701–710. link

P-element transformation with period locus DNA restores rhythmicity to mutant, arrhythmic Drosophila melanogaster – Zehring, W.A., Wheeler, D.A., Reddy, P., Konopka, R.J., Kyriacou, C.P., Rosbash, M., and Hall, J.C. (1984). Cell 39, 369–376. link

Antibodies to the period gene product of Drosophila reveal diverse tissue distribution and rhythmic changes in the visual system – Siwicki, K.K., Eastman, C., Petersen, G., Rosbash, M., and Hall, J.C. (1988). Neuron 1, 141–150. link

Physics

“for decisive contributions to the LIGO detector and the observation of gravitational waves”

While results from the LIGO detector were published in peer-reviewed journals, the development of the detector itself was supported by personnel and grants from MIT and Caltech. As a result, the Nobel laureates’ more important contributions were published as a reports since archived by the LIGO collaboration and made available in the public domain.

Rainer Weiss

Quarterly progress report – R. Weiss, MIT Research Lab of Electronics 105, 54 (1972) link

The Blue Book – R. Weiss, P.R. Saulson, P. Linsay and S. Whitcomb link

Chemistry

“for developing cryo-electron microscopy for the high-resolution structure determination of biomolecules in solution”

The journal Cell, in which the chemistry laureates appear to have published many papers, publicised a collection after the Nobel Prize was announced. Most papers in the collection are marked ‘Open Archive’ and are readable in full. However, the papers cited by the Nobel Committee in its scientific background document don’t appear there. I also don’t know whether the papers in the collection available in full were always available in full.

Jacques Dubochet

Cryo-electron microscopy of vitrified specimens – Dubochet, J., Adrian, M., Chang, J.-J., Homo, J.-C., Lepault, J., McDowall, A. W., and Schultz, P. (1988). Q. Rev. Biophys. 21, 129-228 link

Vitrification of pure water for electron microscopy – Dubochet, J., and McDowall, A. W. (1981). J. Microsc. 124, 3-4 link

Cryo-electron microscopy of viruses – Adrian, M., Dubochet, J., Lepault, J., and McDowall, A. W. (1984). Nature 308, 32-36 link

Joachim Frank

Averaging of low exposure electron micrographs of non-periodic objects – Frank, J. (1975). Ultramicroscopy 1, 159-162 link

Three-dimensional reconstruction from a single-exposure, random conical tilt series applied to the 50S ribosomal subunit of Escherichia coli – Radermacher, M., Wagenknecht, T., Verschoor, A., and Frank, J. (1987). J. Microsc. 146, 113-136 link

SPIDER-A modular software system for electron image processing – Frank, J., Shimkin, B., and Dowse, H. (1981). Ultramicroscopy 6, 343-357 link

Richard Henderson

Model for the structure of bacteriorhodopsin based on high-resolution electron cryo-microscopy – Henderson, R., Baldwin, J. M., Ceska, T. A., Zemlin, F., Beckmann, E., and Downing, K. H. (1990). J. Mol. Biol. 213, 899-929 link

The potential and limitations of neutrons, electrons and X-rays for atomic resolution microscopy of unstained biological molecules – Henderson, R. (1995). Q. Rev. Biophys. 28, 171-193 link (available in full here)

By locking the red-tagged papers behind a paywall – often impossible to breach because of the fees involved – they’re kept out of hands of less-well-funded institutions and libraries, particularly researchers in countries whose currencies have lower purchasing power. More about this here and here. But the more detestable thing with the papers listed above is that the latest of them (among the reds) was published in 1995, fully 22 years ago, and the earliest, 42 years go – both on cryo-electron microscopy. Both represent almost unforgivable durations across which to have paywalls, with the journals Nature and Cell further attempting to ride the Nobel wave for attention. It’s not clear if the papers they’ve liberated from behind the paywall will always be available for free hence either.

Read all this in the context of the Nobel Prizes not being awarded to more than three people at a time and maybe you’ll see how much of scientific knowledge is truly out of bounds of most of humankind.

Featured image credit: Pexels/pixabay.

Are the papers behind this year's Nobel Prizes in the public domain?

Note: One of my editors thought this post would work for The Wire as well, so it’s been republished there.

Physiology/medicine

“for their discoveries of molecular mechanisms controlling the circadian rhythm”

Michael Young

Restoration of circadian behavioural rhythms by gene transfer in Drosophila – Nature 312, 752 – 754 (20 December 1984); doi:10.1038/312752a0 link

Michael Rosbash

Feedback of the Drosophila period gene product on circadian cycling of its messenger RNA levels – Nature 343, 536 – 540 (08 February 1990); doi:10.1038/343536a0 link

The period gene encodes a predominantly nuclear protein in adult Drosophila – Liu, X., Zwiebel, L.J., Hinton, D., Benzer, S., Hall, J.C., and Rosbash, M. (1992). J Neurosci 12, 2735–2744. link

Jeffrey Hall

Physics

“for decisive contributions to the LIGO detector and the observation of gravitational waves”

Rainer Weiss

Quarterly progress report – R. Weiss, MIT Research Lab of Electronics 105, 54 (1972) link

The Blue Book – R. Weiss, P.R. Saulson, P. Linsay and S. Whitcomb link

Chemistry

“for developing cryo-electron microscopy for the high-resolution structure determination of biomolecules in solution”

Jacques Dubochet

Cryo-electron microscopy of vitrified specimens – Dubochet, J., Adrian, M., Chang, J.-J., Homo, J.-C., Lepault, J., McDowall, A. W., and Schultz, P. (1988). Q. Rev. Biophys. 21, 129-228 link

Vitrification of pure water for electron microscopy – Dubochet, J., and McDowall, A. W. (1981). J. Microsc. 124, 3-4 link

Cryo-electron microscopy of viruses – Adrian, M., Dubochet, J., Lepault, J., and McDowall, A. W. (1984). Nature 308, 32-36 link

Joachim Frank

Averaging of low exposure electron micrographs of non-periodic objects – Frank, J. (1975). Ultramicroscopy 1, 159-162 link

SPIDER-A modular software system for electron image processing – Frank, J., Shimkin, B., and Dowse, H. (1981). Ultramicroscopy 6, 343-357 link

Richard Henderson

Featured image credit: Pexels/pixabay.

No Space Age for us

There’s a 500-word section on the Wikipedia page for the NASA Space Shuttle that describes the markings on the programme’s iconic orbiter vehicle (OV). Specifically, it talks about where the words ‘NASA’ and ‘USA’ appeared on the vehicle’s body, if there were any other markings, as well as some modifications to how the flag was positioned. Small-time trivia-hunters like myself love this sort of thing because, whether in my imagination or writing, being able to recall and describe these markings provides a strong sense of character to the OV, apart from making it more memorable to my readers as well as myself.

These are the symbols in our memories, the emblem of choices that weren’t dictated by engineering requirements but by human wants, ambitions. And it’s important to remember that these signatures exist and even more so to remember them because of what they signify: ownership, belonging, identity.

Then again, the markings on an OV are a part of its visual identity. A majority of humans have not seen the OV take off and land, and there are many of us who can’t remember what that looked like on TV either. For us, the visual identity and its attendant shapes and colours may not be very cathartic – but we are also among those who have consumed information of these fascinating, awe-inspiring vehicles through news articles, podcasts, archival footage, etc., on the internet. There are feelings attached to some vague recollections of a name; we recall feats as well as some kind of character, as if the name belonged to a human. We remember where we were, what we were doing when the first flights of iconic missions took off. We use the triggers of our nostalgia to personalise our histories. Using some symbol or other, we forge a connection and make it ours.

This ourness is precisely what is lost, rather effectively diluted, through the use of bad metaphors, through ignorance and through silence. Great technology and great communication strive in opposite directions: the former is responsible, though in only an insentient and mechanistic way, for underscoring the distance – technological as much as physical – between starlight and the human eye that recognises it; the latter hopes to make us forget that distance. And in the absence of communication, our knowledge becomes clogged with noise and the facile beauty of our machines; without our symbols, we don’t see the imprints of humanity in the night sky but only our loneliness.

Such considerations are far removed from our daily lives. We don’t stop (okay, maybe Dennis Overbye does) to think about what our journalism needs to demand from history-making institutions – such as the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) – apart from the precise details of those important moments. We don’t question the foundations of their glories as much as enquire after the glories themselves. We don’t engender the creation of sanctions against long-term equitable and sustainable growth. We thump our chests when probes are navigated to Mars on a Hollywood budget but we’re not outraged when only one scientific result has come of it. We are gratuitous with our praise even when all we’re processing are second-handed tidbits. We are proud of ISRO’s being removed from bureaucratic interference and, somehow, we are okay with ISRO giving access only to those journalists who have endeared themselves by reproducing press releases for two decades.

There’s no legislation that even says all knowledge generated by ISRO lies in the public domain. Irrespective of it being unlikely that ISRO will pursue legal action against me, I do deserve the right to use ISRO’s findings unto my private ends without anxiety. I’m reminded every once in a while that I, or one of my colleagues, could get into trouble for reusing images of the IRNSS launches from isro.gov.in in a didactic video we made at The Wire (or even the image at the top of this piece). At the same time, many of us are proponents of the open access, open science and open knowledge movements.

We remember the multiwavelength astronomy satellite launched in September 2015 as “India’s Hubble” – which only serves to remind us how much smaller the ASTROSAT is than its American counterpart. How many of you know that one of the ASTROSAT instruments is one of the world’s best at studying gamma-ray bursts? We discover, like hungry dogs, ISRO’s first tests of a proto-RLV as “India’s space shuttle”; when, and if, we do have the RLV in 2030, wouldn’t we be thrilled to know that there is something wonderful about it not just of national provenance but of Indian provenance, too?

Instead, what we are beginning to see is that India – with its strapped-on space programme – is emulating its predecessors, reliving jubilations from a previous age. We see that there is no more of an Indianess in them as much as there is an HDR recap of American and Soviet aspirations. Without communication, without the symbols of its progress being bandied about, without pride (and just a little bit of arrogance thrown in), it is becoming increasingly harder through the decades for us – as journalists or otherwise – to lay claim to something, a scrap of paper, a scrap of attitude, that will make a part of the Space Age feel like our own.

At some point, I fear we will miss the starlight for the distance in between.

Update: We are more concerned for our machines than for our dreams. Hardly anyone is helping put together the bigger picture; hardly anyone is taking control of what we will remember, leaving us to pick up on piecemeal details, to piece together a fragmented, disjointed memory of what ISRO used to be. There is no freedom in making up your version of a moment in history. There needs to be more information; there need to be souvenirs and memorabilia; and the onus of making them needs to be not on the consumers of this culture but the producers.

OA shouldn’t stop at access

Joseph Esposito argues in the scholarly kitchen why it’s okay for OA articles (which come with a CC-BY license) to be repackaged and then sold for a price by other merchants once they’re out in a paper.

The economic incentive to reach new audiences could make that otherwise OA article into something that gets brought to the attention of more and more readers. What incentive does a pure-play OA publisher have to market the materials it publishes? Unfortunately, the real name of this game is not “Open Access” but “Post and Forget.” Well-designed commerce, in other words, leads to enhanced discovery. And when it doesn’t, it enters the archaeological record.

If we can chase the idealists, ideologues, and moralists out of the temple, we may see that the practical act of providing economic incentives may be able to do more for access than any resolution from Budapest, Bayonne, Bethesda, or Berlin. The market works, and when it doesn’t, things quietly go away. So why all the fuss?

It’s not an argument that’s evident on the face of it, becoming apparent only when you realize OA’s victory march stopped halfway at allowing people to access research papers, not find them. The people who are good to helping other people find stuff are actually taking the trouble to market their wares.

So Esposito’s essentially argued to leave in a “finding fee” where it exists because there’s a big difference between something just being there in the public domain and something being found. I thought I’d disagree with the consequences of this reasoning for OA but I largely don’t.

Where I stop short is where this permission to sell papers available for free infringes on the ideals of OA for no fault of the principle of OA. But then what can OA do about that?

Read: Getting Beyond “Post and Forget” Open Access, the scholarly kitchen