NEJM: Op-ed Against Open Access Publishing

This week's New England Journal of Medicine contained a provocative article attacking open access publishers like PLoS Medicine. After pointing out the tremendous sunk costs by for-profit publishers and non-profit professional societies that have enabled fast internet access to journal articles in the first place, Martin Frank, executive director of the American Physiological Society, asks who will pick up the estimated $3,000 cost of publishing in a first-tier journal like NEJM?

One obvious possibility is the government that funds much of the research in the first place. After all, most science and research grants range in the tens of thousands if not hundreds of thousands of dollars. How costly would it be to increase that by $3,000 IF something worthy of publishing comes out of the grant? NIH has already amended its policy to require researchers to deposit full text copies of articles in the PubMed database at the Library of Medicine (www.pubmed.org) one year after publication in the original journal (this was amended from six months after protests from journal publishers).

Frank estimates it would cost $200 million per year to move from a subscription and advertiser-driven model of science publishing to one that provided free internet access. He then goes on to ask: "Spending some $200 million in support of open access should give Congress pause, particularly since the NIH budget has been cut this year for the first time in 36 years. At a time of shrinking budgets for biomedical research, does it make sense to spend scarce dollars on publication costs instead of on research to develop treatments and cures for disease?"

Frankly, the answer to his question is an unequivocal YES. Disseminating knowledge widely will hasten the development of cures for disease.