Toll Booths on the Information Superhighway
“Information superhighway” is a metaphor that conjures up a powerful image of an expressway going to new places and new information. You read to find information and you want to find it fast and efficiently. This is clearly an outgrowth of the computer age, a technique for managing information like nothing before it.
Last month we announced a free gift for you—a complete library of all issues of The Angle Orthodontist for your very own at www.angle.org. Thanks to computer technology, we can also give this gift to everyone else on the globe at no extra cost. The multiple copies are free. The originals, unfortunately, are not.
The current traditional approach puts all of the costs for preparation of articles on the paper publication. Since modern printing requires articles to be in electronic format for paper publication, moving them online is a relatively minor additional cost. Online publication was just a simple add-on.
The future depends on how you, the user, responds to all of this. If the more computer-literate future readers ignore the paper, the paper libraries will become obsolete. However, since we currently charge for paper and give away the digital model, what then will be the source of revenue? If we shift the charges for article publication to the digital model, we will be setting up “toll booths” on the information superhighway.
Libraries face the same dilemma. Some think the paper journal era is waning to be replaced by computers. They see their subscription costs rising more rapidly than their budgets.
“The good guys, in the eyes of many scientists and librarians, are the revolutionaries offering an alternative to the publishing status quo. They are creating online journals that charge no subscription fees. These agitators for change want to rescue librarians from the tyranny of prohibitively costly journals. ….”1 “At the big-sticker end are publications like The Journal of Comparative Neurology, for which a one-year institutional subscription has a list price of $17,995. Access to Brain Research goes for $21,269, around the price of a Toyota Camry XLE.”2 “According to the Association of Research Libraries, journal prices went up 215 percent from 1986 to 2003, while the consumer price index rose 63 percent.”2
It is easy to say that science should be free and available for the good of the public. It's also easy to blame those journal publishers who appear to be seeking avaricious profits. Moreover, published science was almost never sponsored by the publisher, so why does the publisher get the right to hold the copyright and control the dissemination of the information? In fact, you can argue that the information was commonly sponsored by a governmental unit and so the results already belong to the public.
A new term is coming into our vocabularies: “open access.” An international major movement is occurring to make the products of science freely open to everyone. Harold E. Varmus, former director of NIH and now president and chief executive of the Memorial-Sloan Kettering Cancer Center was quoted in January as saying, “I'm trying to change the way in which our society deals with academic information.”1
The science committee of Britain's House of Commons recently endorsed open access to research results and criticized publishers for the escalating prices of scientific journals. The report came just days after a US Congressional panel recommended free access to papers based on research financed by the National Institutes of Health.3
We all know that there is no free lunch. An open access policy clearly cannot exist without someone paying the publishing bills. Some journals have established “toll booths” and require a user of their electronic information to pay a per article use fee. Other journals waive the user fee if the user is a subscriber to their paper publication. Still others charge separate fees for the electronic and the paper forms of their articles. Others are proposing assessing a charge against the author of the article for the right to be published. All of these solutions presuppose that the amount of revenue received by the publisher is appropriate and needs to be continued, and this point is very hotly disputed.
For a small niche journal like us, there does not appear to be reasonable commercial answer to this financial challenge. A stable ongoing revenue source is needed if we are to sponsor an open access journal in the face of declining revenues. A goal worthy of the Angle Foundation would be creation of an endowment fund with 100% of its earnings providing the core support for the transition of refereed articles from authors to the Internet. This could come with help from member estate plans and would assure the indefinite leadership of The Angle Orthodontist.
After a member donation recently made the entirety of volumes 1–75 of The Angle Orthodontist available online, two members stepped up and also sent generous contributions to the Foundation. This is a clear statement that orthodontics gave me a better life than I ever imagined. Here is my return for even better orthodontics for generations yet to come!