Biophysical Society Bulletin | December 2019

President’s Message

Scientific Publishing: Past, Present, and Future Not so long ago, most papers

the APC or for an additional fee, as a carrot to attract papers. Now, some open access journals charge APCs of $5,000 or more, and with these payments, the journals no longer need to sell library subscriptions. This has contributed to growing stables of cascading journals (such as the Nature subtitles) that lead to expensive open access journals at the end of the line. In the past, outstanding papers that were not accept- ed by one of the top high-impact journals would usually be submitted to the appropriate society journal. Today, these papers often move down the chain of subsidiary journals with little effort required by the authors, and this contributes to decreased submissions to other journals. For many of us, achieving 100 percent open access is an ideal goal for scientific publishing, and the arguments in support of an open access model are many. Some scientists have been unapologetically pushing the transition to open access, but the rest of us have largely been complicit by chasing after the status of “high impact” journal articles. Regardless of how we feel about open access, however, the path towards 100 percent open access publishing has, directly or indirectly, at least three harmful side-effects for science and the scientific community. First, it has moved significant financial support for scientific publishing from an indirect cost (library subscriptions) to a direct cost (author-paid APCs) . For those of us who are funded by government agencies or disease-based philan- thropies, this means we must spend more of our research grant dollars for publications. Some deep-pocketed private foundations, such as the Wellcome Trust and Howard Hughes Medical Institute might provide additional funds for publi- cation, but in general, direct costs are a finite pool. The cost differences between the average open access journal and the traditional model means that for about every 100 open ac- cess papers, the additional publishing costs would fully fund a National Institutes of Health R01 grant. That might not sound like much, but in 2017, there were over 50,000 papers published in PLoS One , Scientific Reports , Nature Communica- tions , and Cell Reports altogether, which is the equivalent cost of approximately 500 research grants. Second, as detailed recently by James Zimring in Scientific American (https:/ blogs.scientificamerican.com/observa- tions/were-incentivizing-bad-science/), the economics of open access publishing provide a perverse incentive against rigorous manuscripts and peer review. Open access journals make money based on the number of published articles, rather than the number of journal copies sold. In contrast to traditional publishing models where revenue depends

were published in scientific society owned journals, and only for their most important discoveries did scientists send a short version to one of the weekly magazines. Even then, the full paper with all the data and details was generally published

David. W. Piston

soon afterwards in a traditional journal. The entire enterprise was financed in large part by library subscriptions, with only minimal page charges for authors. Access to papers meant heading to a library to find journal issues on the shelves. This was not ideal, but academic libraries allowed public access and provided copies through interlibrary requests from ac- ademics and the general public as well. This system served the needs of the scientific community for many years, but the advent of the Internet offered a brave new world. With online access and the digitization of journal archives, we no longer had to make trips to the library to read articles or make copies, and we could get papers of interest anytime and any- where we wanted. Libraries wondered why they were paying for subscriptions if no one was reading the print journals, and many institutions found a way to save money by cutting print journals, sometimes not replacing print with institutional on- line access. In the many discussions I have had with colleagues about sci- entific publishing, there seems to be an underlying assump- tion that the costs of running an online journal are minimal. It is true that authors are not compensated for their manu- scripts, and editorial boards and peer reviewers of scientific journals are largely volunteers as well (at Biophysical Journal , there are modest stipends for the Editor-in-Chief and Associ- ate Editors). However, there are still significant costs required in scientific publishing, from managing a secure submission and review site to copy editing and typesetting the final man- uscript to providing archived access to papers and supple- mentary material. The actual cost varies with investment in editorial and presentation efforts, but appears to be at least $2,500 per paper, and likely much more for papers with dy- namic content such as videos and animated figures. Compare this to the average author page charges at Biophysical Journal , which are less than $1,000, a lower direct cost to authors that is supported by a large base of library subscriptions. As the number of library subscribers decreases, journals can balance their budgets by raising fees to authors, typically in the form of an article processing charges (APCs). At the same time, many journals offered open access, either included in

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