Why Pharma should support open access
In Open Access to Science Under Attack, Scientific American’s David Biello describes some of the PR efforts by scientific publishers who hope to extend their subscription-based business model.
Open access to most of the world’s peer-reviewed scientific research is an inevitability Subscription-based access to the primary scientific literature is, quite simply, an anachronism of the print age; it’s dead–it just doesn’t know it yet. The enterprises that will be hurt will be those that cannot or will not alter their business models to reflect the reality of our always-on, just-in-time, just-the way-I-want-it, hyperlinked society.
For example, most scientific societies rely on both membership dues and journal subscriptions for support of their activities. Should open access diminish their subscription bases, they will be forced to increase membership dues, curtail activities, or find alternative sources of revenues to survive. For the most popular societies, the impact will be noticed, but they will find ways to survive. For niche societies and their publications, survival will be a struggle, and many will undoubtedly perish as independent entities.
Not surprsingly, the most powerful opponents of the open-access movement are the for-profit publishing houses. The major for-profit scientific publishers by no means rely solely on scientific journals as a source of revenues; they are diversified businesses. But journal subscriptions and advertisements remain an important source of revenues, and these firms will fight to maintain subscribers.
Why should Pharma get involved in the skirmishes that promise to get nastier as paid-access publishers fight for their survival? There is no doubt that pharmaceutical researchers and marketing strategists rely heavily on the scientific literature to create and sell their products, and they pay dearly for the privilege. But the relative cost of subscriptions and reproduction fees is small compared with the returns it generates. As open access papers proliferate, and paid-access journals feel the squeeze, journal subscription costs might rise. But I can’t imagine that most life-science are going to complain too loudly. Based on cost considerations alone, Pharma should probably sit this fight out.
The real reason Pharma (and related industries) need to get behind open access is that open access will benefit the scientific enterprise generally, by increasing the pace of scientific discoveries. A higher pace of discoveries means more fuel for industrial discovery, which means a faster rate of industrial innovations.
Let me break down the above logic a bit. Paid access necessarily limits the extent and rate of dissemination of scientific knowledge, because not everyone can afford access to everything that they might benefit from reading, and readers’ absorptive capacity for scientific knowledge is finite. Practically speaking, this means that papers are judged prior to reading not only by the reputation of the journal, the authors, their academic affiliations, the abstract content and any “buzz” the work might have generated but also by the cost of obtaining the report. Those papers deemed to be at the margin of utility, or, more accurately, at the margin of cost-utility are more likely to be passed over.
In contrast, open access allows scientific knowledge to disseminate at its “natural” rate and extent, determined by the above reputational factors and the time from result to publication, which should eventually be much faster for open access than for paid access. Cost is out of the equation.
Assuming that the quality of scientific knowledge disseminated isn’t diminished by open access (there’s no reason to believe it will be; peer-review isn’t affected by open access per se), then the rate and extent of knowledge dissemination under an open access paradigm should be faster and larger than they are today. Just how much faster and larger than the status quo aren’t known by either side of the debate. I am arguing, though, that it’s in Pharma’s interests to err on the benefits being ”substantially faster” and “substantially larger”, so as not to miss an opportunity that costs the industry nothing additional to take advantage of.
The final part of my argument is that a higher rate and extent of scientific knowledge dissemination generally will lead to more discoveries in industry. Innovations don’t occur in a vacuum. Innovations are the culmination of accumulated knowledge put into practice. It follows that the rate of knowledge accumulation will influence the rate of innovation. This idea is nothing new, and there is ample emprirical evidence to support it.
Journals are just one of the conduits for scientific knowledge to disseminate, but they are an important one, particularly for “discovery” of knowledge at the periphery of a scientist’s usual knowledge network. Therefore, pharmaceutical scientists will benefit from enhanced scientific knowledge dissemination indirectly even if pharmaceutical scientists themselves do not alter their reading habits in response to open access.
The bottom line for Pharma is this: Subscribing to journals is more a nuisance than a worry, but the paid-access model is a limitation to your discovery engine, even if it’s not overtly apparent. It is in every industry R&D manager’s interests to eliminate unnecessary impediments to innovation. With the possible exception of angering some scientific societies, there is no downside to Pharma diverting some of the funds it currently invests in paid-access journals to the open access movement (e.g. PLoS).
