Scholarly Communication from Gutenberg to Open Access: A Background
June 12, 2008 – 9:38 amCreated with support from the National Library of Sweden and its development program OpenAccess.se
Peter Linde, 2007 (updated 2009)
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.5/se/
Description of the section
This section attempts to provide a historical background to today’s situation in scholarly communication. Important events from the creation of the printing press to today’s initiative of Open Access are taken up and described briefly.
The purpose of this section is to give a concise historical background to today’s situation in scholarly publishing and to explain relations and indicate certain continuity.
Introduction
Scholarly communication, in its widest definition, is a thousand-year-old phenomenon. Generally, you probably associate the concept with the classical Greek philosophers’ academies and with how in the Middle Ages they collected and passed on ancient knowledge by way of large quantities of translations from Arabic and Greek to Hebrew and Latin.
But throughout the years the scholarly communication has undergone several paradigm shifts. One of the most radical shifts began in the mid-15th century and culminated with the 18th century breakthrough of the art of printing. The very latest paradigm shift is taking place in our age and is made possible through the sensation of our time, the Internet, together with a liberalization of the view on rights and access. The parallels with the medieval knowledge society after the introduction of the mechanical printing press are evident.
Gutenberg’s legacy
With the printing press channels were opened for faster communication at the same time as confidence for the material printed was low. Book historians have pointed at the scepticism which the educated part of the people shared when it came to printed texts. The new technology offered new possibilities for lies and falsifications, something that had earlier been inaccessible to impostors (Johns 2000).
Undoubtedly the increasing amount of printed material brought about a feeling of the transience of being and of objects, which had earlier not been as tangible. An additional reason that contributed to this attitude was the fact that suddenly it was no longer possible to read everything and get a general view of matters and by that the required knowledge to distinguish between a lie and the truth. The English theologian Edward Fisher provided thus in 1644 the following comment on the contemporary knowledge climate: “One day this is a truth, and almost an Article; the next week it is no such matter, but some other thing is the right” (Johns 1998).
The printers, on the other hand, did not have the same negative approach. They travelled to where the money was - to trading centres, bank centres, large commercial ports as e.g. Venice, and to the courts. The universities were, however, few and of little interest to the printers. There the scribes continued their trade. Gradually the art of printing was developed and production time as well as the cost per book were reduced and by that the scribes were finally driven out of business.
Through the entry of the printed book new professional categories emerged- printers, book vendors, publishers and librarians who at the medieval universities systematized, arranged and procured manuscripts from encyclopedists and translators.
At this time it was the printer who in all senses of the word owned the word. The printer chose which manuscript to print, and then edited, printed and sold the books. There is nothing strange, thus, about the fact that it was a printer who created the first publishing company in Milan in 1472.
In spite of all the objections, for the learned the new printing technology meant that it was possible to mass produce uniform copies and that also illustrations could be printed in a simple manner. Approximately 35,000 incunabula were produced during the 15th century. About 3,000 of these had scientific contents. In contrast to their precursors, the learned of the Renaissance did not want to limit themselves to take down and collect existing knowledge within a subject. They instead tried to embrace several fields of knowledge. The ideal Renaissance man had many and varied occupations and was an experimenter who set free and analysed knowledge which did not fit within the existing systems. Leonardo Da Vinci, Copernicus and Francis Bacon are well-known names from these times. The ways of attack, which included looking ahead and not looking back, also required new ways of communicating that were faster and supplementary. To organise in societies and to make use of the printing press, a relatively new invention, in order to circulate scientific ideas and discoveries constituted such important communication methods.
It is, however, not until the beginning of the 17th century that the first scientific society is formalised and founded in Italy. Accademia dei Lincei was founded in Rome and the society’s scientific results and experiments were related in the publication “Gesta Lyceorum”. This initiative was followed by similar ones in Spain and England. Scientists met here to discuss their results and new projects. To write a letter was no longer experienced as efficient enough to spread information about new studies. Why not use the printing press to circulate scientific newsletters?
In January 1665, the French lawyer Denis de Sallo printed such a weekly newsletter called “Journal des scavans”. He wrote: “The newsletter has been invented to relieve the pressure on those who are either too lazy or too busy to read entire books. It is a way to satisfy your curiosity and become a learned man without any trouble” (!) (Vickery 2000).
De Sallo’s newsletter inspired Henry Oldenburg, member of the world’s most famous scholarly society -The Royal Society- to create a journal for the society and the first issue was published in March 1665. The journal was given the name “Philosophical Transactions” and is the oldest scholarly journal still published.
Towards the end of the 17th century more than a million books had been printed and the first scholarly journals had made their appearance.
The significance of the scholarly societies
The learned societies provided for the first time a structure and platform for reviewed scientific material. This had earlier been done through personal correspondence but suddenly a new possibility was given.
When the Royal Society, by way of example, had taken an active interest in a journal this meant that material of good scientific quality had to be found in order to be published. At the beginning this was problematic as the members of the Royal Society at this time were not scholars-despite the fact that the roll mainly consisted of the majority of the learned English and quite a few learned men from abroad. In addition, it was difficult to procure texts as the scholars were sceptical to publishing their material. Scientific findings were still surrounded by extreme secrecy and discoveries were often only revealed to a few chosen friends. The scepticism to the printed medium was considerable. The risk for theft of ideas seemed obvious. The Royal Society and other similar societies now had the possibility to change this secretive behaviour for a more open attitude.
To guarantee the reliability of the experiments that were conducted in the name of the Royal Society witnesses were invited whose task was to corroborate the experiments. This was, naturally, a complicated procedure and the articles in the new journal were therefore designed in such a way that the readers of the journal could serve as virtual witnesses (Shapin 1994). The scientists wished for their work to be evaluated and reviewed and the Royal Society was gradually able to offer expert reviewing through its members. This provided an accepted article with a type of authority- and quality label and must be seen as a development of the idea of witnessing.
To employ equals or colleagues for quality reviewing also had the advantage, at least from the publisher’s point of view, of being cheap. The system still exists, which arguably indicates how efficient the system is considered to be. And it could be said that this review system has forcefully contributed to the establishing of the journal as the leading method of publishing scholarly work.
Yet another factor to this was the 1709 copyright act in England. Before 1709, an author did not own the copyright to his or her own work. The copyright act of 1709 establishes that it is only the author who may have an interminable copyright. However, authors were often forced to transfer the copyright of their material in order for it to be published. In the 18th century the view on copyright was thus changed and was now rather seen as the author’s property than that of the publisher or the printer.
In the 18th century the scholarly journal article thus turned into a channel for the improvement of communication between researchers but it also became a way of registering origin and authorial responsibility of a given theory, process or method (Fjällbrant 1997).
During the second half of the 18th century hundreds of scholarly societies and academies were founded around Europe. Specialised societies became common and several natural history museums were founded. In 1753, the British Museum was founded and in 1786 the Swedish Academy was founded. Scholars published their discoveries in the proceedings and annals of the societies and this is also where summaries and translations and attempts at popular science articles could be found.
Towards the end of the century the scholarly journal was well-established. Between 1665 and 1730 more than 300 new journals were started up. Towards the end of the 18th century the trend was also towards an increasing specialization. There were at least three reasons for the increasing extent of the number of journals:
1. A reaction against too long lead time between submitted material and publication.
2. The journals of the societies were published in a great variety of languages which made it impossible to keep track of what happened in other countries.
3. With an increasing number of scholars letter writing became an impossibility and the solution was to publish journals directed at a specialised international circle of scholars. The first journals dealt with subjects like physics and chemistry which was natural in times that saw the chemical- and processing industries as the developers of prosperity and authority.
Towards the end of the 18th century there were outcries at the incredible growth of scholarly literature, low scientific quality and the difficulty of getting the source material. Do we not recognize these opinions?
An exchange of abstracts became a common way of dealing with this problem and also a basic symptom of how scholarly communication had become increasingly faster. And it is now towards the end of the 18th century, the peak of the Age of Enlightenment, that the philosopher Immanuel Kant describes how the spirit of the times is characterized by the freedom to make public use of one’s reason. Through the printed publication philosophers and scientists may come out of the private use of reason and instead speak publicly. Knowledge does not become reliable until then (Kant 1989). In such a system of thought the general public’s free access to information constitutes a condition for scholarly work.
During the 19th century, which was the golden century of the patents, applied science and engineering together with modern industrial development dominated the scene. The industrialization speeded up and large industries employed scientists. Important means of communication in the shape of the telegraph and the telephone saw the light of the day and great progress was made within printing technology.
The specialization among the scientists continued to grow. At the beginning of the 20th century approximately 9 million book titles had been published in all subjects. Two-thirds of these were printed in the 19th century. About two million scholarly articles were published in this century.
The 20th century
Among the events and trends that most influenced the scholarly communication in the 20th century were the establishing of multinational companies, the emergence of national research institutes and institutions; Big Science with its team and inter-institutional collaboration; increased specialization, increasing processing speed and storage capacity of computers for filing, analyzing or seeking and displaying data.; Increasing gaps of GNP between countries; The establishing of English as the dominating scholarly language and increasing collaboration between international organisations.
But while the scientific development and the industrialization have advanced the last hundred years in the Western World the extent of the advance has not been as great in other parts of the world. Proportionally, the population in the world’s least developed countries has increased. Statistics from the UN show that in 1990 the industrialized countries had 81 scientists and technicians per thousand inhabitants corresponding to 8 in the developing countries. The technological and scientific gap between poor and rich countries has increased during the later part of the 20th century, in part owing to the fact that scientific information, articles, patents, etc. have become increasingly more expensive and more and more surrounded by restrictions.
The total amount of scientific literature published in the 20th century has been estimated to approximately fifty times the amount produced up to the end of the 19th century. Scientific books and journals have continuously increased in numbers as have the societies that publish them. Naturally, this also applies to other publishers such as academic institutes, research institutes and authorities but during the second half of the century it applies above all to commercial publishing companies.
After almost 350 years of scholarly journals the scholarly publication is today concentrated at three major commercial companies: Reed Elsevier with just under 2,000 journals, Taylor and Francis with slightly more than 1,000 and Springer with ca. 500. Together they control ca. 60% of the material that is indexed in the world’s leading indexing database ISI Web of Science.
To buy up smaller publishing companies and continually raise the subscription rates has been the policy throughout of these publishing giants.
Up to the 1950’s the scholarly societies dominated as publishers. But in response to the postwar increasing investment in research and development the commercial publishing companies saw a possibility in offering new journals with the publication of discoveries stemming from the increasing amount of scientific research areas. The scholarly societies were, on the other hand, very careful about starting new publications.
A study of economics journals has shown what this development led to. In 1960 there were within the subject of economics ca. 30 major journals; almost all of them run on by non-profit sponsored scientific organizations. Twenty years later the number of titles had risen to 120 of which half were published by commercial publishing companies and in the year of 2000 the commercial share was two-thirds of the ca. 300 available journals. The average subscription price for the commercial journals ranked among the top twenty was ca. 1,700 dollars/year compared to 180 dollars/year for the non-commercial top twenty (Willinsky 2006).
Paradigm shift
Not even ten years into the new millennium and quite a few things have happened in the field of scholarly communication. We speak of a new paradigm shift. The reasons for this are primarily two:
1. The Internet and the possibility of transferring and distributing heavy files via broadband networks.
2. Substantial price increases of subscriptions to scholarly journals.
The publication model for scholarly journals, which has been accounted for above, and which caught on in the 18th century is still used. A publisher receives an article from a scholar who wishes to get published in order to spread his or her discoveries and for qualification. The phrase “publish or perish” has great relevance within the scholarly world. The journal’s editors, themselves scholars, decide whether to publish the article or not. They send the article over to a number of reviewers who will determine the scientific quality of the article. These reviewers are scientific specialists in different subject fields. In most cases, the authors, editors and reviewers and their colleagues also constitute the journal’s readership. More often than not they have access to the journal via their library.
Since the 1990’s librarians and scholars have complained about the continually increasing costs for subscriptions to scholarly journals and particularly about the fact that commercial publishing companies make a great profit on research that is publicly funded. The scholar, the editor and the reviewer, all of them coming from the sphere of science, receive no pay or minimal pay for their contributions. Their pay consists of qualification and status. The contribution made by the commercial publishing company is primarily distribution and design.
For many universities and institutes of higher education it is a bitter experience to purchase expensive texts from their own scholars; scholars who have given the articles free of charge to a publishing company that packs and sells them back to the universities and institutes at a good profit.
When the prices skyrocketed, at times up to 4 times the consumer price index, libraries were forced to cancel subscriptions and instead rely on distant loans and copying.
In the middle of the 1990’s people had great expectations on the electronic journal databases and the package solutions that were offered by the big publishing companies of scholarly journals. For a while these databases purchased by consortiums seemed like a solution to the dilemma. The libraries were offered to jointly buy a package of databases that could contain thousands of digital journals, at a favorable cost which was much lower than the subscriptions to each individual journal. Certainly, a considerable amount of titles that were not of interest to the library formed part of the package but all in all it was still, to begin with, a good deal for the libraries. Right up to the point when the prices started to increase again and the difficulty of keeping the subscriptions to the important journals presented itself again. In the USA the New York Times, among others, commented on how university libraries and scholars refused to buy the journals with a yearly increase in costs of up to 10 % (Kutz, 2002).
Already in the beginning of the 1990’s the scholar Paul Ginsparg had, as he started the Los Alamos Physics e-Print Archive, shown how efficient the Internet could be when it came to distribution of scientific research. The archive is a freely accessible archive that today contains more than 400,000 articles self-published by physicians and mathematicians from the whole world.
The possibilities provided by the Internet in combination with the galloping journal prices was also the reason why the association of American research libraries (ARL) in 1999 started “The Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition - SPARC” in order to spread information to scholars about self-publication and to encourage new independent scholarly journals. Through new publication models there was hope of being able to keep down costs and subscription rates and also to “give back research to the researchers”.
Open Archives Initiative
The source of inspiration for SPARC is largely the organization the Open Archives Initiative whose prominent figures are Carl Lagoze, Cornell University and Herbert van de Sompel, Los Alamos National Laboratory. The idea that has been worked out here is that authors should themselves deposit reviewed articles in open digital archives. This would mean that journal publishers could concentrate on quality control and authorization via reviewing and editing, which, in turn, should be paid by the author or his or her organization instead of by the reader.
In order for the idea of self-archiving to work the deposited articles must be searchable and compatible with technical standards for them to be transferable via the Internet. One of the greatest tasks of the OAI has been to develop such standards as The Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting - OAI-PMH. This makes possible an application-independent interoperable framework for exchange of data between so-called data providers (in whose archives the articles are found) and service providers (those who collect the data from the providers rendering it searchable). The development of software for open archives and protocols for transfer has taken place with, among other things, support from the English state.
Since the beginning of the 21st century the networks acting for Open Access have grown increasingly stronger. Not least because of a number of important initiatives like the Budapest Open Access Initiative (2001) and the Berlin Declaration (2003) which have functioned as a call for free access to scholarly information. As a result of these initiatives representatives for leading research institutes and public authorities have signed declarations which support the two most important corner-stones of the Open Access movement whose purpose it is to act on the behalf of making research results freely accessible as soon and as widely as possible through, principally, two steps:
1. To implement a policy, locally, regionally and nationally, which requires researchers to parallel publish a copy of their work in a freely accessible digital archive.
2. To encourage researchers to publish their articles in freely accessible journals, if available, and to encourage attempts at starting journals with free accessibility.
Parallel publication is today made possible through an increasing amount of open archives at universities and college universities all around the world where researchers parallel publish a copy of articles which have been published in scholarly journals. To a large extent these archives (so-called data providers) follow The Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting - OAI-PMH, thereby making its contents accessible for retrieval and indexing of central services, so-called service providers. An example of such a major provider is OAISTER.
Lists of data providers can be found at the Directory of Open Access Repositories and at the Registry of Open Access Repositories .
Scholarly journals which offer free access to articles constitute a phenomenon from this millenium. The publishing company BioMedCentral has been particularly successful. Researchers in biomedicine are here offered publication possibilities in close to 200 quality journals. The cost is charged to the author who has to pay between ca. 1,500 - 3.000 USD to see his/her accepted article freely accessible.
By the end of 2009 there were more than 4.000 free scholarly journals accessible according to “The Directory of Open Access Journals“, an archive set up to collect and make visible Open Access journals.
Both the number of parallel-published documents and the number of open access journals are increasing. In the last years several national committees (House of Commons, the Scottish Parliament, the US Congress, the National Institute of Health etc.) recommended that the results of nationally funded research must also be made publicly and freely accessible.
In 2006, a study ordered by the EU Commission led to the publication of a report on how the future scholarly publication should be structured. Among other things the report “Study on the Economic and Technical Evolution of the Scientific Publication Markets in Europe” recommends free access to publicly funded research results as soon as possible after publication (the European Commission 2006).
At the same time as the possibilities and the advantages of publishing scholarly material openly increase it is still only a minority of the researchers who actually have tested the possibility. However, investigations indicate considerable understanding and a positive approach among the researchers when it comes to making their material open for access. More than 70 % of the authors who were asked and who had published in open sources declared that they would be willing to do so again (JISC 2004).
Also publishers are thinking of how to position themselves in relation to the Open Access movement. In the so-called Washington DC Principles for Free Access to Science some 50 or so non-commercial publishers declare that they, on principle, support the idea of open access. The majority of the commercial publishers have also accepted, on certain conditions, that their authors parallel publish postprints (published articles) in the digital research archives of their organizations. Via SHERPA/RoMEO Publisher copyright policies & self-archiving you can find the policy of both publishing companies and journals when it comes to their approach to parallel publishing. The service grades the policy documents using the colours white (prohibition) to green (go-ahead).
Several commercial publishing companies have also reacted to the competition from OA journals and are offering publication within their toll access journals with open access at a cost. At a cost of between ca. 1.500 - 3,000 USD an author can make his/her accepted article open for access via these so called hybrid journals.
Conclusion
We have seen how principally three ideas from the 17th and 18th centuries shaped the scholarly communication of the last 300 years: The idea of peer review, the idea of the author as the responsible originator and the idea of free access to information as a prerequisite of scholarly work.
These ideas keep inspiring scientists across the world, the difference being that the Internet is now used as recourse for the spreading of ideas and for the guarantee of free access. As in the 17th century, the new medium is looked at with great scepticism as are the new models that are used for scholarly communication. However, the basic thinking seems solid and so does the insight that it is time to win back the research to the researchers. In this context it is also important to understand that the commercial publishing companies many times function more as “brake blocks” than as engines.
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