The Open Access Interviews: Wellcome Trust’s Robert Kiley

Over the past year Open Access (OA) publishing has gained considerable mindshare, not just amongst researchers and librarians, but publishers too. This has been helped greatly by the perceived success of the Public Library of Science (PLoS) — which in 2010 managed to cover its operating costs with revenue for the first time. But as it becomes increasingly likely that OA publishing will prove no less expensive than traditional subscription publishing, a couple of key questions arise: How much will Gold OA eventually cost? And how will the research community pay for it? I explored these questions recently with Robert Kiley, Head of Digital Services at the UK-based Wellcome Trust, one of the world's largest medical research charities.

The consensus is that viability for PLoS was eventually achieved thanks to PLoS ONE and the “light” peer review model that it has pioneered. Indeed PLoS ONE is widely described as a “cash cow”, since it is believed to be subsidising not just the publisher’s flagship journals but practically the entire PLoS enterprise. For this reason, no doubt, traditional publishers are currently rushing to create clones of what PLoS itself describes as the first of a new breed of megajournals.

Amongst those to announce PLoS ONE look-alikes in recent months are the American Institute of Physics (AIP Advances), Nature Publishing Group (Scientific Reports), the Company of Biologists (Biology Open) and Sage (Sage Open).

In addition, practically all subscription publishers now offer a Hybrid OA option. This allows researchers to have their papers made freely available on the Web even when they publish in a subscription journal — if they agree to pay an article processing charge (APC). Designed by publishers as a way to offer OA without loss of revenue, Hybrid OA is invariable charged at premium rates — which range from between $3,000 to $5,000 per paper.

In short, despite their initial rejection (not to say repugnance) of OA, publishers now view it as a lucrative new revenue stream to have opened up in the scholarly publishing space. Indeed, they appear to fear that unless they move quickly they may lose out in what some have characterised as a “gold rush”.

This new attitude was articulated on the Liblicense mailing list recently by publishing consultant Joe Esposito, who assured list members “OA can grow and commercial publishers can become even more profitable, in part by co-opting OA publishing.”

Dilemma

In the meantime, however, many in the research community have resigned themselves to the fact that OA publishing may never provide the cost savings that it was expected to deliver. As former director of Penn State University Press Sandy Thatcher put it recently on Liblicense, “[W]ith the gold OA model, you are entirely at the mercy of publishers, who will charge what they need to make their preferred profit margin and will not be any more transparent than they are now about their actual costs. End users will benefit, but will the costs to the system be any less?”

If costs do not fall the research community faces a dilemma, since it was widely assumed that OA would provide a solution to the long-standing serials crisis — the phenomenon whereby library budgets have consistently failed to keep pace with the rise in the cost of journal subscriptions (effectively it is libraries that pay for scholarly publishing).

To add to the challenge, in the short term OA can only increase costs, because during the transition research institutions are having to continue to pay subscriptions while also paying for OA membership schemes. The latter are subscription-like deals offered by OA publishers like PLoS, BioMed Central (BMC) and Hindawi to enable research institutions to block purchase free-at-the-point-of-use publication rights so that faculty members can make their papers Open Access without being billed personally. These too are usually funded from library budgets.

In addition, many universities have created Gold OA funds so that one-off grants can be awarded to researchers wanting to publish in OA journals for which the institution has no membership agreement.

To cap it all, these additional costs come at a time when the global financial crisis is squeezing university budgets to death. Rather than being able to provide additional funds, most universities are beginning to find that they need to take an axe to their journal subscriptions.

In its 2010 Study of Subscription Prices for Scholarly Society Journals, for instance, Allen Press published a list of universities that made “significant institutional subscription cancellations” last year. This included Georgia Tech, the University of California, San Francisco, Oregon State University, and the University of Nevada, Las Vegas.

And this July The Chronicle of Higher Education reported that the University of Oregon and Southern Illinois University even felt compelled to cancel a number of “big deals”, which can mean depriving researchers of access to thousands of journals in one fell swoop.

Meanwhile on the other side of the Atlantic, Research Libraries UK (RLUK) has informed both Elsevier and Wiley-Blackwell that unless they agree to a 15% reduction in prices it will not renew its Big Deal contracts with them next year. This is serious: RLUK represents the so-called Russell Group of universities, whose membership consists of thirty major institutions, including Oxford, Cambridge and Manchester universities, Imperial College, the London School of Economics, and the British Library.

Safety net

In this kind of environment how can universities avoid eventually having to cancel their institutional membership schemes too — as in fact Columbia University did in 2009? And how long can they avoid having to close their Gold OA funds — as the University of Amsterdam did the same year.

In fact, Gold OA funds today tend to be more nominal than real. Having realised that demand could quickly outstrip available resources if OA took off, universities have in recent years started to impose rigorous eligibility rules on authors asking for assistance. When the Compact for Open-Access Publishing Equity (COPE) was founded in 2009, its stated policy made this explicit.

As the Director of the Office for Scholarly Communication at Harvard University Stuart Shieber explained at the time, “By design, the overall cost to a university of implementing the compact, in the short term, would be quite small. Hybrid open-access fees are explicitly eschewed, and true open-access fees tend to be found at present in just those areas of scholarship where grant support is most prevalent, reducing the underwriting load on the university substantially. Rough estimates based on the experience of the Berkeley Research Impact Initiative fall in the range of tens of dollars per faculty member per year.”

A year later Shieber was pleased to be able to report that, in practice, Gold OA funds are providing even less support than he had envisaged. Harvard’s own HOPE Fund, for instance, has to this day paid for only three OA papers.

In other words, the policy of many Gold OA funds is that if there is any alternative source of funding, and/or if the proposed journal does not meet a very strict set of criteria, no money will be made available. As Shieber points out, these funds should be viewed as “safety nets” alone. “Safety nets are useful even when they are not used.”

If institutions now start to cancel their OA membership schemes (which some believe provide pretty poor value anyway), the question inevitably arises: in light of the continuing financial squeeze, who on earth is going to pay for the “dramatic growth of Open Access” — as some characterise it?

An answer to this question is all the more pressing given that the fee waivers currently offered by many OA publishers could be under threat. With commercial publishers like Nature Publishing Group (NPG) entering the no-frills market created by PLoS ONE, it is anticipated that the waiver schemes could become rare, or even disappear altogether — a point made by Phil Davis on The Scholarly Kitchen blog earlier this year.

Dissemination costs are research costs

So who will pay for Gold OA? Shieber hinted at one alternative funding source in 2009: research funders. In his mind, no doubt, was the example of the Wellcome Trust, which in 2005 — when it announced its OA policy — stated that it believed “dissemination costs are research costs”. As a consequence, it said, in future it would foot the bill for any grantee who wanted to publish in an OA journal.

This decision cost Wellcome £622,000 ($1m) in 2005/6, and the bill has grown steadily over time. Last year the Trust forked out just over £3 million ($4.9m). And if and when OA publishing becomes the norm the cost could rise to £7.3 million ($12m) per annum, which represents around 1.25% of Wellcome’s current research spend.

Wellcome’s decision is good news for any of its funded researchers who want to embrace OA. Some, however, believe that it put the nail in the coffin of hopes that OA would reduce the cost of scholarly publishing. Unlike the funds created by COPE members, for instance, Wellcome is happy to pay for papers to be published in Hybrid OA journals — which, as noted earlier, charge premium rates.

With one of the world's largest medical research charities prepared to pay their asking price, critics complain, publishers have naturally come to assume that they can charge whatever they want for OA products — much as they have always done for journal subscriptions. As a result, critics add, the serials crisis will simply morph into a different kind of pricing impasse.

Others, however, argue that overpricing may not actually be possible in the current economic environment — as the stand taken by RLUK might seem to imply. Most research, they point out, is funded not by private charities like Wellcome, but by governments — and the current sovereign debt crisis afflicting the Western world has made money so tight that it just won’t be feasible to pay publishers the rates they want.

In fact, private funders are no less susceptible than governments to the financial turbulence we have witnessed in recent years. In 2008, for instance, the London Times reported that the Wellcome Trust had lost £1.5 billion ($2.4 billion) after some of its investments had turned sour the preceding year. This saw the Trust’s investments after debt shrink from £15.1billion to £13.1billion.

As a result, the amount of money Wellcome has available to fund research has fallen by £95m since 2007. And the continuing panics still sweeping through markets suggest that the situation is likely to get worse before it improves.

All in all, it is not at all clear today how Gold OA will be paid for going forward, or how OA publishing will develop.

Intriguingly, two months ago the Wellcome Trust announced that — together with the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) and the Max Planck Society — it plans to launch a new OA journal. Even more intriguingly, the three partners stated that no APCs will be levied “for a number of years”.

This will inevitably further reduce the amount of money that the Trust has available for funding research projects. But what does it portend?

Confident

With these thoughts in mind I recently emailed some questions over to Wellcome’s Robert Kiley.

As will be evident from the Q&A below, Kiley remains confident that Wellcome’s decision to pay for Gold OA was the right thing to do, and he does not believe it will have a significant impact on the amount of money Wellcome is able to make available to fund research.

He rightly points out that — compared to the shifts in value that the ups and downs of the market can inflict on the Trust's resources — the $12m that it may have to spend on Gold OA is small beer. Moreover, Kiley adds, that figure “assumes we pick up 100% of the OA costs.” Since most research is funded by more than one organisation, he explains, it is safe to assume that the other organisations funding the research will share any publication costs.

And while declining to say how much money Wellcome is investing in the new OA journal, Kiley insists that the percentage of its funds devoted to research dissemination (rather than research itself) will rise only “slightly” as a result.

Finally, Kiley expresses himself confident that OA publishing will prove cheaper than subscription publishing, particularly in light of the current wave of PLoS ONE-clones being launched. These, he points out, levy lower APCs than both Hybrid and pure OA journals (i.e. between $1,350 and $1,980).

This assumes, of course, that a sufficient number of Wellcome-funded researchers will be content to publish in less prestigious no-frills journals like PLoS ONE.

But given the straitened circumstances that the research community finds itself in today, perhaps the more important point is that if PLoS ONE’s prices are such that they can subsidise the larger PLoS enterprise (and spark a me-to “gold rush” as a result), then we must assume that publishers still believe they can ask the research community to pay premium prices, even when selling entry-level products that provide only a minimal service (PLoS ONE articles are not copyedited for instance).

The research community might justifiably wonder why publishers appear to be the only stakeholders that do not believe they have to tighten their belts.

Wellcome’s plans to introduce a new OA journal do, however, suggest an intriguing possibility: Although the three partners have certainly not said as much (in fact they have given a number of not entirely convincing reasons), it is tempting to speculate that the unspoken motivation for launching the journal could be a realisation that, in the age of the Internet, professional publishers have become an unnecessary and expensive luxury.

We could note, for instance, that the project’s FAQ states, “Online open access journals such as the PLoS titles and 'Nature Scientific Reports' are a step in the right direction. Our open access journal will also incorporate online technology to allow for an engaging, interactive experience, but will be staffed by experienced, active scientists and will use a faster, more transparent peer review system.”

Below I publish the email Q&A I had with Robert Kiley.


Robert Kiley 

RP: I believe the research funded by The Wellcome Trust generates around 5,000 papers a year. Is that right? 

RK: Yes it is. 

RP: In 2005 the Trust introduced an OA mandate that requires all its funded researchers to either self-archive their final peer-reviewed manuscript in the UKPMC repository within six months of publication, or to publish them in Gold or Hybrid journals. To help them do the latter the Trust agreed to pay any OA charges incurred. 

RK: Correct. 

RP: I am told that Wellcome’s contribution to Gold OA costs consists primarily of block grants that it makes to around 30 large institutions. Other Wellcome-funded researchers have to apply to the Trust to have their grants supplemented on a case-by-case basis. Are the block grants based on an estimate of the number of papers that Wellcome grantees at those individual institutions are likely to generate, or is there a one-for-one relationship? 

RK: The block grants are based on an estimate of the number of papers that will arise from Wellcome-funded researchers at a particular institution. 

RP: Do the beneficiaries of the block grants supply Wellcome with statistics showing exactly how that block grant has been used? 

RK: At the end of each year, each institution supplies the Trust with a spread sheet showing what they actually spent on OA publication costs.

As with any grant, the institution can only claim against the grant commitment for money it has actually spent. I.e. this explains why the commitment funding levels are often higher than the actual funding spend.

Regrettable? 

RP: As I understand it, the costs arising from the Trust’s OA policy have grown over the past five years from £622,000 ($1 million) to just over £3 million ($4.9m). Is that correct? 

RK: This increase reflects the fact that more and more authors are complying with the Wellcome mandate, and for this many more are selecting the "author pays" option.

I guess it also reflects the growing availability of "pure" OA journals, from the stables of PLoS and BMC, and more recently from Wiley, BMJ, NPG etc. 

RP: If OA becomes the norm, then I understand that Wellcome expects these costs to grow to around $12 million (£7.3 million) per annum, which would represent around 1.25% of its total research spend? 

RK: Yes, but that 1.25% assumes that Wellcome is picking up 100% of the research publication costs. In reality, much of the research Wellcome funds is also funded by other funders. Thus, if a paper is attributed to more than one research funder then we would expect the publication costs to be apportioned as well.

We recognise that this splitting of OA costs is probably not fully in place yet, but with the development of "middleware" solutions — such as Open Access Key — the splitting of publication costs across funders should become easier. 

RP: What I take away from this is that in a fully OA world Wellcome could have around $12 million a year less available for funding research (as opposed to communicating it). I assume that previously these costs would have been met by research institutions (through journal subscriptions). Is that regrettable in any way? 

RK: To repeat the point, the $12m assumes we pick up 100% of the OA costs. The scale of support available for research is driven by our investment portfolio. 

RP: What does that mean in practice? 

RK: For example the total amount spent on grants in 2009/10 was £450m, compared to £490m in 2008/09 and £545m in 2007/08. The introduction of our OA policy has not impacted the funding available for research grants. See here for the details.

Costs 

RP: In a presentation you gave earlier this year at the annual conference of the Association of Subscription Agents and Intermediaries you reported that during a three month period at the end of last year Wellcome funded the publication of 440 articles. This cost the organisation just over $1million (£611,000), which averages out at $2,367 per paper (£1,447)? 

RK: Correct. Those figures were based on the 440 papers that we paid for during the last quarter of 2010. These articles were published in journals with a wide range of APCs, up to and including $5,000 for Cell Press. The median cost was $2,250 and the mode $3,000.

The recent RIN/CEPA/Ware study on transition models, by the way, argued that if the average Article Processing Charges were set at about £1,457 (or $2,185 — the estimate by Outsell of the 2009 average charge) then "UK universities would benefit from substantial annual net savings that we estimate at £2.8m (or £3.0m including non-cash savings), .....whilst at the national level the UK makes annual savings in funding costs of £9.7m"

As you say, in the piece of work I undertook I calculated that the average APC levied on Wellcome Trust authors was $2,367 — thus validating the estimates provided by Outsell, and confirming that the "low APC" modelled in this report is highly realistic.

We believe that the benefits of maximising the dissemination of Trust-funded research findings, via our open access policy, outweigh the costs. 

RP: As you imply, the RIN figures you cite assume that APC rates settle at a lower level. However, the report also says, “if average APCs were set at a level equal to the estimated current global average cost per article (£2,634), UK universities’ annual cash costs would rise significantly, leading to a high net cost to the UK relative to the other scenarios (other than licensing).” Your assumption presumably is that the average APC cost will fall by at least £1,177 from today’s price? 

RK: If you look at the raft of new, "pure OA" journals that have been announced over the past six months you will see that the APC is akin to the PLoS ONE APC. So, the APC for NPG's Scientific reports is $1,350; BMJ Open is £1,200 [$1,980], Open Biology (Royal Society £1,200); Biology Open (Company of Biologists) $1,350 etc. — all of which suggests that an average APC of around £1,457/$2,185 is realistic.

The RIN report also looked at the benefits (not just cash savings) that would arise if greater access were provided to each of the core user groups. Again, with an APC of around $2,200 the benefits cost ratio (BCR) is "very substantially positive, in the range 10.8-15.7".

New journal 

RP: As well as committing to pay all the Gold OA fees incurred by its grantees Wellcome recently announced — with HHMI and Max Planck — that it plans to launch its own OA journal. In doing so it does not intend to levy any publishing charges on authors "for a number of years". Presumably the Trust’s financial commitment to dissemination can be expected to grow even more going forward, removing further money from actually doing research. Would you agree? Do you have any figures on what these additional costs might be? 

RK: Yes, our support for this new journal will mean that we are spending (slightly) more on dissemination costs.

We have not disclosed how much we are investing in this new journal, but remember that this initiative is being jointly funded by the HHMI and MPS (as well as the Trust). Details about the new journal can be found here. 

RP: Wellcome is a private funder, and it was one of the first funders to embrace OA, so it has been very much in the vanguard of OA. Most research is funded by governments. Do you believe that they will follow Wellcome's lead and assume, as Wellcome does, that "dissemination costs are research costs", and so agree to pay all OA publication costs? 

RK: I think you will need to talk to RCUK etc. to get their view on this. That said, the RCs do already provide mechanisms for their grant holders to meet open access publications cost — either as direct costs through the grant, or indirect costs.

Anecdotally we hear that RCUK-funded researchers find it more difficult than Wellcome-funded researchers to meet OA costs. And, though I would agree that our mechanisms for meeting OA costs greatly simplify the process, a quick search on PubMed shows (for example) that in the past year there have been some 196 Medical Research Council-funded papers published in either PLoS ONE, PLoS Medicine, PLoS Biology or PLoS genetics.

The point I am trying to make is that, in this simple example, MRC researchers were able to meet the APCs levied by PLoS. 

RP: Or perhaps they were beneficiaries of the APC waivers currently provided by PLoS. As its FAQ puts it, “PLoS is committed to ensuring that our fee is never a barrier to publication and so we offer a waiver to any authors who do not have access to funds to cover our publication fees.” The problem with waivers, of course, is that they can be discontinued at any point. I am wondering, however, whether some of these costs are unnecessary in any case. It is widely believed, for instance, that far too many papers are published today (partly because researchers are evaluated by their institutions on the number of papers they publish). 

RK: Umm.. I think I might take issue with the assertion that "it is widely believed that far too many papers are being published" — I'm not sure this is a problem as such and there are actually some drivers for more papers to be published, such as those reporting negative results etc. And anyway, we — and I'm sure most other funders — would never evaluate purely on quantitative terms of course. 

RP: Thank you for your time. 

I discuss the affordability problem confronting scholarly publishing in an article on the “Big Deal” published in the September issue of Information Today. (More here)

The Open Access Interviews: WebmedCentral’s Kamal Mahawar

In any discussion about scholarly communication today two thorny issues quickly emerge: the so-called access problem, and the problem of declining peer review standards. Kamal Mahawar, co-founder and CEO of a new web platform for publishing biomedical research called WebmedCentral, believes he has a solution to both problems. WebmedCentral, however, is not without its critics.

The access problem afflicting the research community is essentially an issue of affordability. Researchers submit a paper to a publisher, who then invites other researchers to assess it for quality and value. Assuming it is deemed to be adequate the paper is then published in a journal. To fund this process publishers sell subscriptions to their journals. Research institutions buy these subscriptions to ensure that their researchers have access to all relevant research being done around the world.

As library budgets have declined, however, research institutions have struggled to find the necessary money to pay for all the subscriptions their faculty require, depriving researchers of access to more and more research — a phenomenon known as the serials crisis.

Advocates of open-access publishing (as distinct from self-archiving) believe that the answer to this access/affordability problem is for researchers to abandon publishing in subscription journals and publish in OA journals instead. Rather than imposing charges for access (subscriptions), OA journals levy a publication fee, or “article-processing charge” on authors, or more usually their institutions. This enables publishers to make the papers they publish freely available on the Web, and so provide unfettered access to them.

The problem with OA publishing, however, is that the publication fees are far from cheap — around $1,350 to $3,000 per paper. Consequently, not all researchers have access to the necessary funds. While some OA publishers offer waivers for those without the wherewithal, this is generally done on a case-by-case basis, and the practice could very well be discontinued at some point in the future. If it was, indigent authors could find themselves unable to get their research published, particularly authors based in the developing world.

Raghavendra Gadagkar, a researcher at the Centre for Ecological Sciences at the Indian Institute of Science in Bangalore, made this point eloquently in a letter to Nature in 2008. He concluded that author-pays OA, “does more harm than good in the developing world”.


Decline in quality

Meanwhile, there is a growing conviction that the quality of peer review is declining. This concern was addressed recently by the House of Commons Science & Technology Committee. In its report, the Select Committee stated: “the integrity of the peer-review process can only ever be as robust as the integrity of the people involved”; and it concluded that “oversight of research integrity in the UK is unsatisfactory.”

Kamal Mahawar — whose day job is Consultant General and Bariatric Surgeon at City Hospitals Sunderland NHS Trust in the North East of England — believes the answer to the present crisis in scholarly communication lies in making research papers open access, but without imposing a publication fee on authors. More radically, he believes that any attempt to undertake pre-publication review should be abandoned.

Mahawar’s reasoning is that since the bulk of the costs associated with publishing research papers arises from the process of managing peer review, and the quality of the reviewing is in any case open to question, pre-publication review has become an unnecessary tax on the research community.

All that is needed, he adds, is to provide a low-cost publishing platform, let researchers post their papers on it, and then have independent researchers from other institutions review the papers — a process known as post-publication peer review.

As Mahawar put it in a written submission to the Science & Technology Committee inquiry, “There is widespread belief that pre-publication peer review, ineffective and harmful as it may be, is a necessary evil. I believe time has now come for scientific community to discard pre-publication peer review and concentrate on reinforcing post publication peer review.”

Of course there is no shortage of people happy to share with you their views on peer review. What is different about Mahawar is that he has put his money where his mouth: a year ago, with a group of colleagues, he launched WebmedCentral as an open-access post-publication peer review platform for biomedical science.

WebmedCentral promises to publish all papers submitted to it within 48 hours without reviewing them, and then help authors solicit reviews for the papers post factum.

Suspicion and criticism

To Mahawar’s disappointment, however, the research community has reacted to WebmedCentral with a degree of suspicion and criticism. It did not help that there were initially no details available on the site indicating who owns and manages the service.

Amongst other things, this led to speculation that WebmedCentral was some kind of marketing channel to enable the pharmaceutical industry promote its products. There were also complaints that its publication model would “flood the market” with unreviewed papers and “threaten the current models (including PLoS ONE)”.

In January, PLoS ONE associate editor Matt Hodgkinson posted a detailed and critical review of WebmedCentral on his blog Journalology. Many of the articles on the site, he concluded, “are unpublishable in any biomedical journal”; and he suggested that, given its copyright policy, it would be misleading to call WebmedCentral “open access”.

In a separate post, Hodgkinson criticised WebmedCentral for not publishing its ownership details. Having discovered these for himself in the Companies House database, Hodgkinson posted them on his blog, and ended by saying: “Drs Mahawar, Malviya, Kejariwal, Mr Jain, you should be proud of launching a site that aims to reform biomedical publishing. Why hide away?”

It was not a promising start for a new venture. But Mahawar and his colleagues believe that their cause is a worthy one so they have persisted. And to their credit they have responded to the criticism and made a number of changes, including publishing ownership details on the site and updating their copyright policy. They are also currently looking at how they can introduce an additional quality control layer on the site so that readers can, as Mahawar puts it, more easily judge "which sections have been found by reviewers and faculty to be of a better quality”.

Mahawar has also responded to Hodgkinson’s review. In his response he denies that it is misleading to call WebmedCentral open access, and he suggests that Hodgkinson’s review may have been too judgemental.

He is also unrepentant about publishing what Hodgkinson called “fringe science”. As he put it to me, “That some of these articles would be considered unpublishable in the current system is the whole point of WebmedCentral”.

He added, “It is inevitable that early on we will attract submissions which have not found a place elsewhere but gradually we hope to move the emphasis away from the act of publication to science, and then the quality of submissions should improve.”

Another obstacle the service faces is that researchers have shown themselves generally reluctant to commit time to post-publication reviewing, a point that post-publication review advocate and former BMJ editor Richard Smith has had to concede.

Put this point to Mahawar, however, and he responds: “We feel that other journals have been distracted by pre-publication peer review and were thus not able to give post-publication peer review much attention. Since this is our sole review model, we take it very seriously and are likely to be more successful as a consequence.”

But the greatest obstacle WebmedCentral faces is that it still lacks a business model. As one researcher commented on FriendFeed, “I don't see a viable business model and no evidence of an active reviewing community. Lot of things like this have been tried and none succeeded yet. People are not willing to submit good work to such unrecognised systems. Would love to see something like this succeed but I don't think this will be it.”

Comments like this also do not faze Mahawar. “We believe that if we provide a service which the community values, money will not be too difficult to find,” he told me. “We are exploring all options including philanthropic donation, advertisements, and angel investment for continued funding of this venture.”

The good news is that post-publication peer review is gaining favour — helped no doubt by the perceived success of Faculty 1000 (although it should be noted that F1000 only reviews papers that have already been traditionally reviewed and published in a regular journal).

On the topic of post-publication review the Science & Technology Committee Report remarks, “While pre-publication peer review continues to play an important role, the growth of post-publication peer review and commentary represents an enormous opportunity for experimentation … We encourage the prudent use of online tools for post-publication review and commentary as a means of supplementing pre-publication review.”

In other words, for the moment post-publication review is seen as an adjunct to pre-publication review. Whether it will eventually replace traditional pre-publication peer review, and if so how it will be facilitated and funded, remains for the moment unclear. In the meantime, however, experiments like WebmedCentral are surely to be welcomed.

Below Mahawar answers some specific questions about WebmedCentral.



Kamal Mahawar 

Q: Can you clarify when WebmedCentral was launched, what your position is at WebmedCentral, and who else is involved? 

A: The portal www.webmedcentral.com (commonly known as WebmedCentral) was officially launched in August 2010. It is owned by a company called Webmed Limited, which is registered in England.

I am a shareholder, director and CEO of the company. The others involved are my friends Deepak Kejariwal (shareholder, director and chairman), Mr Ajay Malviya (shareholder and director) and Mr Manish Jain (shareholder, director, and CFO).

In addition we have a technical team based in the US, UK, and India running our day-to-day affairs. We also have a number of scientists helping us as advisory board members, faculty, and scholarly reviewers. 

Q: You say on the site that “Biomedical publishing needs radical changes to empower authors, reviewers and readers.” Can you say more about why you launched WebmedCentral and how you hope it will address the changes you feel are necessary? 

A: Biomedical publishing is a multibillion dollar industry that thrives on two basic types of publishing model: reader-pays (funded by libraries or readers) and author-pays (funded by research agencies or authors). The money involved is significant and effectively excludes a large section of the scientific community from participating in academic debates, as they simply cannot afford it. The developing world is especially disadvantaged.

On probing further, it becomes clear that the costs arise mainly from pre-publication peer review. Journals organise this reviewing on behalf of the community and they charge the community for doing so. It does seem rather ironic that the same scientists who write articles for free and review them for free have to pay to actually read them (or publish them with open access journals).

Furthermore pre-publication peer review as the gate keeper of science has come under increasing criticism and scrutiny. Post-publication peer review, on the other hand, aims to generate a debate around every published work and each manuscript as if it were a work in progress, with constant monitoring by the community and updating by authors.

WebmedCentral is trying to build a dynamic platform where publication is not considered the end point of scientific communication, but the beginning. This is backed by raw data, free commentary and reviews and author interaction. We will enable these facilities on our portal and it will then be up to the scientific community to use it.

Our model uses the latest internet technologies to facilitate publication. It will allow every scientist, from any part of the world, who has anything to say to express it freely without any fear of rejection by peers. Peers can make their comments post publication if they so wish.

This approach allows us to keep our publication costs very low and delays are practically non-existent (articles are mostly published within 48 hours). We are trying to build a fair, low cost, efficient platform for scientific communication.

Misleading? 

Q: Earlier this year PLoS ONE associate editor Matt Hodgkinson wrote a critical review of WebmedCentral. Do you feel that review was unfair, inaccurate or unbalanced in any way? (One could argue that PLoS ONE is a competitor to WebmedCentral: perhaps Hodgkinson should have added a statement to his review indicating his affiliations?)

 A: Please find attached here our response to Matt Hodgkinson’s blog posting. I have sent it to Matt as well for him to post it on his blog. 

Q: In his review, Hodgkinson referred to a number of contradictory messages on the WebmedCentral site about copyright and concluded, “Calling WebmedCentral ‘open access’ would be misleading.” Does he have a point?

 A: We have clarified this point in the attached document. WebmedCentral is open access and the terminology is not at all misleading. 

Q: Hodgkinson also said that the site includes fringe science and that many of the articles on the site are “unpublishable in any biomedical journal”. Would you agree?

A: That some of these articles would be considered unpublishable in the current system is the whole point of WebmedCentral. We do not wish to judge articles before publication. It is inevitable that early on we will attract submissions which have not found a place elsewhere but gradually we hope to move the emphasis away from the act of publication to science, and then the quality of submissions should improve.

If you agree that making a commodity scarce increases its value, by making publication a non-issue, we seek to take the emphasis away from the act of publication to the science itself. In such an environment, an author has nothing to gain by publishing substandard research under their name, and everything to lose. It is our belief that serious authors looking to enhance their reputation will find this freedom of expression empowering, whereas casual authors will soon bring disrepute upon themselves. 

Q: As I understand it, to address the above point you intend to add an extra quality control layer on the site. Presumably that would mean that the fringe science would remain, but there would be a second layer on top of that which would include some more traditional peer review services?

A: The additional layer being planned would make it easier for a reader to judge which sections have been found by reviewers and faculty to be of a better quality. It would still not prevent anybody from publishing what they want as that is our core principle and we do not wish to compromise it.

Intermittent intervention 

Q: How do you normally seek reviews of uploaded papers, or are authors expected to organise their own reviews?

 A: Reviews are primarily organised by authors, but WebmedCentral intervenes intermittently and invites additional reviewers. We also have our own scholarly reviewers and a team of faculty helping in this task. 

Q: I have had complaints that WebmedCentral “spams” researchers asking them to review papers. Would you accept that charge, or are researchers simply overly sensitive to such issues?

A: As I say, WebmedCentral intermittently invites reviewers to generate debate around published work. We all (including myself) receive such requests from journals all the time and that is mainly due to the fact that number of articles published is increasing geometrically whereas the number of reviewers is not.

WebmedCentral’s answer to this problem is, as I mentioned, to move the emphasis away from the act of publication per se, which we believe is responsible for the massive rise in the number of publications. 

Q: There have been a number of attempts to shift scholarly publishing from a pre-publication review model to post-publication reviewing — including, of course, the attempts by PLoS ONE. To date, however, it has proved very difficult to attract much in the way of post-publication commentary. Where it does occur it tends to take place not on the site where the paper was published, but elsewhere on the Web — on, for instance, researchers’ blogs, and via Twitter etc. Why do you think this is, and how do you think sites like WebmedCentral can encourage more commentary on the papers themselves. 

A: We have already been more successful in generating post-publication debate than many others and we hope to be able to improve upon our performance in future by several planned interventions.

We feel that other journals have been distracted by pre-publication peer review and were thus not able to give post-publication peer review much attention. Since this is our sole review model, we take it very seriously and are likely to be more successful as a consequence. 

Q: As I understand it, WebmedCentral has published 558 papers since it was launched. Are you pleased with this figure or disappointed? What are your expectations for submissions going forward? 

A: We are very pleased with what WebmedCentral has achieved in less than a year. It is much beyond our expectations. We expect to grow by 100% every year for the next few years in terms of hits to our website, growing our user base, and growing the number of articles submitted and reviews posted.

 Q: Unless I am mistaken, the only income you receive from WebmedCentral is from the premium upload service you offer (which costs $50), which I assume is minimal. You and your partners must however have invested (and continue to invest) considerable sums of money in the site. Is WebmedCentral a philanthropic project, or is it a commercial venture that has yet to develop a business model?

A: We believe that if we provide a service which the community values, money will not be too difficult to find. So far, the costs are being met by shareholder investments. We are exploring all options including philanthropic donation, advertisements, and angel investment for continued funding of this venture.

With hindsight 

Q: I believe that Matt Hodgkinson’s review of WebmedCentral was sparked partly by the fact that there was no indication on the site of who owns the company behind it. There are a number of OA publishers whose ownership is obscure, and whose business practices many believe to be suspect. You have now added ownership details to WebmedCentral. Do you regret not having done so from the beginning? 

A: We were hoping that the community would take our venture at face value and it would not matter who was behind it. We were also trying to avoid any undue publicity which would inevitably bring potential disruption to our routine professional lives.

However it soon became evident that some scientists were becoming suspicious that we had links with the pharmaceutical industry and other vested interests that we are trying to hide.

With hindsight, it would possibly have been better to reveal our names from the outset. However as Hodgkinson found out earlier this year, this information has been available in the public domain throughout for anyone who really wanted to find out.