Written by David Tebbutt in May 2004

When I started work, boss would dictate message to secretary. Secretary would type memo. Boss would check it. Secretary would pop it in the internal mail. Post boy would collect it. Post room would sort it. Post boy would deliver it. Addressee would read it. Or, in the case of a letter to an outside company, the Royal Mail would get involved.

Today, boss types email. Addressee reads it.

Disintermediation on a grand scale has taken place thanks to desktop computing and, more recently, the internet. The typing pool has vanished. The secretary has transmogrified into a pa working for several bosses. Work has speeded up and become more efficient.

Contrast this with the world of subscription publishing. Research information is nearly always sourced on a computer, sent to a publisher electronically, then painstakingly rendered into print and despatched to libraries from whence one person at a time can read or use each copy.

Woe betide anyone who thinks of copying or scanning said research. The publisher's foot is firmly on the hose of progress. In the name of copyright, it minimises the spread of information. In the name of protecting fat profits, it makes sure that electronic access is tightly bundled with print subscriptions. And it defends its position in the name of quality.

The open access movement has a different view. It believes that mankind would benefit if research were made widely, concurrently and freely available and copying allowed, subject to commonsense provisions. This way, research information would reach all those who needed it rather than the elite who could afford it and the charitably-funded in developing countries.

Such access would save wasted research, speeding the time to meaningful results.

Of course, costs are involved in either publishing method and these costs have to be met somehow. Ignoring the plight of the subscription publishers, if all research information were freely available then the subscription budget could be moved to the R&D budget and used to offset the cost of open access publishing. This might happen within an institution or at a higher level, where government grant-in-aid can be redirected away from library subscriptions and towards research establishments.

If the information is already published internally on a computer system, then it's a relatively short hop to making it available through a credible online open access publisher. Authors can conform to the technical requirements of online publishers fairly easily. Most of the cost of doing so will be under their control. Scare stories about researchers having to pay $3000 or $10,000 to have their work published are nonsense put about by subscription publishers anxious about their business model.

To establish their credibility, open access publishers will have to ensure that submitted material has been scrutinised by an editor, a board or a peer group but, again, this cost can be largely borne prior to delivery.

Some complain that the open access approach will benefit those who put least in. Well, welcome to the real world. You could say that this is true of so much on the internet. In fact, the world wide web design is itself evidence of the massive value of putting key research into the public domain. Sir Tim Berners-Lee could have started a company or gone to someone like Microsoft with his ideas. Instead, he went for the common good. Thanks to him, the worlds of information and commerce have changed forever and mostly for the better.

The number of open source publishers grows by the day and the volume of material published by them is exploding. Researchers rich and poor from around the world are able to access this material. Through 'the author pays' model, publishers are able to conduct their operations profitably or, in the case of not-for-profit organisations, avoid making a loss.

The subscription publishing industry's days are numbered. It either has to adapt, as the secretaries did, or go the way of the typing pool.