Science museums matter

Aside from the news media, which now has less science coverage as the journalism business contracts, museums play a vital role in how the public learns about science outside of school. New data show that science museums play an important part in this informal learning.

Despite enthusiastic scientists who are using social media, leading citizen science, and supporting other kinds of outreach, the vast majority of scientific information is ensconced in journals and conferences.

To connect this knowledge to the public, it’s common practice for closed-access journals to give journalists free (advance) access to new articles. But the same courtesy is not provided to science museums that would also benefit from new articles, as well as a back library of older articles. And science museums rarely budget for journal subscriptions.

This is a shame, as science museums can strongly influence the public’s knowledge and attitudes about science and technology, and to a surprising degree can cut across racial, ethnic, educational and economic barriers. (See OSU press release.)

Science museums lack journal access

Scholarly knowledge is hidden in closed-access journals. Vital and current knowledge is behind paywalls, out of reach of educators. This reduces the quality of new exhibitions and harms the chances of new funding.

Charlie Carlson, senior scientist at the Exploratorium, says this lack of access is unfortunate because “scientific journal access would be extremely useful in covering, describing and presenting the latest scientific developments and discourse. This seems a bit like a no brainer.”

Martin Weiss, a science interpretation consultant for the New York Hall of Science, says he needs journal access to research and prepare content for exhibitions. Since he does not have access himself, “when I really need something I prevail upon colleagues who have university library access for PDFs.”

Jeff Courtman is director of exhibit development at Museumscapes, an exhibit design and fabrication firm, and has worked in the museum field for over 25 years, mostly in science centers. During that time, he lacked ready access to science journals. But ironically, now that he’s switching fields and is a student again (working on an Masters degree in mental health counseling) he has access to a broad spectrum of journals via his university.

The converse is true for science organizations who don’t have access to education journals. Sue Ann Heatherly is an education officer at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO). She has access to science, astronomy and engineering journals, but not to fee-based science education journals. Heatherly says she “can ask my organization to purchase articles for me, but that’s not the same as the ‘random walk’ one needs to do in the early stages of finding relevant studies.”

Heatherly says that as an informal education practitioner, she should be reading more of the research on learning and “not flying by the seat of our pants when developing educational programming. I’m working now on a rewrite of the failed proposal and I have learned so much from digging into the research as I always do.” She doesn’t have an alternative, “I’m trying to gain privileges at a state university — so far no luck. Right now, I read abstracts, and purchase a few articles.”

Open access & blogs

The good news is that museum and educational staff increasingly rely on open access journals and blogs for access to new information about scientific advancements & research, as well as social science research about learning. (See my recent articles about open access journals; and rise of blogging.)

In lieu of institutional journal subscriptions, Carlson personally pays for his own subscription to Science, uses someone else’s subscription to Nature, and reads the open access PLoS journal. Carlson is an avid reader of blogs, and enjoys the provocative themes of New Scientist and Wired. Still, he says that while he loves the blogs and magazine, “I very much like to reference the original materials and see the original papers.” He says, “science bloggers have picked up the slack and they bring freshness and new perspectives, and frequently their perspectives provide valuable observations and insights.”

Courtman was originally trained as an artist. But blogs and free online news have helped him look for new connections and discoveries. He says, “I appreciate sites like physorg.com because it gives me the top-level view.  I don’t have to be a science expert to understand and if something piques my interest — perhaps I begin wondering about a connection — I can dig deeper.”

Relying on science advisors and stale knowledge

Weiss has a strong science background, but says, “I don’t think the majority of science centers have staff to be able to utilize [science journals]. For them the science advisors are sufficient.” Creating new exhibitions is a complex business, involving many staff, and the science is only a small piece. Weiss says that not all of the staff who are preparing programs or exhibitions “need or really want to have access… we use expert advisors to vet information for us.”

Only a small subset of staff at science museums actually want to read science literature, Carlson says. “It seems to me that getting the focus of informal science education back on the science and process of discovery would be a first step.  When I started the focus was science and investigation, now it’s education and science is the vehicle, and it should be the other way.”

There may be too much focus on methods instead of substance. Carlson says that informal science education professionals tend to focus on “educational technique and methodologies rather than content, principles, and critical thinking. Basically, science is not deemed critical to the mission, which is unfortunate, since it’s actually central to the mission and essential to the development of new content.”

Carlson says that excessive focus on methodology “inherently diminishes the role of scientific discovery. Most information discussed in the informal science education field comes from secondary and tertiary sources where it has been preprocessed and sometimes distorted. And then it’s impossible to get to the sources. Carlson says, “I think that there can be a stagnation without access to journals. The New York Times [science section] will take you only so far.”

Collective bargaining power?

If museums can’t afford the rates from commercial journal providers, can they band together to get a better deal? The membership society of science centers, Association of Science-Technology Centers (ASTC), has not used its bargaining power of 600 member museums and centers in 45 countries to negotiate journal access to get a good deal for this overlooked corner of the market.

The merchandisers fills in

Where there’s no money for knowledge, the merchandizers have a field day. One alarming example is the content in the $2m Harry Potter exhibition which recently circulated several top museums, and had it’s content provided by Warner Bros. Consumer Products division, which handles licensing and merchandising deals, like action figures for fast food kid’s meals. See my article on blockbuster traveling exhibits.

Without science as a mandate, that Harry Potter exhibit missed a ton of opportunities to bring in the science of potions, flight, or invisibility. By contrast, when the U.S. National Library of Medicine created a small format (a set of panels) traveling exhibition, “Harry Potter’s World: Renaissance Science, Magic, and Medicine,” which travels to libraries for less than $500 cost, they included much more science.

Update: 27-Apr: Minor typos fixed.

How much are authors paying? What do they think about it? And what are some other business models to sustain journals and other kinds of digital content?

Per-article fees

A common business model is that authors pay. The amount paid varies widely by discipline:

The data for these graphs is from last years’s EC-funded Study of Open Access Publishing (SOAP). The data was collected in winter 2009-10 from N=23k scholars.

Regardless of whether scholars pay a fee or not, they tend to value the same benefits of open access journals:

For more info from the SOAP study, see their slides.

Business models

To pay the bills, there are several business models which apply to journals, as well as other kinds of publishing like books and apps:

Traditional Publishing (Toll Access) — The reader/user pays. This was the common model until recently. Payment is proportional to demand, though the actual payment was often paid indirectly, via universities and libraries. Even in the past, this model did not work well for relatively esoteric fields with low demand (e.g., some areas of academic monograph publishing).

Author-pays Publishing — Pioneered in scholarly communications by BioMed Central and then copied by PLoS, Hindawi, and now many others including Sage, Wiley, BMJ, and AIP. This turned the traditional model upside down. There are potential conflicts of interest, since the author is the actual customer, but journals can maintain rigorous editorial policies. This works well for narrowly defined communities, where authors and readers work in close collaboration.

Institutional Sponsorship — Examples are repositories at colleges and universities. MIT’s DSpace repository is paid for out of MIT funds, and the California Digital Library’s eScholarship service is a budget line for the University of California. Any institution (e.g., a governmental agency) may decide to sponsor a repository or publication program. Anything which is paid out of the operating costs of a parent or separate organization. This includes grant support.

Marketing Services — This can include running advertisements, as well as cross promotion. For example, free content drives traffic to web sites, and can also lead to donations or purchased of print versions or other related materials. Advertising support runs the risk of corrupting editorial values, as trade magazines are notorious for receiving kickbacks from advertisers. Another problem is that much scholarly publishing serves audiences that are too small or too highly specialized to attract much interest from marketers.

“Freemium” Publishing — Some portion of a service can be made available for free, but other parts will require payment. This is common online. For example, sign up for a free account at LinkedIn, but if you want additional features including broader access to other LinkedIn members, you must subscribe to the professional (meaning paid) version. You can store your files and share them with DropBox, but once the files stored exceed a limit, you will be charged by the amount of storage you require. You may read abstracts of scientific articles as much as you want without cost, but if you want to read the entire article, you either have to purchase the article or subcribe to the journal.

Licensing to a secondary market — For example, granting permission for translation into other languages.

Much content uses a hybrid model, drawing revenue from multiple sources.

For example, the hybrid textbook publisher FlatWorld Knowledge hybridizes marketing services (the availability of the full text of a work online for free) with traditional publishing (the sale of PDFs and print-on-demand editions).

The above breakdown is adapted from Joseph Esposito’s ‘What We Talk About When We Talk About Business Models: A Bestiary of Revenue Streams‘ in February 2011. Esposito is a management consultant working in the publishing and software industries. Esposito sees analogies to the entertainment industry: A movie studio can travel across a couple categories over time. Thus the initial release of a film is almost always in the traditional model, with viewers paying for content at theaters. Later the same film may show up on television, where it is used as a marketing service to attract viewers for the benefit of advertisers. Esposito anticipates that we will be seeing author-pays publishing develop a modest additional revenue stream from traditional publishing, with articles originally appearing in open access (author-pays) repositories being collected and edited for publication in books (traditional model).

Open access journals are now commonplace. As of last lear, nearly 10% of scholarly articles were published in open access journals. There are now currently over 7500 open access journals, according to the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ), which indexes freely available, peer-reviewed journals that don’t have an embargo period (see criteria). 

Here’s a current breakdown of which fields currently have open access journals:

The above graph is based on DOAJ’s data on the number of journals from last month. Also, we can see which fields tend to have more or fewer articles per journal. Here’s a graph of the total number of journals, and articles/year:

The above data is from the EC-funded Study of Open Access Publishing (SOAP), as of winter 2009-10.

Open access journals span many subjects, and are based in a surprising range of countries.

Some related online scholarly publications, e.g., some conference proceedings, partially fit the spirit of open access because they don’t have an ISSN or a formal peer-review process. Also, there are related models which are variations of open access, such as “hybrid” open access where only selected articles are free to the public, and “delayed” open access which becomes free after a fee-only embargo period.

Key facts

For a view of how open access journals are used in academia and research, the SOAP project surveyed over 40k published scholars, and released their findings in Fall 2010. Findings:

• The number of open access articles published in “full” or “hybrid” open access journals was around 120,000 in 2009, some 8-10% of the estimated yearly global scientific output. Journals offering a “hybrid” open access option had a take-up of around 2%.
• Open access journals in several disciplines (including Life Sciences, Medicine, and Earth Sciences) are of outstanding quality, and have Impact Factors in the top 1-2% of their disciplines.
• Scientists who published in open access journals say they did so because of the free availability of the content to readers and the quality of the journal, as well as the speed of publication and, in some cases, the fact that no fee had to be paid directly by the author.
• The main barriers encountered by 5000 scientists who would like to publish in open access journals but did not manage to do so are funding — some open access journals require a fee to publish — (for 39% of them) and the lack of journals of sufficient quality in their field (for 30%).

For more comprehensive background on the foundation and history of open access, see Peter Suber’s Open Access Overview. And also Stevan Harnad’s Open Access Archivangelism blog.

There is also evidence that open access boosts citations. Last month, Donovan (U Kentucky) and Watson (U Georgia) looked at citation patterns in law journals and found that publishing in open access journals led to a 50% higher chance of being cited in subsequent papers.