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Online publishing has rapidly expanded in the past decade 1 as scientists, like the rest of society, have shifted to a more interactive style of communication, demanding more information, faster and often at no cost. It is all very convenient and exciting, but it is also rapidly shifting the ground rules for publishing scientific work. To borrow the words of Peter Booth Wiley, Chairman of the Board of John Wiley & Sons, it is like a roller coaster ride: both exhilarating and terrifying 2. On the exhilarating side, online open access publishing overcomes several problems inherent in traditional hard-copy publishing: it is cheaper, more efficient and it provides universal access, which must surely be good for scholarship 3. But online open access publishing also comes with its downsides, some of which are considered below. One seductive feature of online open access journals is that their publications are free. The irony is that the establishment of ‘free’ journals requires substantial financial backing and they still charge fees to publish 1. For example, the open access journal PLOS Biology was launched in 2003 with a 9 million dollar grant from the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation. By 2010, fees to publish in the PLOS subject-specific journal series ranged from $2250 to $2900 1. In the same year, the number of North American institutions that had established funding pools to cover these charges had risen to 15, from two institutions only 2 years earlier 4. The reality is that even in the digital world, there are still costs to be borne (e.g. copy-editing, software, marketing) and someone has to pay. Essentially we are still paying, but how we pay is changing. A consequent concern is that sustaining the financial viability of fee-for-publishing open access journals could lead to a quantity for quality trade-off. According to the Directory of Open Access Journals, which tracks some 5000 scholarly and scientific journals, only two-thirds are peer-reviewed 1. Even the more prestigious journals, such as PLOS ONE, have been criticised for publishing some low-quality fee-for-publication papers to make their operation financially viable 1. The number of online journals has exploded over the past decade: in 2010 they were estimated to comprise between 7% and 11% of the world's journals 1. This growth may increase the dominance of non-peer-reviewed or lightly peer-reviewed work. Online journals also substantially change the structure of publishing, in that there are fewer constraints on the number of manuscripts that can be published. For example, in 2010, PLOS ONE forecast the publication of 7500 articles 1. Conventional print journals vary in their size, but are restricted by print costs and their potential audience: restrictions that are drastically reduced by online open access publishing. The ‘supersizing’ of journals may not only substantially inflate the quantity of material published, but it may increase reliance on large open access journals for content. This could alter citation patterns, as these journal conglomerates come with inbuilt search engines 5, which circumvents the need for specialised software (e.g. Medline®, PsycINFO®), and allows their content to be browsed independently of content from other journals. The impact of online open access on citation rates is not well understood, although a preference for citing electronic material over print material has emerged in some disciplines 6-8. The increased availability of material online could be expected to broaden the literature we canvass and cite in doing our research. However, James Evans portends a narrowing of how we cite research as we search electronically and follow hyperlinks rather than browse or peruse hard copy 8. He examined citation rates across a database of 34 million articles from 1945 to 2005 and found that as online publishing increased, researchers cited relatively fewer papers and those papers came from fewer journals. There was also a relative neglect of historical contributions in the literature. To the extent that these findings are a result of online publishing, or a more general shift in how we conduct science, is debatable, but they do suggest we are at risk of ‘herd behaviour’ 9, narrowing in on prevailing opinions and consensus at the expense of the broader literature. A further issue that we need to consider is how the role of publishers will develop, or diminish, as funding bodies increasingly mandate open access publishing. This process was initially instigated by the National Institute for Health in the USA, on the premise that if research was funded by tax-payers, that it should be available to tax-payers. Funding bodies around the world are following suit, and so are academics who feel that they should have the right to freely disseminate their own research articles. However, open access is likely undermine journal subscriptions and some argue it may even destroy the commercial market for scientific journals by diluting copyright ownership 10. Allan Adler, vice president for legal and governmental affairs at the Association of American Publishers, points to a 2006 survey of librarians, which found that if two-fifths of a journal's articles became free within 12 months, 44% would cancel their subscriptions 10. Currently it is estimated that around 20% of peer-reviewed articles are freely available online, with this increasing at around 1% per year 1. The tipping point beyond which subscription journals become unviable is unlikely to be clear until they start going out of business. This will have flow-on effects, reducing the income of the professional societies who host journals. How we operate in a world without commercial publishers and subscription journals as we currently know them is an eventuality that we need to consider. A final issue is access. As explained by Elias Zerhouni, the former National Institute for Health director, the real value in online content is in its connectivity: the capacity to link documents and information in a way that maximises their utility 10. But the rapid escalation of online content not only creates a need for archiving facilities that can store large quantities of digital material, but also for software that can effectively and efficiently search enormous volumes of digital information. Neither existing academic search engines (e.g. Medline®) nor commercial web-crawlers (e.g. Google) are designed to systematically search institutional repositories for academic documents. Tools to search multiple online repositories are under development, but not yet developed, and will require ongoing investment 11, 12. Who will lead the charge on this, and who will pay, are questions currently on the lips of librarians around the world 4, 13. All of these issues apply to the alcohol and other drugs field, as they do to any other discipline. However, one challenge that is likely to affect the alcohol and other drugs field more than most other disciplines is how we will ensure the credibility and integrity of our research in an open access environment. Compared with traditional ‘hard science’ disciplines (e.g. cell biology, molecular physics) there is a greater demand for information on drug and alcohol use within the broader community. There is also more political influence in how the findings of research are portrayed in the public arena. The presentation of research in scientific journals is not designed to be interpreted by a lay audience, nor is it intended to be a means of communicating with the broader community. This may lead to inadvertent misinterpretation of research findings or their misuse in policy and practice. Proactively marketing credible and accessible interpretations of research evidence through learned societies (or the journals themselves) may help counter such misadventures. Here I have considered a few issues that we are likely to face as we step off this precipice into the world of online publishing. Doubtless there are many more. Only a fool would predict what our world of scientific journals might look like 10 or 20 years from now. But we would also be fools not to forecast what drastic changes might occur and how this might impact on research within the alcohol and other drugs field. In my view, this should not be a passive ride, but a journey that we negotiate with foresight, so that the shift to online publishing benefits, rather than undermines, our academic endeavours.
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Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 5 citations exist upstream.
Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.
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