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Synapse The UCSF Student Newspaper
Thursday, March 27, 2014
synapse.ucsf.edu
Volume 58, Number 24
NEWS
Scientific Publishing: An Industry in Flux For scientists around the world, the open access movement has changed how journal articles are read and distributed by offering an alternative to the dominant subscription-based access model. Today, many scientific journal articles are available for free on the web. In this three-part series, we examine the impact of open access journals on the scientific publishing industry.
By Alexandra Greer Science Editor
A
s scientists and medical researchers at UCSF, we are accustomed to having ready access to the current body of scientific knowledge at our fingertips. It’s simply a matter of hopping on the Internet or heading over to the library. We give little thought to how this scientific data made its way to us. We may be somewhat familiar with the publication process: scientists write up their laboratory findings and submit it to a scientific journal for consideration and pay the necessary fees. If all goes well, it gets published. End of story. In fact, the business of scientific publishing is a complex, multi-layered infrastructure, not unlike the television industry where producers create programs, networks buy the programs, and large cable and satellite distributors bundle the networks into packages which are then sold to end users on a subscription basis. The annual revenues generated from English-language scientific journal publishing are estimated at $9.4 billion in 2011, with 52 percent coming from the United States, according to Outsell, Inc., a marketing agency focused on the publishing industry. The total size of the global science, technology and medicine (STM) market in 2011 (including journals, books, technical information and standards, databases and tools and medical communications) was estimated by Outsell at $23.5 billion. For decades, the large publishers have served as a middleman between the individual journals and the universities, operating on a subscription business model. Publishers, such as Reed Elsevier, John Wiley & Sons, Springer, and Ovid, bundle an array of scien-
Illustration by Jillian Varonin/BMS4
tific journals and then charge university libraries a subscription fee to access the journals. However, like other publishing industries today, disruptive technologies and new business models are forcing rapid and massive changes. And these changes are already affecting how and where scientists publish their research. “I think the subscription model’s days are very numbered now,” said Dr. Peter Binfield, cofounder of the open access journal PeerJ, in describing the changing publishing landscape. “It’s been driven by all sorts of things, like legislation, peoples’ education about the issues, the fact that library can’t pay for their subscriptions. All of that comes into play.” Most notably, open access journals—peer-reviewed scientific journals where accepted manuscripts are publicly available through a Creative Commons license and do not require a subscription for access—have become increasingly popular with scientists around the world and are challenging the traditional business model based on journal subscription fees.
SCIENTIFIC PUBLISHING » PAGE 3
NEWS
DentStay Helps Minority Dental School Candidates Feel Welcome By Angela Broad Staff Writer
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Photo courtesy of DentStay Dinner with pre-dents: (left to right) Ramon Gutierrez (D3), Ngan Tran (D2), Yamrot Alemu (D2), Maximillion Jensen (D3), Eric Brown (D2), Jennifer Villalta (pre-dent), Hannah Garcia (pre-dent), Whitney Bryant (pre-dent)
hen Eric Brown and Yamrot Alemu were applying to dental schools, they would stay with students from campus minority organizations whenever possible, as a way to save money on housing before their interviews and gain valuable insight into campus life. Now in their second year at UCSF School of Dentistry, they wondered why such a program didn’t exist here. So Brown, Alemu and classmate Ivy Fua, along with the Student National Dental Association (SNDA), formed DentStay this academic year. The organization offers underrepresented minority (URM) students interviewees the opportunity to stay with a dental student of a similar background, relieving the candidates of the expense of staying in a hotel in San Francisco, which can cost several hundred dollars a night. “Ivy Fua and I learned more about the program at SNDA's National Convention in the summer of 2013,” said Brown. “We both
knew this could be a great opportunity for us to get involved with and help increase minority student matriculation here on campus.” In addition to offering overnight lodging, a group of student hosts provide the prospective students with dinner the evening before their big day. In an informal atmosphere, SNDA members answer applicants’ questions about UCSF and try to ease the natural stresses of interviewing. In this way, DentStay helps to better prepare URM students for their interviews, gives them an opportunity to spend time with dental students of similar backgrounds and ultimately, encourages them to matriculate at UCSF. “Meeting members of the SNDA community help interviewees see that we are here to encourage and support them throughout their time in dental school,” said Alemu. “Students see that they will always receive help from the SNDA community. In addition, our members are able to answer last minute questions from the interviewees about the curriculum, out-
DENTSTAY » PAGE 6