The basic problem of the primary literature is that the material to be published grows more rapidly than the number of people or institutions interested in buying and/or using it. A smaller, but still nagging, difficulty is that unit costs increase more rapidly than publishers are able to increase unit productivity.

... But in the last analysis, the primary literature would easily be able to continue basically unchanged, were it not for the fact that the demand has stabilized, while the supply of material has not yet done so.

-David E. Gushee J. Chem. Doc. 1970, 10, 30-32

Gushee goes on to discuss the decline of ACS journal subscription rates and the simultaneous increase in total pages printed and journals published. One wonders to what extent these trends continued over the last 36 years and how this phenomenon may driving the current escalation in journal costs.

About this "price squeeze" and a publisher's inability to escape it, Gushee writes:

A scientific society cannot, however, control cost as the typical business can. In journal publishing, the only real cost we can save is the page we don't print. And to restrict the number of pages printed is to interfere with the dissemination of knowledge, which is, after all, the basic reason the Society exists in the first place.

There are many interesting tidbits in this Back to the Future article, but perhaps none more so than the following:

Should the number of pages go over some critical number, then we get into a position of having to charge such a high price that individuals can no longer afford the journal. Chemical Abstracts, as an entity, reached that point some years ago and can no longer be considered a publication for individual subscriptions.

How expensive does a journal need to become before it can no longer be considered a publication for individual libraries? When that point is reached, who is responsible?

This picture is worth at least 1,000 words on the subject of Open Access in chemistry. But since it's Friday, I'll put up the picture today and leave the words for next week.

Once upon a time, somewhere in post-war Eastern Europe, there was a great famine in which people jealously hoarded whatever food they could find, hiding it even from their friends and neighbors. One day a wandering soldier came into a village and began asking questions as if he planned to stay for the night.

"There's not a bite to eat in the whole province," he was told. "Better keep moving on."

"Oh, I have everything I need," he said. "In fact, I was thinking of making some stone soup to share with all of you." He pulled an iron cauldron from his wagon, filled it with water, and built a fire under it. Then, with great ceremony, he drew an ordinary-looking stone from a velvet bag and dropped it into the water.

By now, hearing the rumor of food, most of the villagers had come to the square or watched from their windows. As the soldier sniffed the "broth" and licked his lips in anticipation, hunger began to overcome their skepticism.

"Ahh," the soldier said to himself rather loudly, "I do like a tasty stone soup. Of course, stone soup with cabbage -- that's hard to beat."

Soon a villager approached hesitantly, holding a cabbage he'd retrieved from its hiding place, and added it to the pot. "Capital!" cried the soldier. "You know, I once had stone soup with cabbage and a bit of salt beef as well, and it was fit for a king."

The village butcher managed to find some salt beef . . . and so it went, through potatoes, onions, carrots, mushrooms, and so on, until there was indeed a delicious meal for all. The villagers offered the soldier a great deal of money for the magic stone, but he refused to sell and traveled on the next day. ...

-Forrest M. Hoffman, William W. Hargrove, and Andrew J. Schultz The Stone SouperComputer Site

Recently eMolecules donated a substantial amount of new code to the Open Babel project. This code, which could help developers of molecular databases write faster query engines, is now free for anyone to use for any purpose. Are eMolecules worried about having parted with something it took them time and money to develop and which could eventually help a competitor? I doubt it. Maybe they're no longer using this code and just decided to give something back to the community. But maybe they're acting out of enlightened self-interest. Scientists naturally grok the Stone Soup story. And so do people who have used Open Source software.

Jealously hoarding intellectual property in a competitive environment seems, on the surface, as rational as hoarding cabbage during a famine. Maybe the hoarding instinct comes from our understanding of the physical world. After all, there's only so much stuff to go around. If I give my cabbage to my neighbor, then I go hungry. It's a sum-zero game. That is, unless there's a smart soldier with a rock in a velvet bag visiting for the night.

Intellectual property disrupts our commonsense notions about the sum-zero game. When I give an idea to a neighbor we both can use it. But he can also use the idea in ways I would never have imagined, or make improvements to it that I either lack the time or skill to make. Rather than costing me, my donation pays me dividends. For this to work, though, my neighbor has to share the same spirit of openness that I do.

The villagers in the story didn't put every last bit of food they had into the pot, and eMolecules didn't donate their entire software infrastructure to Open Babel. There is clearly a place for maintaining a competitive advantage when running a business. What eMolecules did contribute was a small, but important ingredient to the soup they smelled cooking.

You know, I once used a cheminformatics toolkit with a 2-D layout engine, and it was fit for a king...

A recent article discussed chemistry-related journals in the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ). In going through some of my bookmarks, I stumbled on an Open Access journal that DOAJ doesn't have: Metal-Based Drugs.

Unfortunately, the last available issue of Metal-Based Drugs is from 2002. It's not clear if this journal is defunct or not. The journal's Author Guidelines link points to the publisher's general manuscript submission system. There's no mention of publication terminating, so the status of this journal is still a bit of a mystery.

But something interesting appears on the right-hand side of the journal's homepage. It's a sidebar listing news from the publisher, Hindawi Publishing. One of the items reads simply: "Retrodigitization of back volumes of Metal-Based Drugs is completed."

Hindawi Publishing runs a few dozen Open Access scientific journals in addition to Metal-Based Drugs. Their Open Access work has been covered many times in Peter Suber's Open Access News. From a report on Hindawi by Electronic Publishing Service's Majied Robinson:

... In an interview with EPS, Hindawi's Senior Publishing Developer Paul Peters said that the company was looking to acquire more titles to digitise and make freely available .. as well as the establishment of new journals in new fields.

At least one publisher is actively buying the rights to existing journals for the purpose of running them with an Open Access model. Are there any other companies doing the same? What new business models might emerge from these activities to recover their costs - or even turn a profit?

An article by Thomas Engel honoring Johann Gasteiger has recently appeared in J. Chem. Inf. Model. Tucked between two pages of text is a fascinating full-color, full-page timeline of Bio- and Chem(o)informatics. It starts with the abacus in 3000 B.C. and Libavius' Alchemia in 1500 A.D. Near the end, it records the advent of virtual screening in 1998. Then, the very next event on this very large timeline happens in 2000 - it's the founding of the CDK project!