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Tuesday, Oct 7, 2008
The Public Library of Science aims to break the stranglehold that expensive academic journals have over federally funded research -- and start a scientific revolution.
Jul 1, 2003 | Michael Eisen, a biologist at UC-Berkeley, once spent a summer working as a play-by-play announcer for the minor league Columbia Mules, and when he talks about the sorry state of scientific publishing, he has a tendency to slip into an announcer's voice -- quick, high-pitched, loud, intense.
"It's ridiculous," Eisen said in this voice during a recent phone interview from Washington. "All these things we're so used to doing with information on the Internet, we're preventing clever entrepreneurial people from doing with works of science. The idea that a narrow profit motive would prevent the dissemination of this information -- it's insane!"
Eisen was in Washington to lend his support to a congressional effort he believes will make scientific publishing less insane and less ridiculous. Most scientific journals -- such as Science, Nature or the New England Journal of Medicine -- require researchers to turn over all rights to the reports selected for publication; the publications then charge institutions and individuals subscription fees to view these reports, a model that Eisen believes inhibits scientific progress. The approach is especially galling, Eisen says, when you consider that a great deal of the money that funds the research published in these journals comes from the federal government. The public is paying for science that it never gets to see, he says.
On June 26, Rep. Martin Sabo, a Minnesota Democrat, introduced the Public Access to Science Act, a bill intended to rectify the situation. The act would amend U.S. copyright law to deny copyright protection to all "scientific work substantially funded by the federal government." Since the U.S. government is the world's largest sponsor of scientific research -- the White House asked for more than $57 billion for science in 2003 -- Sabo's bill would have profound implications for scientific publishing. If passed, it would instantly put a huge swath of newly published research into the public domain, upending the journals' pay-for-access business models.
In a statement, Sabo said, "It is wrong when a breast cancer patient cannot access federally funded research data paid for by her hard-earned taxes. It is wrong when the family whose child has a rare disease must pay again for research data their tax dollars already paid for." He added that "it defies logic to collectively pay for our medical research, only to privatize its profitability and availability."
Eisen has been saying such things for a long while. In 2000, Eisen helped start the Public Library of Science, a nonprofit organization dedicated to "making the world's scientific and medical literature a public resource." He was joined in the effort by Harold Varmus, the Nobel Laureate who directed the National Institutes of Health under Bill Clinton, and Patrick Brown, a Stanford biochemist who pioneered the use of DNA microarrays, a technology that's reshaping biological research. Eisen, Varmus and Brown believed that if they could get scientists to insist on open-access publishing models, the scientific journals would have no choice but to change their ways. And the best way to get scientists to insist on open access, Eisen says, is by showing them that a journal published in an open way can be just as successful -- and prestigious -- as long-established journals.
In December, after receiving a $9 million grant from the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, PLoS, as the Public Library is known, announced that it would soon publish two journals -- PLoS Biology and PLoS Medicine -- both online and in the traditional printed format. The group has come up with a novel business model that it believes will enable these journals to be "sustainable." Instead of charging readers subscription fees to access reports, PLoS would ask the institutions that fund scientific research to pay for the costs associated with publishing scientific research. The price would be modest -- $1, 500 -- says Eisen, for what would be a great service to science: Reports published in PLoS would be freely available to anyone anywhere in the world.
PLoS's efforts have caused a stir in the orthodox world of scientific publishing; the group has managed to recruit several editors from the ranks of other prestigious journals, and there are rumors that many of the staffers who remain at the established publications are pushing their bosses for change.
Most of the journal staff and publishers contacted by Salon for this story were either unavailable or declined to comment on PLoS's efforts and the Sabo bill. But one man who did talk was Robert Bovenschulte, who directs the publication division of the American Chemical Society, which publishes 31 scientific journals. Bovenschulte is skeptical of the idea that scientific research is not widely disseminated; through the various institutions that subscribe to his journals, he says, most people who need the highly technical information that he publishes probably have no problem getting it. "There's one place where I would say there's something of a barrier," he said. "If you are a member of the general public who does not have any affiliation with a university or corporation, you're not going to have our content."
Do members of the general public even need access to extremely technical research -- to, say, an article about "the latest development in the crystal structure of some molecule," as Bovenschulte put it? Eisen says we do. Science works better, he says, when everybody sees what's going on -- the accessibility leads to new breakthroughs, to people from disparate fields bringing new ideas to old-school techniques. Even if Sabo's bill doesn't get very far in Congress, Eisen believes that the prevailing mood in the scientific community is to embrace this openness. The closed-door policies of the science journals are untenable in this atmosphere, he says. PLoS's philosophy, several supporters say, closely mirrors that of the open-source software world -- but if it succeeds, its fruits could conceivably be greater than simply producing a more stable operating system. It could lead, the people at PLoS say, to a revolution in science.
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