As reported on 11 January, Michael B. Eisen, a biologist at the University of California, Berkeley, published a New York Times op-ed calling for open access to scientific publications and advocating defeat of the Research Works Act , a bill in Congress that would roll back open-access mandates at the National Institutes of Health. Now the Guardian has published a commentary headlined 'Academic publishers have become the enemies of science,' and the New York Times has examined how the Web promotes the evolution of the scientific process.
The Guardian identifies the author of its piece as Dr Mike Taylor, a research associate at the Department of Earth Sciences, University of Bristol. 'If passed,' Taylor writes, the bill in Congress 'would prohibit the NIH's public access policy and anything similar enacted by other federal agencies, locking publicly funded research behind paywalls.' This would lead, he says, to 'an ethical disaster: preventable deaths in developing countries, and an incalculable loss for science in the USA and worldwide.' Taylor asserts that the 'only winners would be publishing corporations.'
To make a scientific paper globally available in the internet age, Taylor declares, has become 'a trivial undertaking.' He advocates an author-pays model, with submitters covering the 'contribution that publishers [now] make—coordinating editors, formatting, and posting on websites.' He doesn't mention archiving or the challenge of precision information retrieval. And he is obviously unfamiliar with the professional stature and salaries of the PhD physicists who constitute the editorial staffs at prominent physics journals, for he believes that in academic publishing, 'scientists handle the editorial tasks for free or for token stipends.'
Taylor singles out the commercial publisher Elsevier, condemning its 'obscene profits' and charging that its 'true agenda is nothing nobler than to line [its] pockets at the expense of scientists worldwide and everyone with a preventable or treatable disease.' He says publishers will 'fight dirty' to preserve the status quo, and he sees scientists 'perpetuating this feudal system.' He closes this way:
The bottom line for scientists is that many publishers have now made themselves our enemies instead of the allies they once were. Elsevier's business does not make money by publishing our work, but by doing the exact opposite: restricting access to it. We must not be complicit in their newest attempt to cripple the progress of science.
With an entirely different tone and approach, the Science Times section of the 17 January New York Times offers, across the top of its front page, Thomas Lin's analytical article 'Cracking open the scientific process.' The piece combines news reporting and contemplation about internet-age change and prospects not only in scientific publishing but in the very ways that scientists work together. It's not just an internet age, Lin seems to say, but also a social networking age that is inevitably rechanneling scientific community practice.
Lin begins by suggesting that many in science have come to see traditional communications processes as 'hidebound, expensive and elitist,' given that peer review 'can take months, journal subscriptions can be prohibitively costly, and a handful of gatekeepers limit the flow of information.' He writes, 'It is an ideal system for sharing knowledge, said the quantum physicist Michael Nielsen, only 'if you're stuck with 17th-century technology.' ' Lin continues as follows:
Dr. Nielsen and other advocates for 'open science' say science can accomplish much more, much faster, in an environment of friction-free collaboration over the Internet. And despite a host of obstacles, including the skepticism of many established scientists, their ideas are gaining traction. Open-access archives and journals like arXiv and the Public Library of Science (PLoS) have sprung up in recent years.
Lin reports that this week, 450 bloggers, journalists, students, scientists, librarians, and programmers will meet at North Carolina State University concerning open science, with thousands more joining online. He also describes ResearchGate, a social networking site that involves more than 1.3 million scientists. Lin says it 'offers a simple yet effective end run around restrictive journal access with its 'self-archiving repository.' '
Lin quotes Alan Leshner, executive publisher of the journal Science, concerning open access: 'I would love for it to be free [but] we have to cover the costs.' Lin notes that peer-reviewed open-access journals 'like Nature Communications and PLoS One charge their authors publication fees—$5,000 and $1,350, respectively.' He mentions Eisen's Times op-ed. And he quotes a spokesman for Elsevier: 'Government mandates that require private-sector information products to be made freely available undermine the industry's ability to recoup [necessary publishing] investments.'
Lin's concluding paragraphs sum up an analysis that looks past immediate questions about the processing of scientific papers:
Dr. Leshner, the publisher of Science, agrees that things are moving. 'Will the model of science magazines be the same 10 years from now? I highly doubt it,' he said. 'I believe in evolution.
'When a better system comes into being that has quality and trustability, it will happen. That's how science progresses, by doing scientific experiments. We should be doing that with scientific publishing as well.'
Matt Cohler, the former vice president of product management at Facebook who now represents Benchmark Capital on ResearchGate's board, sees a vast untapped market in online science.
'It's one of the last areas on the Internet where there really isn't anything yet that addresses core needs for this group of people,' he said, adding that 'trillions' are spent each year on global scientific research. Investors are betting that a successful site catering to scientists could shave at least a sliver off that enormous pie.
Dr. Madisch, of ResearchGate, acknowledged that he might never reach many of the established scientists for whom social networking can seem like a foreign language or a waste of time. But wait, he said, until younger scientists weaned on social media and open-source collaboration start running their own labs.
'If you said years ago, 'One day you will be on Facebook sharing all your photos and personal information with people,' they wouldn't believe you,' he said. 'We're just at the beginning. The change is coming.'
Steven T. Corneliussen, a media analyst for the American Institute of Physics, monitors three national newspapers, the weeklies Nature and Science, and occasionally other publications. He has published op-eds in the Washington Post and other newspapers, has written for NASA's history program, and is a science writer at a particle-accelerator laboratory.
