[tlug] Breaking the Monopoly on Science Journals: NYT Article

[Charles Muller <acmuller@example.com>]

Friends,

Thinking again about the recent attention to the issues raised by Larry
Lessig: in case you may have missed it, yesterday's New York Times has a most
encouraging article about breaking the monopoly on science articles, at
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/12/17/science/17JOUR.html. I have included it
below, for your convenience.

Chuck

=========
December 17, 2002

New Premise in Science: Get the Word Out Quickly, Online
By AMY HARMON

group of prominent scientists is mounting an electronic challenge to 
the leading scientific journals, accusing them of holding back the 
progress of science by restricting online access to their articles so 
they can reap higher profits.

Supported by a $9 million grant from the Gordon and Betty Moore 
Foundation, the scientists say that this week they will announce the 
creation of two peer-reviewed online journals on biology and 
medicine, with the goal of cornering the best scientific papers and 
immediately depositing them in the public domain.

By providing a highly visible alternative to what they view as an 
outmoded system of distributing information, the founders hope 
science itself will be transformed. The two journals are the first of 
what they envision as a vast electronic library in which no one has 
to pay dues or seek permission to read, copy or use the collective 
product of the world's academic research.

"The written record is the lifeblood of science," said Dr. Harold E. 
Varmus, a Nobel laureate in medicine and president of the Memorial 
Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center who is serving as the chairman of the 
new nonprofit publisher. "Our ability to build on the old to discover 
the new is all based on the way we disseminate our results."

By contrast, established journals like Science and Nature charge 
steep annual subscription fees and bar access to their online 
editions to nonsubscribers, although Science recently began providing 
free electronic access to articles a year after publication.

The new publishing venture, Public Library of Science, is an 
outgrowth of several years of friction between scientists and the 
journals over who should control access to scientific literature in 
the electronic age. For most scientists, who typically assign their 
copyright to the journals for no compensation, the main goal is to 
distribute their work as widely as possible.

Academic publishers argue that if they made the articles more widely 
available they would lose the subscription revenue they need to 
ensure the quality of the editorial process. Far from holding back 
science, they say, the journals have played a crucial role in its 
advancement as a trusted repository of significant discovery.

"We have very high standards, and it is somewhat costly," said Dr. 
Donald Kennedy, the editor of Science. "We're dealing in a market 
whether we like it or not."

Science estimates that 800,000 people read the magazine 
electronically now, compared with 140,000 readers of the print 
version. Given the number of downloads at universities like Harvard 
and Stanford, which buy site licenses for about $5,000 a year, the 
magazine says people are reading articles for only a few cents each.

In many cases even such small per-article charges to access a digital 
database can make for substantial income. The Dutch-British 
conglomerate Reed Elsevier Group, the world's largest academic 
publisher, posted a 30 percent profit last year on its science 
publishing activities. Science took in $34 million last year on 
advertising alone.

But supporters of the Public Library of Science say the point is not 
how much money the journals make, but their monopoly control over 
literature that should belong to the public.

"We would be perfectly happy for them to have huge profit margins 
providing that in exchange for all this money we're giving them we 
got to own the literature and the literature did not belong to them," 
said Dr. Michael B. Eisen, a biologist at Lawrence Berkeley National 
Laboratory and the University of California, and a founder of the 
Public Library of Science.

When scientists relied on print-and-paper journals to distribute 
their work, the Library's supporters argue, it made sense to charge 
for access, since each copy represented an additional expense. But 
they say that at a time when the Internet has reduced distribution 
costs to almost zero, a system that grants journals exclusive rights 
over distribution is no longer necessary.

By publishing on the Internet and forgoing any profits, the new 
venture says it is now possible to maintain a high-quality journal 
without charging subscription fees.

Instead, the new journals hope institutions that finance research 
will come to regard publishing as part of the cost. The journals will 
initially ask most authors to pay about $1,500 per article, for 
exposure to a wider potential audience and a much faster turnaround 
time.

The library's founders agree that its success will depend largely on 
whether leading scholars are willing to forsake the certain status of 
publishing in the established journals to support the principle of 
science as a public resource. In a profession where publishing in a 
top journal is often crucial to success and grant money, that may be 
a difficult task.

"I'd be happy to forswear publishing in any of those journals, but 
I'm not in a position where I need a job," said Dr. Marc Kirschner, 
chairman of the cell biology department at Harvard Medical School and 
a member of the electronic library's editorial board. "The difficulty 
will be getting over this hump from the point where people say, `Why 
should I risk it?' to where they don't see it as a risk."

In that regard, the Howard Hughes Medical Institute - the nonprofit 
institute whose $11 billion endowment makes it a leading supporter of 
medical research - has emerged as a powerful ally. Dr. Thomas R. 
Cech, the institute's president, has publicly endorsed the library's 
goals and promised to cover its investigators' extra costs of 
publishing in the new journals.

As for other researchers, "people will want to be associated with 
this because it is such a good deed," said another member of the 
library's editorial board, Dr. Nicholas R. Cozzarelli, editor of The 
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Unfettered access to the literature, library supporters say, would 
eliminate unnecessary duplication and allow doctors in poor 
countries, scientists at budget-conscious institutions, high school 
students, cancer patients and anyone else who could not afford 
subscriptions to benefit from existing research and add to it.

Moreover, they say, the taxpayers, who spend nearly $40 billion a 
year on biomedical research, should not have to pay again - or wait 
some unspecified period - to be able to search for and see the 
results themselves.

But Derk Haank, chairman of Elsevier Science, whose 1,500 journals 
include Cell, says such criticism is misguided. Elsevier, he says, is 
offering broader access to its electronic databases to the 
institutions that want it for far less than the cost of subscribing 
to dozens of paper journals. "It sounds very sympathetic to say this 
should be available to the public," he said. "But this kind of 
material is only used by experts."

Still, in addition to making data available to more people sooner, 
the electronic library's founders argue that the research itself 
becomes more valuable when it is not walled off by copyrights and 
Balkanized in separate electronic databases. They envision the 
sprouting of a kind of cyber neural network, where all of scientific 
knowledge can be searched, sorted and grafted with a fluidity that 
will speed discovery.

Under the library's editorial policy, any data can be integrated into 
new work as long as the original author is credited appropriately. 
The model is inspired by GenBank, the central repository of DNA 
sequences whose open access policy has driven much of the progress in 
genomics and biotechnology of the last decade.

The library's roots can be traced to Dr. Patrick O. Brown's 
frustration at the barriers to literature he needed for research at 
his genetics laboratory at the Stanford University School of Medicine 
in 1998. "The information I wanted was information scientists had 
published with the goal of making it available to all their 
colleagues," he said. "And I couldn't get it readily because of the 
way the system was organized."

Dr. Varmus, then director of the National Institutes for Health, 
talked with Dr. Brown in January 1999 and decided to pay for a Web 
site that would provide free access to peer-reviewed scientific 
literature. PubMedCentral (www.pubmedcentral.gov) was opened the next 
year.

By a year later, however, only a handful of journals had decided to 
participate in the government archive. In an effort to whip up 
enthusiasm, Drs. Varmus, Brown and Eisen began circulating an open 
letter to the journals, asking them to place their articles in a free 
online database.

The petition quickly garnered 30,000 signers around the world, 
including several Nobel laureates, who promised to publish their work 
only in journals that complied with their demand. But almost none did.

That is when Dr. Varmus and his colleagues became convinced that they 
needed to raise money to start their own publication. After being 
rejected by several traditional science research foundations, the 
scientists found a sympathetic ear at the Silicon Valley foundation 
whose benefactor, Dr. Gordon E. Moore, was the co-founder of Intel 
Corporation.

"Scientists are a conservative bunch," said Dr. Edward Penhoet, the 
foundation's senior director for science. "In the short term they'll 
still be publishing in Cell and other places. But in the long term, I 
think this has the potential to dramatically facilitate science."

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Charles Muller  <acmuller@example.com>
Faculty of Humanities,  Toyo Gakuen University
Digital Dictionary of Buddhism and CJKV-English Dictionary [http://www.acmuller.net]
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