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Medical School Applications Increase PLoS Goes Online: Will It Spark a Revolution in Scientific Publishing? A Word from the President: Project Medical Education ViewPoint: Crossing Boundaries with International Medical Education "Portraits of Medical Education"
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PLoS Goes Online: Will It Spark a Revolution in Scientific Publishing?By Suria Santana Venturing outside of their laboratories, a Nobel Prize-winning biologist and two of his colleagues have initiated what has been described as a potentially revolutionary experiment in marketing and publishing - the development of "open-access" scientific journals, containing the latest information on research discoveries and related initiatives.
Harold Varmus, M.D., M.A., president and CEO of Memorial Sloan Kettering and co-recipient of a Nobel Prize for studies of the genetic basis of cancer; Patrick Brown, M.D., Ph.D., a professor at Stanford University School of Medicine's department of biochemistry and acclaimed genomics expert; and Michael Eisen, Ph.D., a computational and evolutionary biologist at University of California at Berkeley, are some of the academic luminaries behind an effort to publish scientific and medical journals and make them immediately available online for anyone to download, print, and distribute - gratis. This new online scientific publishing venture is being done under the auspices of the Public Library of Science (PloS), a non-profit organization founded by Varmus, Brown, and Eisen in 2000. The PLoS founders laid out their vision in the editorial pages of the organization's first open-access venture, PLoS Biology. This inaugural online publication was launched at midnight on October 12 and netted more than half a million hits in the first 12 hours. "Our aim is to catalyze a revolution in scientific publishing by providing a compelling demonstration of the value and feasibility of open-access publication," they wrote. By demonstrating that their publishing model is effective and financially feasible, they hope other journals will follow their lead and enter the world of open access. "If we succeed, everyone who has access to a computer and an Internet connection will be a keystroke away from our living treasury of scientific and medical knowledge." The PLoS publishing plan is to shift the cost from the readers to the researchers, who are required to pay PLoS approximately $1,500 for every article they publish. Under their business model, the costs of publication are regarded as the "final integral step of the funding of the research project," as government agencies and groups funding researchers will often be the actual payers of authorship fees. In arguing for its initiative, the PLoS has contended that the current system of scientific publication places the interests of publishers before the public interest, and diminishes the value of the more than $50 billion invested yearly by U.S. taxpayers in scientific and medical research. "It's a scandal that anyone is denied free access to the results of research paid for by their tax dollars," says Dr. Eisen. "And it's a scandal that the scientific community is denied the free and unfettered sharing of research discoveries upon which scientific and medical progress is built. If the public were more conscious of these problems, there would be tremendous pressure for change." This view received a political boost in June, when Reps. Martin Sabo (D-Minn.), Marcy Kaptur (D-Ohio), and Martin Frost (D-Texas) introduced a bill that excludes from copyright protection works resulting from government-funded scientific research. The Public Access to Science Act requires any federal department or agency entering into a funding agreement for the performance of scientific research substantially funded by the federal government to include a provision stating that copyright protection under this title is not available for any work produced under their contract. The AAMC, along with the Association of American Universities, has opposed this bill, worrying that loss of copyright protection could seriously impair current academic publishing arrangements. The PLoS publishing model does not require a loss of copyright protection to individual authors. Contributing authors have the choice to either retain copyright or assign copyright to the journal, and readers are allowed to use and distribute the publication's contents as long as proper attribution is maintained. Earlier efforts
The concept of open access is something scientists have been toying with for at least a decade. The dawn of the Internet age in the early 1990s saw the beginnings of scientific open-access experimentation with the launching of arxiv.org, a server holding digital copies of physics manuscripts. Since then, this server has expanded from its initial role as a vehicle for sharing preprints to functioning as the principal "library" for a large fraction of research literature in physics, computer sciences, astronomy, and many mathematical specialties, according to the PLoS. In 1999, the London-based publisher BioMed Central started publishing peer-reviewed open-access biomedical research journals and offering publication services to scientific groups and societies wishing to launch their own open-access publications. A year later - under the leadership of then director Varmus - the National Institutes of Health followed suit, and established PubMed Central (PMC), an electronic archive for full text journal articles offering unrestricted access to its contents. According to the PLoS, despite the fact that participating publishers are not required to make their materials immediately available to PMC - instead, they are given between six months and a year to deposit their most recent research - few journals have joined the database. In response, the PLoS decided to start a campaign to persuade scientific publishers not only to give free access to articles, but also provide that access immediately upon publication of original pieces. Unrealistic business model?A number of publishers and academic societies have expressed concerns about this latest PLoS initiative. Although the positive aspects of free access are hardly questioned, the feasibility of the business model used by PLoS has been subject to criticism. "The concept of open access is a worthwhile concept," says Judith Bond, Ph.D., president-elect of the American Society for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology (ASBMB) and professor and chair of the department of biochemistry and molecular biology at Penn State University College of Medicine. "We feel that a lot of scientific societies [that publish research literature], including our own, have already worked very hard to open access, and that there are business models now in effect that we know work. For this reason, we don't see why everyone should hop onto the same business model as the one PLoS proposes," says Dr. Bond. A particular aspect of the PLoS publishing business model that is worrisome, according to Dr. Bond, is the cost shift to authors. "There are some researchers who just will not be able to pay these [publication] costs," she says. "The idea is predicated on an elite group of researchers who are very well funded by the NIH or other such groups." Bond's colleague Bettie Sue Masters, Ph.D., ASBMB president and Robert A. Welch distinguished professor in chemistry at the University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio's department of biochemistry, shares her concern. "Their business model puts the entire weight on the person who publishes the piece, and that in turn puts a huge burden on younger researchers, investigators from less wealthy institutions, and foreign authors from developing countries," says Dr. Masters. "It significantly limits the number of articles these investigators can publish every year. Considering the current climate, and what's needed to receive promotions and recognition in scientific fields, that can significantly limit these investigators' professional advancement." The ASBMB publishes the Journal of Biological Chemistry (JBC), Molecular and Cellular Proteomics, and the Journal of Lipid Research, all of which are available online. JBC posts accepted articles to the Web immediately, where they can be viewed free of charge. However, the articles' final versions are posted online only at the end of the calendar year, after the editing and publishing processes are complete and after the print journal is put out for sale. "We are in favor of open access and have gone to extreme measures to put all of our [JBC] articles online, scanning all of our articles back to the very beginning of our journal, in 1905," she continues. That alone cost ASBMB a whopping $700,000. "We believe that we've made significant progress in making our journals accessible to the public, scientists, or just anybody who wants to access them. So we think our model works." The British Medical Journal (BMJ) was the first general medical journal to launch itself into cyberspace, and since 1995 has allowed free access to everything on its Web site. According to Dr. Masters, BMJ has just announced it can no longer provide these services, and in January 2005 the publication will start charging for online subscriptions. She cites that as an example of why open-access business models are not always feasible, and why there is a need to keep a source of revenue coming in order to sustain high-quality publishing practices. PLoS will launch an open-access medical journal, PLoS Medicine, in the spring of next year. Another form of access
Dr. Bond worries that free-access proponents might be overlooking an essential aspect of accessibility - the ability to understand information before one's eyes. The effective translation of esoteric, scientific information into language that most members of the public can understand requires some financial investment, mostly due to costs associated with the services of scientific reviewers and trained editors who are fluent in scholarly jargon. She worries that although many scientific publishers may choose to jump into the "open- access bandwagon," the information they make freely accessible to the public will not be of much help unless they rely on expert services to "massage" and ensure the high quality of their publication's content, something that will cost them money. PLoS has assembled a distinguished editorial board for its journals, and recently hired away a senior editor from the journal Cell. The organization says that it will retain all of the important features of established scientific journals, including rigorous peer review and high editorial and production standards. Despite these pledges, Dr. Bond worries that the lay reader may not understand all of the information that PLoS's first publishing venture is putting out to the public. "The PLoS Biology model is fine for a subgroup of people," says Dr. Bond. "It's really competing with an intellectual class of journals whose readers are scientists of some sophistication. I don't think it will work for the public at large." Despite concerns, many members of the medical, scientific, and publishing communities are adopting a wait-and-see attitude. "This venture is an experiment, and in that sense, it's a good thing to try and see if it will work," says Dr. Bond. |
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