Free online journal seeks revolution in science publishing

A new online journal aims to radically alter scientific publishing, breaking the stranglehold that expensive private journals have on the details of most discoveries by making vital research freely available on the Internet.

By Paul Elias, Associated Press USA Today

The San Francisco-based Public Library of Science, though backed by leading academics including Nobel laureates, was dismissed as idealistic and unfeasible by many in the scientific and publishing communities when announced over the summer.

Those critics are now thinking twice. In its first issue this week, the peer-reviewed publication featured a stunning study that forced the world to take notice.

Duke University researchers Miguel Nicolelis and Jose Carmena reported that they had successfully trained monkeys with brain implants to move a robot arm with their thoughts — a key advance by researchers who hope one day to allow paralyzed people to perform similar tasks. (Related story: Monkeys with brain implants move robot arm by thought) http://www.usatoday.com/tech/news/techinnovations/2003-10-13-robo-monkey-mind-control_x.htm

The journal made the research paper freely available Sunday night on its Web site, instantly moving to the forefront of a movement that insists on more democratic access to information and that has excited many in the science, technology and scholarly communities.

"It was perhaps our best paper ever," said Nicolelis, who has published papers in Nature and Science, two of the most prestigious scientific journals.

"But the PLoS philosophy is part of the philosophy I share," Nicolelis said of his decision to shun the established journals. "The scientific data has to reach the community."

Just as so-called open source software has gained adherents because nobody owns the code, so has "open access" science won converts in labs around the world.

By Monday morning, the Duke paper was rendered inaccessible by a crush of traffic from interested readers that crashed the Public Library’s servers. The site received 500,000 hits in the hours immediately after the paper was posted and some 80,000 downloads occurred, prompted by worldwide media coverage.

"Nothing else has ever argued so strongly for open-access publishing," said Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory researcher Michael Eisen, who co-founded the nonprofit organization along with Nobel laureate Harold Varmus and Stanford University biochemist Patrick Brown.

The Public Library of Science was launched out of frustration with rising subscription costs and fat profit margins of the most prestigious research journals, some of which can cost more than $11,000 a year.

Many scientists and doctors complain that they’ve been priced out of access to the latest data by price increases. The public, too, is being increasingly cut out as university libraries switch their subscriptions from hard-bound editions to online accounts and sign licensing agreements that restrict access to students and faculty.

PLoS founders and other open-access advocates argue that research paid for with $57 billion in federal funding each year should be made instantly and freely available, since taxpayers have already paid for it. A bill introduced this summer in Congress by Rep. Martin Sabo (D.-Minn.) aims to do just that.

Instead of charging for a subscription to its journal, PLoS charges scientists $1,500 each to publish their papers.

The organization, which received a $9 million startup grant from the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, also plans to launch a medicine journal next year.

"There is a lot of excitement in the library community about this," said Barbara Epstein, interim director of the University of Pittsburgh’s Falk Library of the Health Sciences. Libraries now pay for 85% of all subscriptions to academic journals. "PLoS will certainly benefit a lot of institutions that had their budgets crunched."

The Pitt library is abandoning traditional subscriptions to hard-bound editions of many journals in favor of online versions, which need to be negotiated with each publisher and are a bureaucratic headache.

Still, Epstein and many others question who will ultimately pay the $1,500 fee the new journal charges each research team to publish. The fee could prove a budget killer if it’s passed on to research-intensive universities that publish thousands of papers a year, Epstein said.

PLoS founders hope to convince funding agencies, such as the National Institutes of Health, to pick up the tab, since it’s taxpayers who ultimately pay for the work.

Science journals report — first and exclusively — nearly all the world’s scientific breakthroughs. While the highlights are often reported in newspapers and other media, the details of these studies are available only to paying customers.

Those fees feed a $5 billion-a-year science publishing industry that began when the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society first hit newsstands in 1665.

The world’s largest science publisher, Elsevier — part of the Anglo-Dutch company Reed Elsevier Group — now owns some 1,800 science and medical journals, which accounted for $1.3 billion in revenue last year, according to a report by BNP Paribas, a Paris-based investment firm.

Journal publishers defend their subscription-driven model as the only way they can afford to disseminate the science papers. Largely, they’re skeptical that the PLoS model of charging authors instead of readers will survive financially.

Elsevier doesn’t believe the subscription-based business model should be abandoned until the world is sure something else works, Marike Westra, a company representative, said in an e-mail. "Furthermore, Elsevier does not believe that the ‘author pays’ model embraced by PLoS and others is economically viable for the longer term."

Further, many publishers say their subscription charges allow them to give their content away or at reduced prices to developing nations and others unable to pay full price. Many journals also make their papers free several months after publication.

The scientific publishing industry may, however, nevertheless be in for the same sort of upheaval that the Internet encouraged in the music industry.

In a report this month, BNP Paribas warned that "open-access is a potential long-term challenge to the profitability of academic journal publishing."

PLoS is online at http://www.plos.org.

http://www.usatoday.com/tech/news/techinnovations/2003-10-16-plos-online-sci-journal_x.htm