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Science Journal to Put Research Online

Posted on: Friday, 17 October 2003, 06:00 CDT

By PAUL ELIAS

SAN FRANCISCO (AP) -- A new online journal wants to radically alter the exchange of scientific information by making vital research available for free to anyone who logs on the Internet.

If the Public Library of Science's online journal succeeds, it could break the stranglehold that expensive, subscription-only journals have on the publication of many scientific breakthroughs.

The idea was dismissed as idealistic and unrealistic by many in the scientific and publishing communities when the San Francisco-based organization announced its plans for the journal 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 to one day allow paralyzed people to perform similar tasks.

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

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.

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.

Journals such as Nature and Science report - first and exclusively - nearly all the world's scientific advances. 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.

The idea to publish research online 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 have been priced out of access to the latest information. 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.

Public Library of Science founders and other open-access advocates argue that research paid for with $57 billion in federal funding each year should be made available for free to everyone, since taxpayers have already paid for it.

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

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

Elsevier, the world's largest science publisher, 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."

The Public Library of Science, 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 percent of all subscriptions to academic journals. "PLoS will certainly benefit a lot of institutions that had their budgets crunched."

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 is passed on to research-intensive universities that publish thousands of papers a year, Epstein said.

Public Library of Science founders hope to persuade agencies such as the National Institutes of Health to pick up the tab, since it is taxpayers who ultimately pay for the work.

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