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Stevan Harnad, University of Southampton, May 8, 1999

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Stevan Harnad, University of Southampton, May 8, 1999 Stevan Harnad, University of Southampton, May 8, 1999 [This is a revised draft of comments on the ebiomed proposal, sent to Harold Varmus earlier.] The following are my comments on: http://www.nih.gov/welcome/director/ebiomed/ebiomed.htm This extremely welcome and important initiative is deserving of the strongest support. The following recommendations are made in the interests of strengthening the proposal by clarifying some crucial central aspects and modifying or eliminating some minor, weaker aspects. E-BIOMED: A PROPOSAL FOR ELECTRONIC PUBLICATION IN THE BIOMEDICAL SCIENCES Prologue The full potential of electronic communication has yet to be realized. The scientific community has made only sparing use thus far of the Internet as a means to publish scientific work and to distribute it widely and without significant barriers to access. This generally accurate assessment of the current failure to exploit the full potential of the Internet for scientific publication has one prominent and extremely relevant and important exception. It would be much more accurate as well as helpful to note this explicitly from the outset, as this notable exception is very likely to be the model for all the rest of the disciplines: Physics is the exception (and to some degree, mathematics). It is now both an empirical and a historical fact that well over half of the current physics (journal) literature is freely available online from the Los Alamos Archive and its 14 mirror archives worldwide, and is being used by perhaps 50,000 physicists a day. http://xxx.lanl.gov/cgi-bin/show_monthly_submissions It would be misleading in the extreme to describe this as "sparing use"! Instead, it should be acknowledged that this has been a revolutionary change in Physics, and if there were a way to extend it to the other sciences (and the other learned disciplines) then the full potential of electronic communication WOULD indeed be realized. I stress this, because to pass over the revolution in Physics as if it had not happened is not only to fail to give historical facts their due, but it is to miss an important lesson for the rest of the scientific and scholarly world in general, and the Biomedical Sciences in particular. Insofar as the other disciplines are concerned, the paragraph quoted above is a fair description of the status quo. The only bit of ambiguity is the word "publish" in: "sparing use thus far of the Internet as a means to publish scientific work and to distribute it widely and without significant barriers to access." "Publish" has two meanings in this context. One is "to make publicly available in written form" (whether on paper, tape or screen), and the other is "to appear in a refereed journal." It is best to distinguish these two, as many people these days, usually well-meaning but extremely under-informed about the nature of peer- reviewed publication, have been suggesting that the latter (refereed publication) be watered down or abandoned entirely in favour of the former (making publicly available online). I think that such proposals (to modify peer review or substitute for it the mere public online distribution of papers -- I am not speaking of the E-biomed Proposal here, but of the need to distance it from such proposals) are both (1) risky and (2) counterproductive (1) Proposals to modify peer reviewed publication are based on armchair speculation about publication and quality control, rather than on any real experience with peer review or any tested alternatives to it (there are none at the moment). Hence armchair proposals put the quality and reliability of the research literature at risk without any proven alternative, should any substantial number of well-meaning people decide to go ahead and implement such proposals on any scale without first carefully testing them out empirically. Peer review can certainly benefit from study and improvement, and it is indeed being studied empirically, but not by the armchair (or screenside) tacticians. This research takes time and careful experimental trials. And it is COMPLETELY INdependent of the medium -- paper or online -- in which the publication will take place. (The online implementation of refereeing can be much faster and more efficient, but this is just as true for paper publication, and indeed more and more of classical peer review is being implemented online already). It is accordingly arbitrary and erroneous to couple changes in quality control mechanism with changes in medium a priori. Not only is it impossible to sort out the effect of two empirical variables if you change both of them at the same time, but if quality control is compromised by the implementation of untested alternatives, then the effect could be misattributed to the online medium with which is was coupled, thereby setting back the day when the learned community finally realises the full benefits of a free online corpus. This is why such proposals are not only risky (1), but counterproductive (2): They can set back the online agenda instead of advancing it. Change one variable at a time. If one's mission is to reform quality control, then study and test new alternatives empirically. But if one's mission is to make the current quality-controlled literature, such as it is, freely available to everyone, everywhere online, rather than having access to it continue to be obstructed by toll-barriers (Subscription/Site-License/Pay-Per-View, S/L/P), then there is no need either to await the reform of peer review, or to test whether free access would be a good thing! The Los Alamos Archive has already proved that it is a good thing; the world Physics community has already voted with its eyes and fingers (and its papers, which are being self-archived in the LANL Archive at an astounding and accelerating daily rate). So: About "publishing" vs. "distributing": the picture is clear now: Authors can now publicly self-archive their unrefereed preprints as well as their refereed reprints. There is no reason to redefine "publication." Let it continue to refer to acceptance by a refereed journal. And let authors continue to submit all their papers to the established refereed journals. But let them also self-archive them (both as unrefereed preprints, and, once accepted, as refereed reprints) in both their local institution's archive and in a global archive such as LANL, with which E-biomed should COLLABORATE, emulating its dramatically proven strengths, rather than trying to re-invent them or modify them a priori with untested incursions into either peer review or publication. Preprint and reprint Archives are collective services to the world scientific community; their efforts and resources should be pooled to take advantage of economies of scale as well as to share the momentum of the faster moving disciplines. See: http://www.library.yale.edu/~okerson/subversive.html E-BIOMED: Informative and even visionary essays have explored this topic (see, for example, articles by Ginsparg http://xxx.lanl.gov/blurb/pg96unesco.html, Walker http://www.amsci.org/amsci/articles/98articles/Walker.html, and Harnad http://www.princeton.edu/~harnad/nature.html, and references cited therein, as well as other recent proposals http://library.caltech.edu/publications/scholarsforum and http://www.arl.org/newsltr/202/intro.html. I have done some critical commentary on both the Walker proposal and the CalTech proposal. It all appears in the American Scientist Archive: http://amsci-forum.amsci.org/archives/september-forum.html In a nutshell, Walker proposes financing free online eprints of published journal articles out of journal offprint page charges; but why should an author want to pay those charges if he can already self-archive, in his local institutional archive and the Global Archive (LANL/E-biomed), for free? There are some issues about how to pay for the quality control, and page charges are indeed the right way, but not author offprint charges levied by a journal that still blocks access via S/L/P! The ARL initiative is largely backing new forms of licensing. Inasmuch as these retain the author's right to self-archive for free, they are commendable; inasmuch as they help to preserve S/L/P barriers -- in the form of L alone -- they are counterproductive. The shared desideratum of all these initiatives is this: "It is easy to say what would be the ideal online resource for scholars and scientists: all papers in all fields, systematically interconnected, effortlessly accessible and rationally navigable from any researcher's desk worldwide, for free." The way to arrive at this optimal outcome is through online self-archiving by all authors (locally and globally). THAT is what needs to be encouraged and facilitated. The rest will then take care of itself (although we do need a rational transition strategy to cushion the conversion of publishers from hybrid paper/online publication with costs covered through S/L/P access barriers, to online-only publication with the scaled down cost covered by up-front page charges, and the literature then barrier-free for all). E-BIOMED: Before describing our proposal, it is important to acknowledge the strengths of the current system for published scientific work, because it has served the scientific community well for over 300 years. I agree completely with the description that followed this passage, of the value of the classical system of peer reviewed publication. I would just add that even mentioning it risks introducing a red herring, because there is no need whatsoever to tamper with this proven system of quality control in order to achieve the optimal outcome above. E-BIOMED: No proposal to change the way scientists publish their results and ideas should ignore these and other virtues of the current system.
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