It Is NOT Junk a Blog About Genomes, DNA, Evolution, Open Science, Baseball and Other Important Things
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it is NOT junk a blog about genomes, DNA, evolution, open science, baseball and other important things The Past, Present and Future of Scholarly Publishing By MIC H A EL EISEN | Published: MA RC H 2 8 , 2 0 1 3 Search To search, type and hit enter I gave a talk last night at the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco about science publishing and PLoS. There will be an audio link soon, but, for the first time in my life, Michael Eisen I actually gave the talk (largely) from prepared remarks, so I thought I’d post it here. I'm a biologist at UC An audio recording of the talk with Q&A is available here. Berkeley and an Investigator of the —— Howard Hughes Medical Institute. I work primarily On January 6, 2011, 24 year old hacker and activist Aaron Swartz was arrested by on flies, and my research encompases police at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology for downloading several million evolution, development, genetics, articles from an online archive of research journals called JSTOR. genomics, chemical ecology and behavior. I am a strong proponent of After Swartz committed suicide earlier this year in the face of legal troubles arising open science, and a co-founder of the from this incident, questions were raised about why MIT, whose access to JSTOR he Public Library of Science. And most exploited, chose to pursue charges, and what motivated the US Department of Justice importantly, I am a Red Sox fan. (More to demand jail time for his transgression. about me here). But the question that should have been asked is why downloading scholarly research I can be reached at: articles was a crime in the first place. Why, twenty years after the birth of the modern mbeisen at berkeley.edu and @mbeisen on Twitter Internet, is it a felony to download works that academics chose to share with the world? Recent Posts The Internet, after all, was invented so that scientists could communicate their Seeking a postdoctoral fellow hellbent research results with each other. But while you can now get immediate, free access to on understanding how transcriptional enhancers work 675 million videos of cats (I checked this number today), the scholarly literature – one Why I, a founder of PLOS, am forsaking of greatest public works projects of all time – remains locked behind expensive pay open access walls. FIRST of all, THIS is why you should never trust publishers Every year universities, governments and other organizations spend in excess of $10 On anonymity in science and on billion dollars to buy back access to papers their researchers gave to journals for free, Twitter while most teachers, students, health care providers and members of the public are left Billion Dollar Scam: Why you should out in the cold. play the lottery instead of going to H&R Block Even worse, the stranglehold existing journals have on academic publishing has stifled efforts to improve the ways scholars communicate with each other and the public. In Categories an era when anyone can share anything with the entire world at the click of a button, Select Category the fact that it takes a typical paper nine months to be published should be a scandal. open access These delays matter – they slow down progress and in many cases literally cost lives. PLoS Tonight, I will describe how we got to this ridiculous place. How twenty years of science and politics avarice from publishers, conservatism from researchers, fecklessness from politics universities and funders, and a basic lack of common sense from everyone has made EisenLab the research community and public miss the manifest opportunities created by the GMO Internet to transform how scholars communicate their ideas and discoveries. I will also talk about what some of us have been doing to liberate the scholarly literature – where we have succeeded and where there is more work to be done. And finally, with these efforts gaining traction, I will describe where we are going next. RSS Links All posts While I talk, I want you to keep in mind that this is about more than just academic All comments publications. This is about the future of the Internet and what we are willing to do, as individuals and societies, to ensure that information that should be free IS free. If we Meta can’t figure out how to make scientific and scholarly works – most of which were Log in funded by taxpayers and published by authors with no expectation of being paid – freely available, we will struggle to do it in cases where the conditions for free access are less ripe. One last bit of introduction. I am a scientist, and so, for the rest of this talk, I am going to focus on the scientific literature. But everything I will say holds equally true for other areas of scholarship. OK. Most people date the birth of the modern scientific journal to the middle of the 17th century, when the Royal Society in England took advantage of the growing printing industry to begin publishing proceedings of their meetings for the benefit of members unable to attend, as well as for posterity. But scholarly journals as we know them were really a product of the 19th century, when growing activity and public interest in science led to the creation of most of the big titles we know about today: Science, Nature, The New England Journal of Medicine, The Journal of the American Medical Association and The Lancet published their first editions in the 1800’s. They had noble missions. For example, the preface to the first edition of Science in July 1880 stated that its goal was to “afford scientific workers in the United States the opportunity of promptly recording the fruits of their researches, and facilities for communication between one another and the world”. Like their predecessor, these journals were enabled by the technologies of the industrial revolution – steam powered rotary printing presses and efficient rail-based mail service. But they were also severely limited by them. Printing and shipping articles around the country and the world was expensive, and because of this, two key features of modern journals were established. First, journals limited what they printed, choosing for publication only those works deemed to be of the greatest interest to their target audience. And second, they sold subscriptions – sending copies only to those who had paid. While intrinsically restricting, this business arrangement made sense. Every printed copy of a journal incurred a cost to the publisher, and charging readers meant revenues scaled with costs. As science grew, so too did science publishing, with increasingly specific journals emerging to cater to new disciplines. By 1990 there were around 5,000 scientific journals in circulation, all of them printed and shipped to subscribers. And the costs were skyrocketing. If you were lucky enough to be at a major research university, you could find most of these journals in the library. But most scientists had to make do with a small subset – whatever their library could afford. And the public was all but completely shut out. Then along came the Internet. Scientific journals, serving a computer savvy audience with access to fast Internet connections through universities, were amongst the first commercial ventures to take advantage of this new technology. Within a few years – from 1995 to 1998 – virtually all major publishers put versions of their printed journals online. But in doing so they made a crucial and fateful choice. Rather than adopting their business model to the new medium, they stuck with the same subscription-based system that they used for their print journals. And why not – so long as scientists were still giving them papers, and universities were buying them back, it was a great business. An even better one given that they no longer had to pay for printing and shipping. But with this major shift in the means of dissemination, what was once a common sense way for publishers to provide a valuable service while dealing with the limitations of available technology became an irrational impediment to achieving this very goal. To understand just how crazy this system is, you need to understand a bit more about how scientific journals work and what the life cycle of a scientific idea looks like. Take your typical scientist at my home institution – the University of California Berkeley. She draws a salary from the state of California, and works in a building funded by the state. When she has a new idea, she goes out and raises money to buy equipment and supplies and to pay the salaries of the students and staff who will actually do the work. In all likelihood this money will come from the US government – through agencies like the NIH or NSF. And if not from them, from a public minded non-profit or foundation like the Howard Hughes Medical Institute that funds my lab. This scientist and her students then spend a great deal of time – usually years – pursuing the idea, until they finally have a result they want to share with their peers. So they sit down and write a paper describing why they were interested in the question, what they did, how they did it, what they found, and what they think it means. And then they hopefully submit it to one of the 10,000 journals currently in operation – choosing based on scope and importance. With few exceptions, these journals work the same way. The paper is assigned to an editor – sometimes a salaried professional, but usually a practicing scientist volunteering their time.