 Freedom of Information Conference 2000
Freedom of Information - conference summary
Fiona Godlee
Open
access challenges us all to be "good scientific citizens"
Who
pays for science, who profits from it, and who is it all for anyway? If
a large proportion of scientific research is paid for by public money,
if a key motivation for scientists is to communicate their work to others,
and if the new technology allows free access to information, what is preventing
open public access to the results of scientific research? Who but the
publishers benefit from a system that expects scientists to submit their
work free to journals and then expects them and everyone else to pay to
access it? Pat Brown
from the University of Stanford spoke for many at a meeting in New York
last week when he asked, “If all journals disappeared tomorrow, would
science just stop?”
In
a challenging finale to the meeting on
freedom of information, organised by BioMed Central, Pat Brown called
on all scientists to take back control of their work, to insist on retaining
copyright, and to boycott journals that refused to make the results of
primary science freely available: ‘scientists must insist that scientific
research is free, untaxed by the parasites in the publishing world.'
Opening
the meeting, Harold
Varmus, director of the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Centre in
New York and one of the architects of PubMed
Central--the NIH's open access repository of peer reviewed material,
suggested that the scientific community should test different models of
open access during what he called this “transfer period.” There was an
assumption, he said, that those who needed to access information could
already do so. In fact, most people in developing countries, as well as
many in the developed world remained “disenfranchised.”
Open
access did not mean loss of quality, he said. Pieter Bolman of Academic
Press, disagreed. Speaking for commercial scientific publishers, he
said that peer review was expensive, and that only by charging people
to access material could publishers, on behalf of society as a whole,
ensure the quality of scientific information. But others suggested that,
far from compromising quality, open access had the potential to improve
it. Peer review could change from a closed, poorly accountable, binary
event (to publish or not to publish), in which a few chosen peers take
part, into an open, ongoing process, potentially involving many peers
from a range of disciplines. As Paul Ginsparg of the Los Alamos National
Laboratory said, “The web offers peer review at lower cost and with greater
functionality.”
Open access
would mean “disentangling distribution of science from validation,” said
Paul Ginsparg, as has already happened to some extent within physics.
Journals of the future would no longer be involved in distribution. Their
role would be to validate science, with multiple journals able to point
at a single report or dataset.
Society
publishers expressed an additional concern about open access--that the
useful work they do in lobbying and educating would suffer without the
money they made from journals. But, said Elizabeth Marincola of the American
Society for Cell Biology, resisting open access was not in the interests
of the people societies were set up to serve—their members and the public.
The new technology offered scope for efficiencies and diversification.
Only those professional and academic societies that embraced open access
would survive what she called the “Darwinian shake-up.”
Setting
up open access sites, such as BioMed
Central, may be a crucial first step in changing the way that science
is disseminated. But most speakers agreed that it would take more than
setting up alternatives to change behaviour. Opening the door of a rat's
cage did not mean that the rat, after years of confinement, would rush
to escape. Especially, said Peter Singer of the University
of Toronto, since the cage was where the rat found its food and water.
“For authors to be incentivised to submit their articles to the new forms
of e publishing, the incentive system needs to be modified to reward this
behaviour – the food and water need to be moved outside the cage,” he
said.
This
could only be achieved if granting agencies and academic institutions
were prepared to stop using the status of the journal in which a paper
was published to short cut their way through funding and appointment decisions.
As explained by Barry Markovitz of Washington
University Medical School, journal impact factors are anyway a poor
proxy for the value of individual pieces of research.
Delegates
at the meeting can have been left in little doubt that open access was
on its way and would bring with it huge changes in the way science is
communicated and judged. “We have to ask ourselves what it means to be
a good scientific citizen,” said Pat Brown. If this meant never again
publishing his work in the New
England Journal of Medicine for instance, he was prepared to do
that. Scientists with their reputations still to make may prefer to wait
for the climate to change. So the real challenge from the meeting falls
on granting agencies and academic institutions, to stop penalising authors
who submit their work to open access sites, and even to insist that this
is what they should do.
Fiona Godlee,
Editorial Director (Medicine), BioMed Central
(fiona@biomedcentral.com)
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