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08 October 2003

Dear Sir,

Although I applaud open archiving, from my point of view open access publishing is what is needed in the long run. This is now possible.

I come from the community that led open release of data in genomics: the C. elegans genome mapping, then sequencing, project followed by the Human Genome Project. The real value of the way that genome data, such as the human genome sequence, is available is that people can use it and build on it. Building on publications used to be open, because the only way to do it was to read and then write something else (such as a review or a new paper with a new idea). And a subscription cost was reasonable historically because most of the costs of producing journals were in printing and distribution. Now, at least in biological science, a lot of valuable data are published in papers in tables and figures, and people are developing computational tools that can use this information, and even the free text (see www.textpresso.org for an example of the latter). So, there are ways to use the information in papers for new science, but to do this we need much more open access to the literature.

Research funding is provided to generate outputs that others can build on. Funders, and the rest of the system, want publication to be as unconstrained as possible, and the only reasons that we haven't yet taken advantage of electronic publishing to make things less constrained are historical inertia and the commercial interests of some publishers. So, for me, open archiving is just a tactical move to keep the publishers moving towards the larger goal of changing scientific publishing to a better and more natural model, which is possible now with the internet and electronic publishing.

Richard Durbin

Head of Informatics
Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute
Hinxton, UK