Thursday, August 14, 2003
Copyright © Las Vegas Review-Journal

EDITORIAL: Scientific publishing

Tax-funded research should be available to those who paid for it

Most of the cutting-edge scientific research done in America is, for better or worse, taxpayer funded -- either directly by grants, or indirectly through the underlying taxpayer subsidies of universities and their faculties.

The academic authors then traditionally submit their findings to esteemed professional journals, which perform several valuable functions ... at least in theory.

First, the articles are subjected to peer review -- sent to experts in the respective fields who give them a once-over. Then, sound experimental findings are published so reviewers elsewhere can keep up on scientific progress, try to duplicate the results, and use the published findings as a starting point for further work, systematically building up our combined trove of scientific knowledge.

But is that really what happens? Increasingly in recent years, budget-crunched librarians and members of the academic community without unlimited physical access to major libraries have been complaining that the publishers of the world's 28,000 scientific journals have jacked up the annual subscription prices of their journals to the range of $1,000 to $5,000 per year, each ... with often only summaries of articles available online.

Now three respected scientists -- cancer researcher and 1989 Nobel Prize winner Harold Varmus; genome expert Patrick O. Brown of the Stanford University School of Medicine; and Michael Eisen, an evolutionary biologist at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory -- think they have a better way.

The three scientists have founded the Public Library of Science, or PLoS, which proposes to publish scientific journals that will offer "open access" to their findings to the everyday taxpayers.

Their first publication -- PLoS Biology -- is set to launch in October. Their next publication, PLoS Medicine, is envisioned for 2004.

And publishing papers in open electronic databases -- rather than limiting them to those expensive ink-on-paper journals -- will also facilitate downloading of their complex data tables, which can then be interlinked and compared to other databases, faster and with fewer errors.

"It is wrong when a breast cancer patient cannot access federally funded research data paid for by her hard-earned taxes," declared Rep. Martin Sabo, D-Minn., as he introduced legislation to help PLoS by loosening copyright restrictions on tax-funded research.

Copyright and other intellectual property rights are also important, of course. But the underlying idea was to make scientific findings readily available -- not to sell monopoly rights for tax-funded research to profit-making companies which then, in effect, ration and limit their accessibility to the very taxpayers who funded the work.

It's a new, electronic era. It's past time for the world of scientific publishing to catch up.PLoS ... proposes to publish scientific journals that will offer 'open access' to their findings to the everyday taxpayers.