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Over 1500 life scientists pledge to use only journals that archive for free

"We believe that the permanent, archival record of scientific research and ideas should neither be owned or controlled by publishers, but should belong to the public, and should be freely available through an international online public library" from the open letter of The "Public Library of Science" http://www.publiclibraryofscience.org/

Source  :  BioMedNet News

24 January 2001 14:50 EST
by Vicki Brower

A grass-roots movement is gaining momentum among life scientists, who are pressing for the creation of a permanent, public Internet archive of life science research, provided free of charge. The "Public Library of Science" inititative, begun last November by Stanford University biochemist Patrick Brown, has picked up the support of some 1,600 scientists to date.

An editorial backing the effort, written by Nobel Prizewinning geneticist Richard Roberts of New England Biolabs, appeared in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences on 9 January. Nicholas Cozzarelli, who is Editor of PNAS and professor of molecular and cell biology at the University of California in Berkeley, invited Roberts to write the editorial. "Europe is also interested in developing a similar initiative for its journals," he told BioMedNet News.

The initiative calls for scientists to agree that, as of September 2001, they will submit research and subscribe only to those journals that grant unrestricted free distribution rights to published work through a central site, within six months after the initial publication date of primary research articles. "We believe that the permanent, archival record of scientific research and ideas should neither be owned or controlled by publishers, but should belong to the public, and should be freely available through an international online public library," states an open letter on the Public Library of Science website. Research, it maintains, should be "freely accessible, fully searchable, [and in an] interlinked form."

Major scientific publishers (including Elsevier, which owns BioMedNet) by and large decline to comment on the issue, while they consider their response to "the pledge." Publishers fear open archiving will lead to loss of control, loss of subscription income, and problems with copyright, says PNAS editor Cozzarelli. (Some publishers agreed last year to provide archived articles for free on High Wire Press, but only one or two years - not six months - after publication.)

The starting point for a public archive is that the public pays for most science, Roberts tells BioMedNet News. "Scientific literature should belong to the scientific community," said geneticist Michael Eisen of the University of California at Berkeley and the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, who is one of the organizers of the effort. Rather than a boycott, Eisen prefers to characterize the movement as "a strong positive statement of support for journals willing to make their articles freely accessible."

A steering committee, the "open letter advocacy group," has been formed to promote and coordinate the effort with scientists and publishers. Members includes Eisen, Roberts, Lee Hartwell of the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, and Harold Varmus of Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center.

In his PNAS editorial, Roberts cites PubMed Central as an example of the type of publicly accessible electronic archive which should be a repository for life science content. Varmus, while still at the helm of the National Institutes of Health, established PubMed Central in 1999. Located at the National Center for Biotechnology Information, PubMed Central is an example of what the initiative is trying to promote, said Eisen. "It is important that other scientific archives come into being, however," he added.

In response to this challenge, some journals are considering providing their archival content for free on a site such as (but not limited to) PubMed Central. In addition to PNAS, other journals adopting the policy that all original research they publish belongs in the public domain include The British Medical Journal, Molecular Biology of the Cell, Genome Biology, and everything published by the Web-based publisher BioMed Central.

"Overall, most publishers we have contacted have responded positively to the initiative," said Eisen. However, major publishers such as Science, Nature, and Elsevier have made no decision as yet. (Nature and Elsevier had no comment for this article; Oxford University Press and Cold Spring Harbor Press did not respond to inquiries.)
Science provided a statement on 19 January that it had not yet reached a definitive understanding of the impact of either PubMedCentral or the Brown initiative, and thus could not yet reach a decision. "In addition, some of the details related to the implementation of both these ideas seem to be in flux," said the statement.

Currently, the Journal of Cell Biology and all journals of the American Society for Microbiology provide their recent content for free within six months of publication, but only through their own website or through a third agent, High Wire Press. In a recent open letter to members of the American Society for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, the authors and editorial board of the Journal of Biological Chemistry said that JBC does have a policy of providing back issues for free to everyone, and is currently converting its archives to electronic form on its own site.

Somewhat cryptically, it also stated that it "favor[s] archiving the JBC content in a variety of locations which will preserve the integrity and quality of the information and guarantee its continued free availability to all of our readers." JBC will not put its content on PubMed Central, according to the statement. However, it went on, "we believe such archiving is most important, and work is in progress to establish such a multisite archive, including such locations as the US Library of Congress."

Roberts says that behind-the-scenes negotiations with scientific journals are taking place, but they can be expected to take time because the copyright issues are complicated. "We do believe that there is enough money in the system to support such an undertaking without financially harming publishers," he added.

Eisen views a public, electronic, easily searchable archive to be merely another step in a continuum of rendering scientific publishing accessible. "Accessibility began with abstracts, and moved to the Internet, where first abstracts and then whole articles became available." Archiving all research electronically for the public will render the information more usable for scientists - a textual parallel to the GenBank database of gene sequences, Eisen said. Today, genomic work without access to GenBank is inconceivable. Research without a similar archive for the publishing in the life sciences will one day seem just as inconceivable, he predicts.
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