Science / Researchers fight the traditional journals
Amy Harmon New York Times, Haaretz (Wala!)
A group of prominent scientists is e-challenging the leading scientific journals. The scientists accuse the journals of preventing progress in science by restricting online access to their articles in order to generate higher profits.
The scientists, who received a $XNUMX million grant from the American Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, said they will soon announce the establishment of two online journals in biology and medicine, edited by fellow scientists. The purpose of the journals will be to locate the best scientific articles and their immediate distribution in the public arena.
The founders hope that a prominent and accessible alternative to what they perceive as an outdated method of disseminating information, will change the face of science itself. Two journals will be the first in the scientists' vision of an extensive electronic library, where no one will have to pay membership fees or ask for permission to read, copy or use the collective product of global academic research.
"The record is the lifeblood of science," said Dr. Harold Vermus, a Nobel laureate in medicine and president of the Sloan-Kettering Cancer Research Center, who serves as chairman of the new, not-for-profit publication. "Our ability to build on the old to discover the new is based entirely on the way we distribute our results."
Institutional journals such as Science and Nature, on the other hand, charge high annual subscription fees and deny access to their online editions to non-subscribers, although Science recently began offering free electronic access to articles after one year of publication.
The new publishing initiative, the "Public Library of Science" (publiclibraryofscience.org), is the product of several years of struggle between scientists and journals over the control of access to scientific literature. For most scientists, who usually entrust their copyrights to journals without compensation, the main goal is to distribute their work to as many readers as possible.
Academic publishers claim that if wider access to the articles is allowed, they will lose the income from the subscription fees, which they need to maintain the quality of the editing. According to them, not only are they not preventing the progress of science, but the journals have played a key role in its advancement.
"We have very high standards, and there is a price for that," said Dr. Donald Kennedy, the editor-in-chief of "Science." According to a journal estimate, 800 people currently read "Science" online, compared to 140 readers of the printed edition. Considering the number of downloads at universities such as Harvard and Stanford, which purchase the right to use the site for about $5,000 per year, the journal claims that readers receive the articles in exchange Just a few cents.
In many cases, even charging such small amounts for access to a digital database can generate significant income. The British-Dutch corporation, Reed Elsevier, the world's largest academic publisher, recorded a profit of 30% last year in the field of scientific publishing. Last year, Science earned 34 million dollars just from advertising.
But the supporters of the public library of science say that the point is not how much money the journals make, but their monopolistic control over literature that should be in the hands of the public. "We would be very happy that they are making huge sums, if in exchange for all the money we put into them, we could own the literature and the literature did not belong to them," said Dr. Michael Eisen, a biologist at the Lawrence National Laboratory in Berkeley and the University of California and the founder of the Public Library of Science.
When scientists depended on print journals to disseminate their work, library advocates argue, it made sense to charge for access, since each copy equaled an additional expense. But according to them, at a time when the Internet has reduced distribution expenses to almost zero, there is no longer a need for a method that gives journals exclusive distribution rights.
Library promoters say that by publishing online and forgoing profits, it will now be possible to maintain a high-quality journal without charging subscription fees. Instead, they hope that institutions that fund research will begin to include the publication in the calculation of the cost of the research. The electronic journals will initially ask most authors to pay about $1,500 per article, in exchange for exposure to a wider potential audience and much faster response times.
The library's founders agree that its success will largely depend on whether leading researchers will be willing to give up the secure status of publishing in leading journals to support the principle of science as a public resource. In a profession where publication in a leading journal is sometimes a decisive factor in success and raising grant funds, this may be a difficult task.
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