A group of prominent researchers have come together to establish a Public Library of Science (PLoS). They want free access to published scientific data - especially data emerging from research that was supported by tax dollars.
If this sounds like a new brainstorm from a few Woodstock Nation survivors, think again. Even a cursory review of the PLoS Board of Directors indicates that this is a serious effort: Harold E. Varmus, MD, is Co-founder and Chairman of the PLoS Board.
Dr. Varmus, a Nobel laureate and former Director of the National Institutes of Health who is now President and Chief Executive Officer of Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York, NY, is joined as a Co-founder by Patrick O. Brown, MD, PhD, of Stanford University School of Medicine and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, and Michael Eisen, PhD, of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory at the University of California-Berkeley. The remaining board positions are filled by a handful of researchers from Berkeley, Stanford, Harvard, Cornell, and the University of Oregon, as well as a representative from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.
FREE ACCESS BIOLOGYJOURNAL LAUNCHES
This group has already secured a $9 million grant from the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation and begun publishing an online, peer-reviewed biology journal in October. PLoS press materials state that the biology journal will be followed by a medical science journal in early 2004. Researchers submitting articles will be charged a publication fee of $1,500, and PLoS press releases claim that several institutions, including the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, have agreed to pay the publication fees for all their researchers.
But that is only part of the story. PLoS has enlisted the help of Rep. Martin Olav Sabo (D-MN) to introduce the Public Access to Science Act, which would place all results of government-funded research in the public domain so those data cannot be protected by copyright. If this bill were to become law, journals could not, for example, copyright papers that describe NIH-funded research. The bill, which was introduced in late June, was referred to the House Judiciary Committee.
Figure. Dr. Harold E...Image Tools
A CRITICAL VIEW
Most major medical journals provide online access to their subscribers only and charge a fee for access to non-subscribers. Academic medical faculty gain free access to journals through their institutions' subscriptions to individual journals or online services such as Ovid.
Editors of five leading neurology journals generally oppose the free access movement. I feel strongly that this is a bad idea, said Robert C. Griggs, MD, Editor of Neurology and Professor and Chair of the Department of Neurology at University of Rochester School of Medicine in Rochester, NY. The problem with medical literature in the clinical arena is that there is too much, not too little, and all good journals reject a large proportion of what they receive from investigators - many of whom are funded by the federal government - because it is not suitable for publication.
Interviews with the editors of Annals of Neurology, Journal of the Neurological Sciences, Neurorehabilitation and Neural Repair, Neurology, and Stroke found almost universal agreement with Dr. Griggs's sentiments.
STUDIES WITH MULTIPLE FUNDING SOURCES
Robert P. Lisak, MD, Editor of the Journal of the Neurological Sciences and Parker Webber Professor and Chair of Neurology at Wayne State University School of Medicine in Detroit, MI, said offering free access is not without problems. For example, he asked: What about research that is partially funded with NIH money and partially funded with MS Foundation money? What do you do then? Publish part of the article online? Or, said Dr. Lisak, what if every government took this same approach then Scandinavia, the UK, Germany, France, Italy, and Japan start doing this. It would be chaos.
Dr. Varmus pointed out that, while this could be a problem with the bill being sponsored by Rep. Sabo, it is not a problem for PLoS since it plans to publish research from all funding sources.
Even if the wealth of scientific data became readily available without the need to pay journal subscription fees, would the American public be ready to interpret the data? Dr. Lisak has his doubts. I think there would need to be an editorial accompanying every article to explain its significance…Do you think the average person can understand confidence intervals, odds ratios, benefit-for-treatment ratios? Of course not, he said.
Asked about this, Dr. Varmus said PLoS has anticipated this problem and plans to publish a 300- to 500-word summary in layman's language that will accompany each article and explain its significance.
Another potential problem, said Dr. Lisak, is the inherent conflict when government not only pays for the research, but also has control over what gets published. He pointed out that arguing that the public has a right to know because tax dollars paid for research would only be a compelling argument if the public had open access to everything tax money funds, which is clearly not the case with the Department of Defense or the Central Intelligence Agency - information that he said he does not know but would like to know.
SPEEDY ACCESS?
In published statements Dr. Varmus has charged that the current private journal system ties up and delays getting scientific information to the public. That charge, said Dr. Griggs is so untrue. The New England Journal of Medicine can get a paper out in eight days and within a year Neurology will be able to publish within 14 days of acceptance.
Michael E. Selzer, MD, PhD, Editor of Neurorehabilitation and Neural Repair and Professor of Neurology at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine in Philadelphia, said: Most journals have a policy of expedited review, and if something is very important they will speed publication. So the time that it takes to publish is not the issue.
Figure. Dr. Robert C...Image Tools
Dr. Selzer and other editors noted that under the current system most blockbuster research is first presented at scientific meetings, where it is usually well covered by both the consumer and professional press. There is no dearth of ways that hot news gets leaked and publicized, he said.
But that fast and early access to hot news presents a unique set of problems that could be compounded by public access, said Richard T. Johnson, MD, Editor of Annals of Neurology and Distinguished Service Professor Neurology, Microbiology, and Neuroscience at Johns Hopkins University and the Bloomberg School of Public Health in Baltimore, MD.
QUESTION OF PEER REVIEW
The key to quality medical publishing, he said, is peer review. The single most important thing I do as editor is to select the reviewers - reviewers who will be critical, fair, and responsible. They are not in excess supply. The great reviewers probably number in the 100s and they are not on a published list. I've gotten to know the reviewers by spending six years as an editor, and 50 percent of that time has been spent finding reviewers. It is not a trivial matter…it is not as simple as falling off a log.
Peer review, said Dr. Varmus, is a completely bogus issue and I find it hard to believe that my colleagues continue to raise it. Obviously, there is a great deal of unedited and unreviewed material on the Web, but it is not our intent to add to it. We have recruited a group of distinguished editors and we are very clear that every article will be reviewed by reviewers at the very highest levels. Our 'experiment' will only be useful if we demonstrate that we can publish the very best kinds of science and medicine so that we can compete with the prestigious journals.
Figure. Dr. Robert P...Image Tools
A MORE POSITIVE VIEW
Only one editor took a glass-half-full approach with the PLoS proposal. Vladimir Hachinski, MD, Editor of Stroke and Professor of Neurology at Western University in London, Ontario, put it this way: Bad ideas are sometimes the beginning of good ideas.
But he said the good idea is not about access but about quality. The real problem, he said, isn't suppression of data but rather the excess of partial, biased, and low-quality information. For example, he said, the current system encourages researchers to break out slices of work so that a single research study can yield multiple publications.
Dr. Hachinski said that researchers that support free access to scientific data would better serve both the public and clinicians if they agree to set new international standards for publication, including the requirement that investigators have control of the study and that clinical studies with negative results be published as regularly as are studies with positive findings. He also cautioned that simply opening up access to data will not guarantee scientific freedom for researchers.
Figure. Dr. Richard ...Image Tools
THE PRACTICE OF 'SLICING' DATA
Dr. Johnson said that he thinks the current public access movement, rather than promoting better-quality information, would lead in the opposite direction…What needs to be changed to satisfy what Vladimir is talking about is this issue of what Marcia Angell [former Editor-in-Chief of the New England Journal of Medicine and currently a lecturer in social medicine at the Harvard Medical School in Boston, MA] calls salami slicing, when data are divided into minimally publishable units that are published separately so that the kudos can be passed around. Dr. Johnson said the slicing phenomenon might be overcome by a system that rewarded extra points if you told the whole story from beginning to end as it sometimes takes 10 years to get the whole story.
Dr. Varmus said the quality issue has been debated for generations and it has little to do with access. A more important concern, he said, is the current system of academic publish or perish culture that rewards those researchers who not only publish, but also publish in the most prestigious journals. That, he said, could be a stumbling block for the fledgling PLoS journals.
Figure. Dr. Vladimir...Image Tools
We need to convince both students and post-docs that publishing in a PLoS journal will benefit their careers. I remain confident that we can do this fairly quickly.
Finally, Dr. Hachinski offered these observations on the world of medical publishing. The basic problem with medical publishing in my opinion is that we have developed an appetite for instant gratification, and just like it is with food - fast is not always good for you, he said. Information has been growing exponentially, knowledge more slowly, and wisdom not at all.
ARTICLE IN BRIEF
✓ Dr. Harold E. Varmus is spearheading an effort to establish the Public Library of Science (PLoS), which would provide free online access to published scientific data - especially data emerging from research that was supported by tax dollars.
✓ Editors of five leading neurology journals generally oppose the free access movement, citing concerns about the quality of data published and peer review.
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