Second Opinion
Open-stack policy
A plan to make scientific publications freely available to all
By Pat Brown MD, PhD
Photograph by Stephen Gladfelter
Last year, Harold Varmus, Michael Eisen and I founded a nonprofit scientific
publisher, the Public Library of Science (PLoS). In October 2003, PLoS
(www.plos.org) began publishing its premier
scientific journal, PLoS Biology. Everything PLoS publishes is immediately
available online, free of charge, with no restrictions on access or use.
Here’s why: The public library, one of the greatest inventions
of human civilization, has been waiting for the Internet. What seemed
an impossible ideal in 1836, when Antonio Panizzi, librarian of the British
Museum, wrote “I want a poor student to have the same means of
indulging his learned curiosity, … of consulting the same authorities, … as
the richest man in the kingdoms” is today within reach. With the
Internet, we have the means to make humanity’s treasury of knowledge
freely available to scientists, teachers, students and the public around
the world. But it won’t happen automatically.
Our government spends more than $50 billion a year on non-classified
research. What this investment yields are new scientific discoveries
and ideas, recorded in scientific publications. The authors of these
research reports, the scientists, give them away to publishers, receiving
in return only an audience and the satisfaction of sharing their ideas
and discoveries with the world. But if your mother learns she has breast
cancer and desperately wants to find what researchers have discovered
about her disease, or when your daughter in high school reads a story
in the New York Times about the latest research on climate change and
wants to see it with her own eyes, they face a perverse and unnecessary
obstacle. They, and countless others around the world who would benefit
from timely access to scientific and medical knowledge, cannot freely
access the published results of research financed by their own tax dollars.
An ever-growing online treasury of scientific and medical knowledge is
open only to the fortunate few who have access to a major university
library, or who are able to pay the exorbitant access fees charged by
publishers.
Even at Stanford, the restrictions on access prevent us from being able
to search the entire corpus of scientific articles for particular terms,
concepts, methods, data or images and retrieve the results — you
can’t “Google” the millions of scientific articles
that have been published online!
Open access for scientific publishing
The traditional business model for scientific publishing, in which individuals
or institutions pay publishers for access to research articles, is a
vestige of an era when printing articles in paper journals and transporting
them in trucks and boats was the most efficient way to disseminate new
scientific discoveries and ideas. When each copy cost money to print
and ship, it made sense to pass these costs on to the recipients. But
today, the Internet delivers articles much more efficiently and conveniently,
transforming the economics of scientific publishing. The costs of the
remaining essential functions of scientific publishers — orchestrating
peer review and professional editing — don’t scale with the
number of copies distributed, but with the number of articles reviewed
and published. But the benefits — to the authors, the scientific
community and the public — grow with the number of potential readers
who can access the published work. Charging for access is therefore no
longer economically necessary, rational or fair — it needlessly
limits access to an essential public good.
What’s the alternative? Just as midwives can earn a living without
claiming ownership or control of the babies they deliver, publishers
can and should be paid a fair price by the sponsors of the research,
a “midwife’s fee,” for their role in orchestrating
peer-review, editing and disseminating the results. But they should not
be given the baby, OUR baby, to own and control. By paying publishers
for each article at the time of its publication, instead of letting them
own the article and charge for access, the doors to the online library
could be opened to everyone.
An “open access” system for scientific publishing will not
entail new expenses, nor should it place a financial burden on the authors.
The governmental and private institutions that finance the research already
pay most of the costs of this publishing indirectly — through the
funds they provide to research libraries. These same institutions would
accomplish far more with the same money by phasing out subscription payments
to restricted-access journals and, instead, paying for open-access publication
of the research they support.
An impressive and rapidly growing list of scientific organizations now
advocate open-access publication. Yet, despite widespread support from
scientists and the public, institutional inertia and fear of change delay
its progress. We who benefit from access to great research libraries
and generous public support of our research should remember Benjamin
Franklin’s words: “As we enjoy great advantages from the
inventions of others, we should be glad of an opportunity to serve others
by any invention of ours; and this we should do freely and generously.” SM
Patrick O. Brown, MD, PhD, co-founder of the Public Library of
Science, is a Stanford biochemistry professor and a Howard Hughes Medical
Institute investigator.
Comments? Contact Stanford Medicine at
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