Biochemist Patrick Brown was among the first researchers to learn how the AIDS virus replicates in healthy cells. He also invented the DNA microarray, a slide upon which scientists can inexpensively print thousands of bits of DNA. Today, the Medical School professor has joined forces with former National Institutes of Health director Harold Varmus and UC-Berkeley assistant professor Mike Eisen on a new project: getting published research into the public domain, where they think it belongs.
Stanford: What’s at stake in scientific publishing?
Something on the order of $40 billion a year in federal funds goes to support nonclassified scientific research in biomedical and other fields, and the explicit purpose is to make new discoveries and generate new knowledge for the public good. Scientists carry out their research and when they have something useful to report, they write a paper and publish it.
What’s wrong with the current system of publishing those papers?
Let’s say you’ve just been diagnosed with some kind of cancer and you want to find out what your tax dollars have paid for in terms of research. It typically costs $15 to $30 just to look at one article. Information paid for by billions of dollars of public money is privately owned by publishers who have complete control over who has access to it and under what terms.
Two years ago, you circulated a letter that was signed by more than 30,000 scientists who pledged to publish only in journals that would make their work available publicly after six months. What did that tell you?
The statement the letter made was quite strong. It was kind of like an invitation to publishers: change your business model and we’ll get behind you. But it was seen by most publishers as more of a threat than an invitation, and the bottom line was that there were very few publishers that actually came around to adopting the model we proposed.
What’s your latest approach to the problem?
For the past year, we’ve been working on a business plan and trying to raise money to launch a nonprofit scientific publisher called the Public Library of Science. Published work will be freely available so anyone can download it, reproduce it, reprint it or load it into databases, and it will be accessible to anyone, worldwide, who has an Internet connection. This stuff is incredibly valuable, and why should someone in Addis Ababa be completely disenfranchised when the whole purpose of research is the public good?
What about “publish or perish”? How will publishing in an online journal affect tenure decisions?
What journals you publish in matters a lot in terms of your career advancement, and that’s an issue we’ve been very sensitive to. We’re making great efforts to recruit the necessary editorial people to see to it that the journal we launch, from the word go, will be regarded as a very prestigious place to publish scientific work.
For more: www.publiclibraryofscience.org
