Moving at the Speed of Creativity by Wesley Fryer

Universally available research

The June issue of Wired Magazine has an interesting article about Nobel Prize winning scientist and academic leader Harold Varmus, titled “Free Radical.” Varmus’ controversial position is that publishing should be free and open in the scientific and academic community.

I agree with him, although this position is a radical departure from the traditional conception academics and scientific researchers have had of elite, peer reviewed journals whose subscriptions can be QUITE expensive (and therefore limiting in the access they provide to the general public.) I see this issue through a lens of ideological publishing freedom, which I embrace, and I have written about previously in the posts “Accessibility supports relevancy”, “Free ideas & Pedagogy” and “Following the Free.” In this article, Varmus’s ideas and goals relating to free idea dissemination are summarized in the following two paragraphis:

He calmly lays out his campaign. For centuries, journals have been the means both of disseminating scientific knowledge and building scientific careers. Accordingly, the journals atop the hierarchy draw the highest-quality submissions, which reinforces their lofty reputations, which in turn enhances the status of the scientists who publish there. This positive feedback loop puts the power in the hands of the journals, even though their existence depends entirely on the scientists who write, edit, and serve as reviewers, usually without compensation.

Meanwhile, their colleagues can gain access only through subscriptions that their institutions pay for, sometimes dearly. (A yearly subscription to Brain Research, for instance, costs more than $20,000.) Worse, most of the public – scientists in developing countries, faculty and students in underfunded colleges, high schoolers, patients – have no access at all, even though taxes fund the government grants that support much of the research. Varmus asks: Shouldn’t this ancient system have changed with the Internet, which allows information to be disseminated cheaply and immediately searched, mined, archived, reviewed, and improved?

Not surprisingly, many (if not most) scientific researchers and others in “the academy” oppose this move against tradition and established practice. But what goals are supported by narrowly limiting access to these ideas? One fear seems to be that riff-raff publishers and scientists will be put on a level field with the true professionals, but Varmus contends (correctly I think) that the cream will rise to the top. Already his open access journal, PLoS Biology, has become one of the most cited and recognized journals in the field of biology.

As I packed up my office in Lubbock recently to make the move to Oklahoma City, I was struck again by how important digital versus analog forms for information are to me personally. I have tons of old papers, but I am very unlikely to go through them all or utilize the information contained there. If that information was digital, however, chances are much higher I would refer back to it and use it. I salute Varmus and others, like those supporting the Science Commons project, who are seeking to further democratize universal access to ideas delivered via the Internet. As Nicholas Negraponte noted many years ago in his book “Being Digital,” delivery costs when information is converted to ones and zeros melt to almost nothing. Given the dynamics of digital social networks, it is certainly possible for peer review to continue and high quality work to still be recognized as it has been in the traditional publishing process. The major difference, however, is one of access and idea distribution.

If you want to be relevant, your ideas not only have to be digital– they also need to be OPENLY accessible to the world on the Web. Lots of folks will fight this future, but I think it is a future we should embrace and actively support as we move forward in the 21st century.

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3 responses to “Universally available research”

  1. Stephen Downes Avatar

    If Wired was going to profile anybody with respect to Open Access, it should have profiled Peter Suber, who has been at the forefront of this very large movement for years now.

    See http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/fosblog.html

  2. andi forte Avatar
    andi forte

    The vision of open access is so enticing, but it’s really a more complicated issue than most people realize. I think one of the challenges of open peer review and publication is captured in one of your quotes. The idea that scientists “write, edit and peer review without compensation” is WAY off. These activities essentially drive funding for scientific research.

    Bruno Latour has written a couple of (relatively inexpensive 😉 ) books about the sociology of the scientific community. He suggested that one of the most critical features of science is the cycle of credit. He observed that publication is part of a cycle of credit that eventually gets translated into research funds and equipment. The entire scientific enterprise is tightly bound to a publishing tradition that essentially serves as the engine that gets scientists the funds they need to continue carrying out their research. By serving as a reviewer or editor, scientists help determine who gets what kind of funding in the future. That’s some serious compensation.

    I like the open publishing vision, in fact, all my work is about wikis, but I think it will take some time before this complex social system shifts in any radical way toward a more open model.

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