Scientists Try Free Journal Access

Three of Harvard’s top scientists are playing a major role in the attempt to provide free access to scholarly research as an alternative to the current for-profit journals industry. But despite being backed by more than 15,000 scientists from around the world, their vision has stagnated, they say.

Last September, Walter Professor of Cell Biology Marc W. Kirschner, Professor Joseph B. Martin, dean of the Faculty of Medicine at Harvard Medical School (HMS) and Provost Stephen E. Hyman helped circulate a mass petition signed by 15,000 scientists who agreed to publish their work only in journals that would grant free online access to their archives after a six-month embargo.

The Harvard scientists joined a roster of nine of the world’s leading scientists to create BioMed Central, an exclusively online journal.

“We wanted the establishment of a high-end journal that was going to make information free to everyone,” Kirschner said.

In a meeting of librarians from across Harvard University yesterday, librarians said the cost of science journals and the importance of free access to archives remains a serious issue, even for the second largest library system in the world.

“There’s a lot of concern in the library community and at large about the high cost of journals these days out of the for-profit press, said Judith Messerle, head of HMS’ Countway Library.

Countway Library alone subscribes to 3,000 journals, of which more than half are available online.

The librarians included a presentation by Kirschner on their agenda, establishing the future of electronic journals as a focus of their future planning.

“This is a political issue that deals with scientific publishers taking research paid for by the federal government and then imposing restraints by yielding copyrights and making a profit, said Harold E. Varmus, Director of Sloan Kettering Hospital and an advocate for free archive distribution. “The current publishing model is outdated.”

But despite the efforts of these top scientists through BioMed Central to create an online journal system to aid free communication, the prestige associated with publishing in one of the premiere scientific journals prevents even the founders of BioMed Central from expecting their students to publish on the site.

“Given the realities of academic credit, I would encourage it only after they have published their first paper in a journal widely recognized by their field,” Hyman said in an email. “The pioneering steps must be taken by established investigators.”

Kirschner said he was not actively encouraging his own doctoral students to publish through BioMed Central.

“There’s the question of post docs trying to get jobs and I can’t encourage them to do something that is not in their own personal interest,” Kirschner said.

Because two of the most prestigious journals—Nature and Cell—do not grant free access, scientists who support the petition and the fledgling status of BioMed Central would have to forego a chance for major recognition.

“A lot has gone into the cachet that comes with publishing in particular journals,” said Vivian Segall, Editor-in-Chief of Cell Magazine, one of the top science journals. “Nobody has really come up with a journal that doesn’t have a real physical form associated with it and with good name recognition.”

Segall said most high profile journals had not seen a downturn in submissions from scientists and that even some of the leading scientists involved in the Public Library of Science continue to submit to for-profit journals or restricted access journals.

“People as readers can trust that they are seeing some of the best work in the world,” said Ellis Rubinstein, editor of the prestigious non-profit Science magazine, which has a year-long embargo on free access.

“We add value to what a scientist does and we put their work in context and give them bigger exposure,” he said.

Segall, speaking as a scientist, also said top journals were a key measure for university hirings.

“I’ve heard it said that if you want tenure, you’ve got to get an article in Science or get on the cover of Cell,” she said. “If you’re a top scientist, you can take the risk of publishing on BioMed Central, but you may hurt your staff.”

Kirschner said the decision to help doctoral students gain credibility in the field of scientific research has prevented BioMed Central from bringing top of the line content to the journal.

“Right now, we are publishing less exciting information,” Kirschner said. “The work isn’t bad, but it hasn’t come to any exciting conclusion.”

HMS Dean Martin refused to comment and would only say through his spokesperson John Lacey, “the project is just too embryonic to say anything about.”

And Hyman agreed that BioMed Central faces an uphill battle in establishing credibility.

“It is often far harder to alter deeply entrenched patterns of human behaviors than it is to make progress in the lab,” he said in an email.

Still, the efforts of the Public Library of Science and BioMed Central have raised awareness in the scientific publishing industry about the problems restricted access presents to scientists who lack the funds to have subscriptions to their journal, journals editors said.

Science now has a content-sharing agreement with every library in China, and Cell will release archives to any scientists who demonstrates need.

And BioMed Centrals founders insist the journal has a future because of its revolutionary approach to publishing, where scientists pay a nominal fee for their article to undergo review and the journal itself makes no profit from the publication of the article.

Traditional journals charge scientists large fees for article reviews and assume the copyright and royalties for any journal article.

“This is the correct business model and will be an outlet for people to publish once they catch on,” Varmus said.

—Staff writer Nicole B. Usher can be reached at usher@fas.harvard.edu.