The Public Library of Science: Reform or Revolt?

How best to communicate and evaluate knowledge?

"Reform" is a buzzword that, for the most part, has lost its meaning. In fact, a more modern definition of reform is that of subtle repression, or engineered change. The idea of reform became popular in Central and Eastern Europe in the late 1980s and early 1990s to denote a change that was seen as a break with the past. Since then, many have become disillusioned with the notion of reform, especially when "reform communists" simply reinvented themselves and carried on as before, leaving a lingering sense that justice had been denied.

Presently, the reform/revolt dichotomy has once again risen to the fore, this time within the international scientific community. The kind of change being talked about is that which seeks to challenge to the framework of intellectual property (IP) rights and its stranglehold on the dissemination of scientific knowledge.

This wave of revolt has first and foremost rocked the world of the life sciences. An appeal for a boycott of specialist publishers who refuse to publish articles about research results on-line, quickly and without charge, has already collected more than 26,000 signatures in over 150 countries. The campaign, known as the Public Library of Science, was launched by a small group of US researchers in biomedicine in September 2000.

Their demand was simple and straightforward: prominent specialist publishers should freely place all articles in the public domain -- by placing them on an appropriate, readily accessible website -- within six months of original publication. Failing this, they call on the worldwide biomedical community to boycott the publishers, by refusing to allow them to publish their results or not taking out a subscription to their publications.

In retrospect, this conflict was bound to happen. When scientific knowledge was foremost transmitted via print, i.e., scientific journals, scientists accepted the position of specialist publishers as a "quid pro quo". With the advent of the internet, however, the situation had changed drastically. Powerful search engines has made the task of linking different research results much easier and quicker. What would previously have taken years to search through a jungle of indexes in different physical locations could now be done in a couple of days using a computer to trawl through on-line databases.

As the power of the internet to mine electronically archived journals for data have grown, scientists have become increasingly frustrated at the publishers' plans to keep tight, lucrative control over their work. In the end, the prospect of access to knowledge being limited and ultimately controlled by large private corporations -- the very antithesis of the concept of an "information society" -- had jerked scientists into action.

The present wave of revolt first arose in the US where, at the instigation of the powerful NIH (National Institutes of Health) and in particular Nobel prize-winner Harold Varmus, the first free on-line library, PubMedCentral (PMC), was started. The primary aim of PMC is to assemble and catalogue all the stocks of knowledge accumulated in publications on biomedicine.

PMC, naturally, caused quite a stir among specialist publishers. Controlling a dominant share of the global market in scientific publications with an estimated value of between 7 billion and 9 billion euros, they see PMC as a direct challenge to their dominant position.

Admittedly, not all who are involved in the publication of scientific journals do so because of simple profit considerations. Many journals are published by scientific associations or universities whose main source of revenue comes from the development of their scientific activities. Hence, it's the potential loss of this revenue stream which has made them reluctant to offer their archives free of charge.

Nevertheless, it can't be denied that because of the concentration of power over the publication of scientific knowledge, specialist publishers have exerted a constant upward pressure on the sale price of journals. These increases have averaged 15% annually over recent years, without any real justification in terms of production costs. Indeed, the most prosperous groups have reported annual profits up by between 33% and 120%, with some journals even proposing that authors should pay to be published.

Europe, as elsewhere in the world, many signatures to the Public Library of Science campaign have been gathered. However, attempts to sap the revolt through the guise of reform are already apparent. As many media outlets in early 2001 made note of the conflict, including the L.A. Times in the US and the Guardian in the UK, government agencies carefully laid the groundwork for a counterattack. The European Commission (EC), for instance, released an article entitled "Trouble in Cyberspace!" (RTD Info, September 2001) which clearly sent a message opposing the revolt in favour of "reform". It criticises the likes of PMC for seeking to "centralise" knowledge. What is more, it points out that the drawback to such an approach is that it "fails to reflect the increasingly complex organisation of knowledge networks."

As a result, the EC trumpets its own version of how the "revolt in cyberspace" should be handled, not failing to emphasise its "European approach". This is done via the European Molecular Biology Organisation (EMBO), which has developed what has come to be known as the E-Biosci initiative. This initiative attempts to establish a portal in where commercial and free access can co-exist side by side. In order to achieve this objective, a non-exclusive interconnection platform between all the important sites where knowledge is generated and stored in all its forms has been created.

Yet given the financial greed of specialist publishers, it's hard to see how the E-Biosci initiative can effectively work. For such an approach to be a success, it would require the co-operation of all those concerned: namely, scientists (and other producers of "knowledge"), publishers, and managers of scientific libraries, in particular universities.

This co-operation is clearly lacking. Indeed, the view of many publishers is that the Public Library of Science campaign is nothing more than a boycott group of naive idealists. Meanwhile, the fallacy of co-operation can be seen in that publishers feel that the price of a subscription to an electronic database should still be tightly linked to the "ever rising" cost of paper journals.

It is the notion of "ever rising costs" -- a truism which has been elevated to that of a self-evident truth -- which lies at the heart of the problem and stands in the way of a "co-operative" solution between the conflicting values of commercial interests and free access advocates. Publishers claim that they are actually the victims, for they are caught in a vicious circle. They argue that the number of articles being submitted increases each year, thereby adding to the firm's costs since each article must be peer-reviewed by fellow scientists to see if it is worthy of publication. Because of these increases, libraries are in turn forced to cut subscriptions, which in turn cut into the income of the publishers, forcing them to increase prices even further.

The rationale behind this argument -- that an increase in scientific knowledge is responsible for the increase in price, is baseless. In most cases, neither the scientists who write the papers, nor their colleagues who peer review them, nor even the editorial boards who vet them, are paid. The publishers' costs are printing and the tiny full-time staff each journal devotes for two tasks -- marketing and distribution. Production costs are actually minimal, therefore there is no justification for the high costs of the journals nor the need for overzealous price increases.

As for costs related to maintaining on-line stores of scientific knowledge, here too publishers make a vain attempt to justify their greedy practices. Although access may be free, they argue that to develop and maintain electronic databases requires expensive high-powered servers, and so they must charge access fees in order to pay for these machines. Yet as Richard Stallman, founder of the GNU project, points out, the solution to this problem is simple: give everyone the freedom to mirror, and libraries around the world will set up mirror sites to meet the demand. Moreover, it will reduce network bandwidth needs and provide faster access, all the while protecting the scholarly record against accidental loss.

In essence, if the role of a specialist publisher is mainly for marketing and distribution, then the question naturally arises: in the digital age, do we need such publishers in the first place? After all, both marketing and distribution can be covered by the world wide web and the use of powerful and comprehensive search engines.

This has led some to explore different approaches to the underlying framework for the dissemination of scientific knowledge. There are those who see that technology should solve all the problems (e.g., Berners-Lee and his Semantic Web idea), while others suggest a collaborative filtering solution (e.g., the OpenArchive idea).

Whichever approach, or combination of them, you look at, there is no doubt that what is needed at this point is a more radical approach to the issue at hand, and not simply the "reform" of existing structures. Science as a whole is faced with a need to review the ways it communicates and evaluates "knowledge". The challenge remains, however, of providing some sort of guarantee that the same (or better) quality traditionally provided by peer review can be also be provided by those who seek to put all knowledge in the public domain.

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