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Rapid Responses: Rapid Responses published:
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Author's update
- Tony Delamothe (20 December 2002)
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Response to "How Online Articles have changed"
- Kevin C Abbott (23 December 2002)
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Reading paper
- Adrian K Midgley (31 December 2002)
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Tony Delamothe, web editor, bmj.com BMA House, London
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More details on the publishing plans of the Public Library of Science were available only after we went to press. Here's its press release: Public Library of Science to Launch New Free-Access Biomedical Journals with $9 Million Grant from the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation December 17, San Francisco, CA. The Public Library of Science (PLoS), a non-profit, international grass-roots organization of scientists, announced today that it is launching a new scientific publishing venture that will make the published results of scientific research more accessible and useful to scientists, physicians and the public. This new effort is backed by a five-year, $9 million grant from the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation and by an important policy decision from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. The PLoS initiative has been led by Dr. Harold E. Varmus, president of the Memorial-Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, former director of the National Institutes of Health and 1989 Nobel Laureate; Dr. Patrick O. Brown of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and Stanford University, and Dr. Michael B. Eisen of Lawrence Orlando Berkeley National Laboratory and the University of California, Berkeley. PLoS will publish two new journals - PLoS Biology and PLoS Medicine. The senior editorial board of the new journals is an international group of scientific luminaries (see list below). The PLoS journals will retain all of the important features of scientific journals, including rigorous peer-review and high editorial standards, but will use a new business model in which the costs of these services are recovered by modest fees on each published paper. This new model will allow PLoS to make all published works immediately available online, with no charges for access or restrictions on subsequent redistribution or use. "By making the published results of biomedical research available for free, and allowing them to be redistributed and used without restriction, these new journals will substantially increase the value - to both the scientific community and the public - of the tremendous investment our society makes in scientific research," explained Dr. Varmus. Open access publication will: · Greatly expand access to scientific knowledge by giving any
scientist, physician, student - or anyone with access to the Internet,
anywhere in the world - unlimited access to the latest scientific
research.
According to Dr. Eisen, "Publication is fundamental to the process of scientific and medical research, and the costs of publication are a small but essential part of the cost of research. If the same institutions and organizations that sponsor our research also committed to directly paying journals for providing peer-review, editorial oversight and production, the latest scientific discoveries could be made freely available online to every scientist and physician or interested citizen in the world in comprehensive, searchable open archives of the scientific literature. The anachronistic system of giving away the copyrights to the original research reports and then paying for access to them costs more and it effectively deprives most of the world - including the people whose taxes paid for the research in the first place - from having any meaningful access to the results." The Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI), among the most highly respected medical research organizations in the world, strongly endorsed this new model for scientific publishing by promising to cover the publication costs for their 350 investigators when they publish in open access electronic journals like PLoS Biology and PLoS Medicine. In so doing, HHMI's scientific leadership - its president, Thomas R. Cech, a Nobel Laureate in Chemistry, and vice presidents Gerald Rubin, Ph.D. and David Clayton, Ph.D. - expressed their support for the PloS initiative, and are helping to assure the success of PLoS's publications by encouraging leading scientists to publish their work in open access journals. "We think that Web publications that are instantly available for free and are readily searchable and downloadable very much support HHMI's mission," said Dr. Cech. "They are clearly "the wave of the future" in terms of our investigators disseminating their research discoveries and learning from the findings of others. In addition, we have a strong commitment to international science and the current subscription system puts many journals out of the reach of our colleagues in poorer countries. As noted by Dr. Varmus, "the generous support by HHMI is a strong vote of confidence in our journals and serves as a model for other funding agencies and institutions." PLoS is confident that the scientific community will support their new publications. In the past two years, more than 30,000 scientists from 180 countries signed an open letter circulated by PLoS, which called on established scientific journals to provide open access to their archives. Dr. Brown expects this initiative to be welcomed by many groups with a stake in biomedical research. "Anyone who has an interest in the results of scientific inquiry, or who believes in making the latest advances in medical knowledge available to physicians and patients around the world, can recognize the importance of more equitable access to the scientific literature. When a woman learns she has breast cancer, she deserves to be able to read the results of research on her treatment options that her own tax dollars have funded. A physician in a public clinic in Uganda ought to have the same access to the latest discoveries about AIDS prevention as a professor at Harvard Medical School. And a precocious high school student in Gary, Indiana who wants to read about the latest discoveries from NIH-sponsored research in cell biology shouldn't have to pay thousands of dollars for journal subscriptions." CONTACT INFO Adrienne Larkin: +1-650-724-4304
Background: Public Library of Science, a 501(c)3 non-profit corporation, was formed in 2000 by a group of biomedical research scientists to encourage scientific publishers to make the archival scientific research literature available for distribution through free online public libraries of science, such as NIH's pioneering online research library, PubMedCentral. Partial List of Editorial Advisors: We are currently contacting prominent scientist around the world who strongly support the goals of PLoS to serve as editorial advisors to our new journals. This is a partial list of those who have agreed to serve. An updated list is available on our website: Michael Ashburner, Ph.D.
Anne-Lise Borresen-Dale, Ph.D.
Patrick O. Brown, M.D., Ph.D. ,br>Stanford University School of Medicine, United States Steve Chu, Ph.D.
Nick Cozzarelli, Ph.D.
Sean Eddy, Ph.D.
Michael B. Eisen, Ph.D.
Mikhail Gelfand, Ph.D., D.Sc.
Alan Fersht, Ph.D., FRS
Lee Hartwell, Ph.D.
David Hillis, Ph.D. ,br>University of Texas, United States Brigid Hogan, Ph.D.
Fred Hughson, Ph.D. ,br>Princeton University, United States Marc Kirschner, Ph.D.
Rowenna Matthews, Ph.D.
Roel Nusse, Ph.D.
Svante Paabo, Ph.D.
Richard Roberts, Ph.D.
Gerry Rubin, Ph.D.
Harold E. Varmus, M.D.
Barbara Wold, Ph.D.
Competing interests: The model pursued by the Public Library of Science threatens some of the revenues of my employer, the BMJ Publishing Group. |
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Kevin C Abbott, Associate Professor of Medicine, USUHS Nephrology Service, WRAMC, Washington, DC 20307
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Dear Dr. Delamothe, Thank you for a fascinating look at the potential future of electronic publishing. I fully agree with your Figure 2 which shows the disconnect between prediction and reality. I would also like to elaborate on your discussion of what users currently do with their downloaded articles. As you mentioned, “If this remains the limit of what users do, it makes the whole online publishing project look like a not very interesting storm in a teacup.” The article implies that if users were more technologically savvy, they would use electronic versions of manuscripts, with their links and other special capabilities, more often. However, I don’t think “technology savvy” is the main obstacle. First, onscreen versions of printed material, even those on PDA’s, are difficult to read from different angles. They are especially difficult to share with a large group (more than 2-3 people) unless they are projected onto a larger screen. Further, it’s difficult if not impossible to make any margin comments in the onscreen versions. There are also substantial limits to how HTML versions of articles can be saved. Trying to “save” an HTML version of article and retrieving it later often results in the loss of most links, since the connections to these links may change over time or is hierarchically dependent (ie, based on the location in the server). The HTML versions are therefore difficult to archive and retrieve apart from their website. They also usually look bad when they are printed out. I would predict that until technology exists that allows users to download manuscripts and read them in an easily retrievable, flexible, lightweight, portable format that allows margin comments, the use of electronic versions of manuscripts will remain relatively low. There is some talk of “E-books” with flexible LCD panels and “graffiti” like interfaces that may solve some of these problems, depending on when they are widely available. Sincerely, Kevin C. Abbott, MD, FACP
Competing interests: None declared |
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Adrian K Midgley, GP EXETER EX1 2QS
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I'm going to nit-pick the previous posting, because I think it shows some fundamental misconceptions. (Rapid responses to an electronic posting are ... well, rapid, whcih is good, and cheap which helps, but possibly an editor or a period on the shelf would have picked these up. Paper responses are slow, expensive, rarely juxtaposed to the article to which they respond, for future readers of that article.) "First, onscreen versions of printed material, even those on PDA’s, are difficult to read from different angles." Especially PDAs have narrow viewing angles. This is a feature, not a bug, and helps preserve privacy, but privacy is not an issue here. So what? These gadgets are for one person to read, not for a cinema or a billboard. And ... "... They are especially difficult to share with a large group (more than 2-3 people) unless they are projected onto a larger screen." Yes. Right, the way you share a BMJ (paper) article is 20 of you line up and try to read it together? I think not. In a library which has one copy of the BMJ, one person or maybe two can read it together. GIven that the electronic one can be accessed from anywhere there is a screen, there is no sensible limit on the numbers of people who can read it together. " Further, it’s difficult if not impossible to make any margin comments in the onscreen versions." We are out of the library now, I take it? This does require some tech savviness - there is Annotea (see the W3C website for this) and a colelction of other annotation servers, there is the Wiki technology which I recoomend to all of you, and there is nothing to stop you making a copy, and annotating that, and by all means using the margins if you like. By typing, so we may be able to read it when it is projected (I apologise to anyone whose handwriting is better than mine, alright, to everyone) "There are also substantial limits to how HTML versions of articles can be saved." No. There are not. "Trying to “save” an HTML version of article and retrieving it later often results in the loss of most links, since the connections to these links may change over time or is hierarchically dependent (ie, based on the location in the server). " Right... unlike the links in the paper version? THose coming late to the on-line version will find that if the links have moved, deliberately, then they will have the advantage of that editing. Many of us while declaring over and over to a largely unheeding paper -based collection of administrators and finance directors that they shouldn't muck about with links anyway would also say that saving the URL is the ideal, and reviewing that article by going back to it, not by freezing it in time on your own hard drive. "The HTML versions are therefore difficult to archive and retrieve apart from their website. They also usually look bad when they are printed out." This still doesn't make sense. If you archive an article you archive all parts of it, no? So if the linked pages are part of the document you have archived them along with the core of it, no? If you didn't archive them, they were something else. If they are fascinating references to elsewhere then how does this differ from paper? Here is a reference: Encylopaedia Brittanica, page 2003 . What are you going to do with it? Buy another copy of volume 1 of the Micropaedia to file along with the torn out page this is on? Of course not. WHether it is to a book, another paper in another issue, or another journal then you rely upon being able to find a copy of the original using the navigational/indexing information provided in the link/reference you are given. And... get a decent printer. Opera tends to print HTML pages better than does Internet Explorer, in my opinion, but the main things involved are the printer and the oeprating system. The BMJ can afford a nice printer, but a laser is adequate. "I would predict that until technology exists that allows users to download manuscripts and read them in an easily retrievable, flexible, lightweight, portable format that allows margin comments, the use of electronic versions of manuscripts will remain relatively low" Well, that technology exists, and you are allowed to print things out... which takes care of the screen resolution problem. But you are only thinking of one use - sequential prompt reading. Paper is appallingly bad for rapid accesss to a specific point at the time of need, and since these are usually small sections the difference in readability between screen and paper doesn't show up much. As one bit of techi-ness to reflect upon, many articles published on line look as if they have headings, but don't. So the speed-reading which is so easy to do as you flick from heading to heading - easier than on paper - is hampered, as is any use of the structure of the document. That can be improved, but paper has plateaued. Competing interests: None declared |
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