Science for Everybody

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http://www.alternet.org/story.html?StoryID=16193

 

Science for Everybody

 

Annalee Newitz, AlterNet

June 16, 2003Viewed on June 18, 2003

 

You've just been diagnosed with a disease whose name you can barely pronounce,

let alone understand. All you know, based on what the doctor has told you, is

that things could get very serious if you don't start treatment. But there are

two possible treatments, each with upsides and downsides. It's up to you to

decide which one you want to try. So where do you turn?

 

Like a lot of people, you go online. If you know how to get good, peer-reviewed

medical information on the Web, you go to the National Library of Medicine's

database of scientific articles called, not very glamorously, PubMed. It's a

pretty nifty site: You can search specifically for the names of the treatments

your doctor has recommended and several dozen articles pop up on your screen.

When you want to read the articles, however, you are stymied. All you get is a

short abstract of the article -- not enough to tell you what you need to know --

and you have to cough up to $40 or $50 for the full text. Why can't you get free

access to information that was paid for using your tax dollars?

 

That's what the activists at the Public Library of Science in San Francisco want

to know, too. Led in part by Nobel laureate Harold Varmus and charismatic

gene-chip whiz kid Michael Eisen, PloS's mission is to make scientific knowledge

a public good.

 

The group traces its immediate history to Varmus's project PubMed Central, a

service associated with the aforementioned PubMed, which was supposed to make

the full text of articles available to anyone who wanted them. Unfortunately,

the scientific publishing business -- exemplified by corporate giants like

Elsevier, which puts out thousands of periodicals and books -- didn't exactly

embrace the idea of making its copyrighted materials available for free.

 

To highlight the growing antagonisms between scientists and many of the journals

that publish them, a coalition of researchers circulated a petition among their

colleagues in 2000 calling for journals to make their contents publicly

accessible. More than 30,000 scientists from all over the world signed it.

 

And so PloS was born. If scientific publications weren't willing to open up

their contents to the world, members of PloS reasoned, then the scientists would

have to start publishing their work in a new way. With a five-year, $9 million

grant from the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation under its belt, PloS is getting

ready to launch two online scientific journals, PloS Biology and PloS Medicine.

Articles in both publications will be written by leaders in the field and

subjected to a rigorous peer-review process. Then they will be released under a

public access license developed by Creative Commons, a group at Stanford

University that develops legal alternatives to the restrictive copyright system

PloS aims to challenge.

 

Vivian Siegel left a high-profile job as editor of Cell -- one of the

triumvirate of top scientific journals, along with Science and Nature -- to work

as executive director of PloS. Why make the move from one of the most

influential scientific journals in the world to an upstart whose future is

uncertain? " I'm an idealist, " she says simply. Plus, if it comes to a showdown

between science and publishing, the biologist turned editor is firmly on the

side of science. " All the editors at Cell wanted to make our articles

open-access, but [parent company] Elsevier didn't want to do it. When I pointed

out that our position made me feel like I wasn't working for the benefit of the

scientific community, my boss said, 'What? You think you're a scientist?' I

realized I couldn't act on my principles and continue at Cell. "

 

Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory researcher and PloS cofounder Eisen says

his passion for the PloS projects grew out of a frustrating experience he had in

his work on DNA microarrays, tools that help biologists analyze genomic

activity. A recent breakthrough in the technology allowed Eisen and his

colleagues to look at an entire genome, which meant they were inundated with

information about thousands of genes. Eisen thought the best way to deal with

the situation would be to link the output from the array to software that would

search databases of scientific literature for information about the relevant

genes. When a researcher wanted to study a section of the genome, he or she

could get information from the array and from the literature at the same time.

But, according to Eisen, " the publishers said, 'No, it's our information.'

That's when I recognized that the publishing system doesn't serve the scientific

community. We couldn't build on other people's knowledge. It's a

perversion of the principles of science. "

 

For a researcher like Eisen, PloS could become the ideal research tool. Data

about genomics is scattered across hundreds of publications; with open-access

publication, all of that data would be at his fingertips. " My research is

dependent on [PloS] succeeding, " he says, and he's not alone. Most microbiology

these days involves data aggregation. Without it, treatment for cancers --

diseases caused by mutations in the genome -- could be much further away than

most of us hope.

 

" Sharing information is a key founding component of science, " Eisen argues.

" Today technology has made it easy to imagine a world where the free full text

of every scientific paper is available to everybody in the universe. " Of course,

technology alone isn't enough. It's only as good as the people using it. And

that's why PloS is a hopeful sign of things to come.

 

Annalee Newitz (genegeek) is a surly media nerd who laughs

in the face of your pathetic copyright laws. Her column also appears in Metro,

Silicon Valley's weekly newspaper.

 

 

 

© 2003 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.

 

 

 

 

 

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