[asa] Nature Precedings / PLoS One / open access model

Just got back from out of town and am trying to catch up on the
backlog of posts and emails. Will no doubt want to comment on a few
things as time permits, but in the meantime, I want to post this item
for those who may not have seen it.

One of my comments is here, for those interested:
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1861088/posts?page=6#6

~ Janice

News Ages Quickly - Scientific publishing moves into the 21st century at last
Reason ^ | July 3, 2007 | Ronald Bailey
http://reason.com/news/printer/121178.html

Arguably, the Information Age began in 1665. That was the year the
<http://www.slais.ubc.ca/courses/libr500/fall1999/www_presentations/K_macdonell/origin.htm>Journal
des scavans and Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of
London started regular publication.

Making new scientific information more easily and widely available
was the spark that ignited the Industrial Revolution. The founding
editor of the Journal des scavans, Denis de Sallo, chose to publish
his new journal weekly because, as he explained, "news ages quickly."
Scientific news ages even more quickly in the 21st century than it
did in the 17th century.

Last week, one of the world's leading scientific journals, Nature,
conceded this fact by launching <http://precedings.nature.com/>Nature
Precedings. Nature Precedings aims to be an online "place for
researchers to share pre-publication research, unpublished
manuscripts, presentations, posters, white papers, technical papers,
supplementary findings, and other scientific documents." The new
archive will make contributions from biology, medicine, chemistry and
the earth sciences available online. The articles, papers and
presentations are evaluated for relevance by an editorial board but
are not subject to more rigorous peer-review.

Nature Precedings and the life sciences are finally catching up with
physicists and mathematicians. In 1991, physicist Paul Ginsparg
launched <http://arxiv.org/>arXive.org (the X is pronounced as the
Greek letter Chi). ArXive is an online system for distributing
scientific research results which bypasses the conventional avenues
of scientific publication. ArXive offers open access to 427,608
e-prints in physics, mathematics, computer science and quantitative
biology. E-prints are not peer-reviewed by editors but readers can
decide for themselves how scientifically valuable they are.

Besides online pre-prints, scientific publishing is moving rapidly
toward an open access model. In February, 2000, the National
Institute of Health's National Center for Biotechnology Information
launched <http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/about/intro.html>PubMed
Central, its open access archive of over 350 biomedical and life
sciences journals. Two weeks ago, PubMed Central announced that it
had archived its
<http://www.nlm.nih.gov/news/pmcmillion.html>millionth article. The
year 2000, also saw the creation of the open access British
publisher, <http://www.biomedcentral.com/home/>BioMed Central which
has now grown to 177 peer-reviewed journals. All BioMed Central
journals are available at PubMed Central. In 2002, the University of
Lund, with support of the Open Society Institute and the
<http://www.arl.org/sparc/>Scholarly Publishing and Academic
Resources Coalition created the online Directory of Open Access
Journals which currently lists <http://www.doaj.org/>2725 journals.
Last week, the U.S. Senate Appropriations Committee agreed to direct
the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to require that all research
the agency funds be made
<http://www.taxpayeraccess.org/media/release07-0628.html>publicly
available on the internet within one year after journal publication.

Also in 2000, three prominent biomedical researchers launched the
<http://www.plos.org/>Public Library of Science (PLoS). Initially
PLoS encouraged other scientific journals to make their articles
available for free online. In 2003, PLoS began launching a series of
online peer-reviewed open source electronic journals. Although arXive
publishes pre-prints without peer review, Ginsparg foresaw the
possibility that segments of the scientific community (he suggested
non-profit scientific societies that publish journals) might
"continue to organize high-quality peer-reviewed overlays." .

In a sense this is what the PLoS journals are now doing. Since
clinical biomedicine depends on the results of randomized control
trials, peer review currently remains an important process for
maintaining data quality. In addition, there is the real possibility
that desperate patients might be misled by bad or incomplete
biomedical information. Harold Sox, editor of Annals of Internal
Medicine has noted, "If a medical article gets out and it's wrong,
the consequences may be greater." Based on such concerns, Nature
Precedings will not accept any submissions describing the results of
clinical trials or those making specific therapeutic claims.

Of course, peer review is no absolute guarantor of scientific
validity. Martin Blume, editor-in-chief of the American Physical
Society and its nine physics journals, says that peer review
overlooks honest errors as well as deliberate fraud. "Peer review
doesn't necessarily say that a paper is right," he notes. "It says
<http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/311/5757/23>it's worth
publishing."

And in any case, peer review is changing from a one time evaluation
by anonymous reviewers of a self-contained research article to a
continuous online process. PLoS has launched a new comprehensive
online journal, <http://www.plosone.org/home.action>PLoS One,
featuring reports of primary research from all disciplines within
science and medicine. The editorial board will make prompt decisions
on whether or not any particular paper merits publication and may
refer it to outside reviewers. But unlike print journals, publication
is not the end of the peer review process.

Once an article has been published on the PLoS One site,
community-based open post-publication peer review involving online
annotation, discussion, and rating begins. Post-publication peer
reviewers can briefly annotate the text of the article with
corrections, additions, or links to other relevant articles. They may
also engage in online debates concerning the content, conclusions,
and consequences of a specific paper. And finally, users may assign
ratings to papers. The hope is that online critiques will detect
errors or fraud more quickly. This is peer review on steroids.

At PLoS One, comments and annotations may not be anonymous. According
to the PLoS good practice guidelines for commenting post-publication
reviewers should confine their criticisms to the demonstrable content
of papers and avoid speculation about the motivations or prejudices
of authors. It may be "good practice" now, but it is inevitable that
that in the future post-publication peer reviewers will disclose any
associations (proper and improper) that they believe relevant to the
findings reported in a paper.

As Ginsparg noted eleven years ago at a UNESCO conference on the
future of electronic publishing, "in some fields of physics, the
on-line electronic archives immediately became the primary means of
communicating ongoing research information, with
<http://people.ccmr.cornell.edu/%7Eginsparg/blurb/pg96unesco.html>conventional
journals entirely supplanted in this role." Science, Nature, and Cell
have nothing to worry about if it turns out that open access and
pre-print websites don't attract cutting edge articles.

On the other hand, it a good bet that opening access and speeding
research to the public via online archives will accelerate scientific
and technological progress just as their 17th century precursors did.

<mailto:rbailey@reason.com>Ronald Bailey is Reason's science correspondent.

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Received on Thu Jul 5 10:45:40 2007