Who Owns Science?

immerrath writes "The New York Times has an article [Sorry, tomorrow's article, no Google link yet] on a movement that is rapidly gaining support in the scientific community: the Public Library of Science(PLoS). The founders, Nobel Laureate Harold Varmus, Stanford biologist Pat Brown and Berkeley Lab scientist Michael Eisen, argue that scientific literature cannot be privately controlled or owned by the publishers of scientific journals, and must instead be available in public archives freely accessible by anyone and everyone. This has very important implications for the fundamental principle that Science must transcend all economic, national and other barriers. For a while now, PLoS has been trying to get scientific journals to release the rights to scientific papers; many major journals have not complied -- in response, PLoS is starting PLoS-standard-compliant journals (for which they received a $9 million grant from the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation), to demonstrate the validity of the idea and persuade academic publishers to adopt the free access model. They even have a GPL-like open access Licence, and their journals have some very prominent scientists on the editorial board. Here is the text of an earlier Newsweek article about PLoS, and here is a Nature Public Debate explaining the issues. Michael Eisen received the 2002 Benjamin Franklin award for his work on PLoS. Don't forget to sign the PLoS open letter!"

Comments

Science is open to everyone

[ObviousGuy]

Everyone has access to Nature. It is just waiting for someone to find out all its secrets.

But for those that do, it is important that they receive some sort of carrot to keep them motivated. If this means charging for academic journals, then perhaps that's the way to go about it.

Those that would steal their hard work because "Science is for everyone" doesn't quite grasp the concept of the reward system.

Re:Science is open to everyone

[lucabrasi999]

Those that would steal their hard work because "Science is for everyone" doesn't quite grasp the concept of the reward system.

"Stealing" is not quite the word that I would use. Remember that every piece of science today is based upon someone elses past research. In order to develop and prove new theories, you have to "steal" from someone else. If you, as a researcher had NO information on widgits, how would you even start developing a theory? Most researchers would begin by finding out what everyone else thinks of Widgits and go from there.

This all reminds me of a quote I read in college (can't remember the person that created the quote). "Western Civilization is a footnote to Plato". This means Without Plato beginning political discourse, the western world would probably have developed in an entirely different manner. It's the same way in pure science. Without having someone to start, how do you develop your own theories?

Re:Science is open to everyone

[Anonymous Coward]

Those that think material reward is necessary to motivate scientific research don't grasp the concept of exploration.

Do you think money motivated Newton? Einstein? Feynman?

Re:Science is open to everyone

[Anonymous Coward]

Money motivated Venter, Wolfram, and Ramanujan.

For every scientist that you think was ambivalent about money, there is another that thought money was a pretty important thing.

Re:Science is open to everyone

[Anonymous Coward]

The scientists who publish in the non-free journals don't get any money. The only carrot in publishing in the journals is the increase in reputation and job prospects for publishing in a top journal. The only people who profit from the journals are the publishers.

Re:Science is open to everyone

[Bicoid]

Yes, if you want to subscribe. However, to read a paper of interest, you can just get off your lazy duff and go to a local library...if your public library doesn't have it, then check out the local university library. True, that's not plausible for everyone, but if it's important to you and you lack the money, it IS availible.

Re:Science is open to everyone

[Anonymous Coward]

Notice that neither Ventner nor Wolfram stayed in academia. It's hard to say about Ramanujan, since he died so young.

Re:Science is open to everyone

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, if I can discover a fact for $1000, someone else might be able to discover it for $500. Someone else might discover it for $100, and finally someone else could do it for $0.50. Since it's just a piece of information we're talking about, I don't think we have to reward people all that much. We're not talking about some hot new song or movie, we're talking about repeatable facts.

Someone will discover the jewels nature has to offer.

Ignoring the fact that most scientists DON'T see much reward, of course. I remember one of my profs in EE telling us about his advancements in night-vision optics, and how he made his company millions and millions of dollars from his inventions and improvements. Someone in the class asked him how much of that he saw, he laughed and said "all I got was a plaque".

Re:Science is open to everyone

[rodgerd]

It also shows a number of flaws with the theory:

1/ Plato hardly started the philosophies that much of Western thinking are based upon. You may recall that Plato studied under Cratylus and was heavily influenced by Socrates. And Cratylus studied under...

2/ Many of Plato's views would likely be considered pretty horrible by those of us working in many of the major Enlightenment streams of thought. Western Civilisation may owe debts to Plato, but the like of Adam Smith, J S Mill, Woolstoncroft, Bertrand Russell, William Morris, and sundry others play a much more immediate role in our day to day lives, in much the same way that Rutherford splitting the atom is more meaningful for people getting their electricity in the US than Newton's work.

Essentially, picking Plato is arbitary. And that's the problem with most notions of identifying the "great thinkers", especially in collaborative areas that build and change over time; things are all too often reduced to popularity/PR contests. Hell, how many people think Edison was a great inventor?

Re:Science is open to everyone

[JanneM]

Yes, "Science" and "nature" are prety much available for everyone. They are possibly the two most prestigious journals you could find yourself in. Also, because they are the most prestigious journals, the cost is very low, as so many people - not just libraries or departments, but individuals - are subscribers. They also charge quite a bit for every page you publish.

I think the very point is that mosts cientific publishing is not in the vein of science or nature. There you get the finished results; the consensus stuff or the magnificient breakthroughs that would be a pride to any daily paper headline setter.

Most of scientific publishing is very boring, very cautious or very incredible. I know that all I've published certainly belongs to this class. That doees not mean it's bad science; for every revolutionary, you need a small army of people dotting the I:s and crssing the T:s. In that process you also tend to find a surprising amount of good, solid science.

Unfortunately, as soon as you step away from the Big Stars of science, things look bleak, as so many othes are documenting. /Jannne

Re:Science is open to everyone

[Idarubicin]

But for those that do, it is important that they receive some sort of carrot to keep them motivated. If this means charging for academic journals, then perhaps that's the way to go about it.

Those that would steal their hard work because "Science is for everyone" doesn't quite grasp the concept of the reward system

Who's stealing from whom? Journals don't do scientific work; scientists do. They've already been compensated for their work. They only publish because they want to contribute to the sum of human knowledge, because they want the prestige, and because their tenure-track job depends on it.

If Nature or Science or Cell can make a buck by printing a researcher's work and selling copies to other people, good for them. By putting together a selection of good papers they're saving me time and providing a useful service. After six months or a year, they've really squeezed all the money they're going to get out of the papers. (Very few reprints are purchased after this point.) The manuscripts should be released to a public repository. If anything, it may stimulate more research and lead to more fodder for the printing presses. And it ensures that older papers are not lost--trapped, mouldering, in musty old library collections--if a publishing house goes out of business.

Re:Science is open to everyone

[Michael Woodhams]

I'm having troubles deciding whether this post is just plain ignorant, or whether it is a subtle parody of the music/napster/copyright/RIAA debate.

Almost all scientific journals charge the researcher money to publish in them. This money is paid from the grant that supported the research activity.

Like almost anyone, academics like to be well paid, but it isn't journal subscriptions that pays any part of their salary.

Re:Science is open to everyone

[whereiswaldo]

But for those that do, it is important that they receive some sort of carrot to keep them motivated. If this means charging for academic journals, then perhaps that's the way to go about it.

That kind of thinking is just wrong.

If scientists are motivated only by the money, they're in the wrong field. The reward is knowledge itself, and being the first person to discover and share that knowledge. Eureka! That's what it's all about: that is what has driven scientists for centuries.

I'd wager that scientists today haven't changed all that much on average. It's the big companies backing them that drive the lust for money and power.

There are other ways to make money than to hold the information ransom. What if Einstein Co. had all the rights to general relativity? How much less would we have advanced as a result?

Ultimately, I think, big picture of the future is that our willingness to learn will be the driving force behind humanity. That's a looong way off, though, but the winds of change are blowing and open source, sharing of information, and revolutionary new concepts and ways of thinking are helping to make it happen.

Re:Science is open to everyone

[Anonymous Coward]

Those that would steal their hard work because "Science is for everyone" doesn't quite grasp the concept of the reward system.

As a scientist, I find that to be an offensive remark. If you ask any serious scientist why they research a problem, the answer should be, "Because it's there," not "Because I'll make some money." That's what separates scientists from economists.

The only way to "steal" work from another scientist is plagiarism and/or fraud- practices that are immoral in any academic field. Nobody can "steal" Newton's Laws. They can reference them, use them to build new theories and to reinforce existing ones, and that's all that's really possible.

If you believe that science is valuable to the general public-- that is, if you think the little line in the U.S. Constitution stating that Congress should support "the useful arts and sciences" says something important-- then there really shouldn't be any argument. If science is for humanity, which it should and must be, then charging for access to it when there's a perfectly reasonable method for free dissemination negates the original premise that it's for humanity for a large number of reasons.

Is it still peer reviewed?

[Anonymous Coward]

What gets in? If it is public I mean, then couldn't anybody submit and be published?

Easiest question I've had to answer all day?

[SteweyGriffin]

Way back in the 19th century, protestant Englishman and Americans celebrated the new religion of amorality. This belief constituted a release from moral stricture for the then ruling class. Well this class rules today, and so does their moral law that they established.

Look, I don't know how to tell you this, but corporate america owns science, and has owned science for over a century. I think you should
consider what this means.

Standing on the shoulders of Giants

[sflory]

Newton put it best. "If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants"

All science, and technology is built on prior theories, experimentation and research. Putting more information out there is the best to speed our understanding of the world. As well bring new technologies into being.

Learning is Co-evolutionary

[Quirk]

Research, knowledge and learning are co-evolutionary endeavours requiring persons capable of sending and deciphering symbols. Proprietory interferrence has no place in the process and proprietory interlopers are late comers to a process that began with the development of speech.

A strange but perhaps helpful analogy might be the railroads. The paths the railways followed were those travelled by those who came before the railways but the capital investment necessary to lay the track and get the trains rolling required huge outlays of private capital. To compensate the capital investment much land and resources was given to the railways. Now with the new technologies the proprietory moguls are trying to make a case that knowledge can't be dissiminated without similar out lays of capital to that necessary to underwrite the railways. And that the outlay entitles them to ownership of the goods and services that use the infrastructure and technology. This is akin to the railways being given ownership of all the goods and services the railway brought to developing nations. This amounts to the old adage of putting the cart before the horse. For knowledge and research to thrive it must have free reign and if the new technology is to carry the fruit of new research then it must be underwritten by government or non-proprietory means.

How Ironic...

[bdesham]

scientific literature cannot be privately controlled or owned by the publishers of scientific journals, and must instead be available in public archives freely accessible by anyone and everyone

Interesting... this is being run in the New York Times, FRRYYY . Obviously its editors aren't reading their own articles that closely...

Bad Idea

[cperciva]

These people are asking authors to pay $1500 per paper to cover the editorial costs. This is a Bad Idea.

First, this will inevitably have a negative effect on the submission of papers; I certainly wouldn't have submitted my first paper (now published) while I was still an undergraduate student if I had to pay for it.

Second, this raises a conflict of interest. If a journal's costs are being met by its authors, there will be a pressure to keep those authors happy -- which means publishing their papers. The current situation, where a journal's costs are met by its subscribers is the opposite -- the journals are under pressure to keep the quality as high as possible.

Finally, remember that quite a few papers are available online already. This varies from field to field, of course, but most mathematicians I know have all of their papers from the past decade online.

Re:Bad Idea

[taehan]

To publish in any reputable journal, the authors have to pay a fee. This fee depends on the number of pages of the article along with the number of figures. The costs go up dramatically if color figures are included. My last paper cost nearly $2000, but most of that was due to my color figures.

Re:Bad Idea

[cperciva]

To publish in any reputable journal, the authors have to pay a fee.

You have an interesting definition of "reputable".

Re:Bad Idea

[jonbaron]

I am associate editor of two journals (Medical Decision Making, Journal of Economic Psychology) and a member of the editorial boards of severa others. I do not get paid one cent. Yet, as an associate editor, I do most of the real work (both soliciting reviews and doing my own, plus final editing). I do not see why "rigorous peer-review, editorial oversight," are included in the cost of production. So far as I can tell, the main cost is copy editing, which often makes things worse! Editors seem to get paid too, for what I don't know, since I do pretty much what they do, and I am happy to work for free. Things may be different in real science, of course. But my field is a kind of scholarship, at least.

Not "science" -- "biology"

[StupendousMan]

Note that the PLoS plans to start with two journals which focus on biology and medicine. These are the fields where basic research can yield megabucks in the relatively short term. In my own field (astronomy), there's not a cent to be made by anyone; hence, I doubt we'll see a PLoS journal of astronomy or astrophysics anytime soon.

Note also that if researchers didn't care about getting money from industry, they wouldn't be chary of publishing their results for all to see. The real problems occur when scientists need big money to set up big labs employing many people to develop new medicines (or do research which has obvious applications to new medicines) which can treat "wealthy" diseases: diseases which affect many people in wealthy countries. I don't see a way around this: investment by big pharmaceutical companies WILL speed the pace of such research (that's good), but will also lead to secrecy and higher drug prices for some time after the products first appear (that's bad).

Some problems are just plain complicated. This is one of them. I wish the PLoS the best of luck, but I don't give them much of a chance. As long as a few researchers are willing to work in secrecy, they can use the PLoS results plus their "secret" results and often beat the "public" researchers to the punch. It's not unlike the prisoner's dilemma.

Enter Politics

[Anik315]

Of course this is all noble, well-intentioned and all that good stuff in principle...

But

This changes subtly capitalistic influences to a subtly politicized ones.

I don't care how accomplished these prominent scientists on the editorial boards are, they're not gods, and they'll have their own subconcious axes to grind. In journals like Science and Nature, at least the capitalistic incentive is dry and impersonal, unlike the motivation to maintain dogma.

I'm not so sure the monetary incentive is worse than the political one which would emerge here.

Distribution Models and the 'net

[ice cream koan]

"It sounds very sympathetic to say this should be available to the public," he said. "But this kind of material is only used by experts."

I have to disagree with this viewpoint. Just because the majority of people who want to get to this information are "experts" doesn't mean you shouldn't make it available to everyone. There are plenty of people (I am one of them) who have an interest in various scientific fields and like to read papers and yet who aren't studying for their PHDs. When are they going to start one of these journals for physics! (I guess there is Arxiv.)

Some people have said that lots of scientific work is copyrighted/patented, but that doesn't prevent free distribution. The whole _point_ of the patent process is to give the patentee a guaranteed limited monopoly so that they _will_ immediately publish their works, instead of hording them as secrets. Free distribution doesn't mean noone can make any money.

Really, this seems like the trend that is happening in many areas where distribution has hitherto been controlled by a small group of publishers, due to the high cost of publishing. The internet can change the way we distribute information without killing commerce!

At least Nature (the magazine) isn't passing their own version of the DMCA...

Re:Distribution Models and the 'net

[Michael Eisen]

Its amazing, although unsurprising, that the head of Elsevier would say something so unbelieveably wrongheaded. The are certainly many articles that are not interesting to the general public (or, for that matter, many scientists). But to argue that the entire contents of the scientific literature is for use only by experts is undbelievably patronizing, and simply wrong.

By his reckoning, the people Haank deems worthy of reading the scientific literature consist mostly of scientists at wealthy institutions in the developed world.

People he deems unworthy of reading about the latest scientific research include scientists in poorer countries and at poor institutions in the developed world, physicians of all stripes across the globe, highschool and college students without access to major research libraries, and interested members of the public, such as someone recently diagnosed with cancer who wants to read about the latest research into treatment options that their tax dollars paid for.

This quote, and this attitude, perfectly summarize why Elsevier (or any other individual or organization) should not be able to control the scientific literature.

OT: .sig

[gilroy]

Blockquoth the poster's .sig:

If not all sentients are human, it stands to reason that not all humans are sentient either.

"If not all fruits are oranges, it stands to reason that not all oranges are fruits, either." Um, no... it exactly does not stand to reason.

The reality...

[Anonymous Coward]

is that limited information access is not the biggest problem for researchers. I can get access to any paper I want for little or no cost. I have the opposite problem - I can't keep up with all the material being published in my relatively narrow field.

It's gotten so bad that unless I am familiar with the author(s), I often pass on a paper just based on the title. If the title looks promising, I scan the abstract. If the abstract looks promising, I add the paper to my "to read" list, hoping I'll have time to get to it.

Let's face it, with more people than ever actively engaged in research, the biggest threat to important scientific ideas is not the control of publishers or the oppression of government/religion/CowboyNeal, it's the threat of being lost in the crowd.

Re:My reply to Nytmes.org

[MrEd]

Good reply.

Now if you could summarize it in fewer than 20 lines it might get printed in the 'letters' section...

Re:You speak the truth, sensei

[mao che minh]

Can you see a ghost? If so, then how can such a thing (something that reflects or emits photons) act as they do? How could such a thing pass through solid material, materials such as concrete and wood (if it was capable of reflecting or emitting photons)? Why would a camera, a device that is less complicated, slower, and efficient then a human eye ball detect ghosts while we cannot?

Think harder grass hopper.

Francis Bacon

[j_w_d]

...advanced arguments that outlined many of the basic ideas that distinguish modern science including the idea that investigations need to cooperative, that many research questions will require social backing and multiple generations of endeavour in order to succeed. The earliest scientific bodies were organized around the baconian model.

Key to these ideas was the view that science advances through the open commnuication of data and ideas. Once published, stealing "their hardwork" is an absurd idea. Without the review of others, their "hard work" might have been little more than mistakes and nonsense. Besides which, few journals pay authors much. The "carrot" a journal offers is usually exposure - fame not wealth.

Re:Peer Review Is a Bad Idea

[glMatrixMode]

Louis wrote : Science belongs to the public who pays for it all, not just a bunch of elitist a-holes competing for grant money.

As an elitist a-hole, i'd like to add some comments to this.

Yes, science belongs to nobody in particular.

You suggest to Publish [my] stuff on the web for everybody to see, download and critique. Okay, so my paper on class field theory and Cebotarev's theorem is available on the web. Anyone can read it. But I've got no feedback from non-mathematicians, of course, because they simply didn't understand it. (In the improbable case that any non-mathematician did download it). I'm not proud of that. It's just a necessity : if I wanted to add enough explanations to make it readable by a very good hi-school student, my paper would be at least 3000 pages long. However, anybody can go to a math library, begin to read undergraduate books, and then more and more advanced books, and after 2 years (I guess) be able to read my paper.

Why do you call us elitist ? You're not the only one, you know. Science is growingly impopular, as obscurantist beliefs like astrology grow wider and wider. I'm from Paris, where the most ancient and prestigious university is called the 'Sorbonne'. Well, some years ago, a well-known astrologer has got a Ph.D. in 'sociology' in the Sorbonne ! One of the main arguments of such obscurantists is that 'official' science, being ununderstandable to the public, is no more verifiable, and hence is no more scientific, than astrology. More than 50% of the population believes in astrology.

I must add some words about the text you cite, which is near to what I hear from the many trotskysts that are present in my school. It talks about the most laughable results in their domain. Can you tell of one mathematic result you'd laugh about ? Every article you submit to publication is thouroughly verified by colleagues, and that verification can take 1 year. If you've noticed an error in a paper, I urge you to write to the author ASAP. But if you're one of the many that won't accept predictions of theoretical physics before they are brought to your eyes by technology, please understand than theoretical physics is not what one believes to be true, neither is it what one would like to be true. It is the most elegant way of formulating in mathematical words what is dictated by experiment. I don't say that there aren't fake papers written by unscrupulous physicists (for, regrettably, physics reviewers are less careful that math reviewers), but they'll all be unmasked if still not forgotten, and anyway most of the papers are very serious, even if they suggest that we live in a 26-dimensionnal space. Now if the public was asked to vote for such a theory against astrology, I guess there'd be 50% abstention, 30% for astrology and 20% for such a theory. And it'd be the end of our golden age.

Finally I'd like to say that I don't defend any business since I do only public research (and there ain't private funds for these useless, elitist, snobbish so-called 'pure' maths anyway).