Open Access News

While the Internet is certainly affecting how the mainstream media works, there’s another area that the anyone’s-a-publisher paradigm is affecting: the world of scientific journals. The place I used to work, the American Chemical Society, just laid off a bunch of people who put its journals together, outsourcing the operation to the company that prints them. The move is indicative of the pressure scientific organizations are feeling as a new generation of scientists enter the lab having grown up in an Internet world. The ACS and other science societies (as well as private publishers) make a lot of money selling science-journal subscriptions to university libraries....Scientists’ standing in their communities is determined by where they’ve published and how often those papers are cited. And believe me, these folks keep careful track of all those data. So publishing those journals is a great business: You get your content free, then charge university libraries thousands of dollars for subscriptions. In other words, colleges pay to receive the papers their own faculty has written....For a scientist, publications are currency. The more you publish, the more you’re worth in terms of the pecking order and - more importantly - the better shot you have at getting grants. And it’s that economy that the Internet is poised to shake up....

Scientific journals are notoriously expensive, and libraries are notoriously under funded. The fact that those libraries are paying for material the publishers got free is galling to a lot of people.  What's emerging is what's called open-access science - something made possible by the Internet. With it, a scientist can make a paper public by putting an electronic copy where everyone can access it and granting the world the right to use, copy, and distribute it.  Organization such as BioMed Central and the Public Library of Science help publish open-access journals. With these, the scientists pay to be published (using their grant money) and the publication is made available free to everyone.  That means you can go to BioMed Central and read any of the papers in any of the journals. You can't do the same at the ACS's site (despite the fact that your tax dollars paid for much of the research there)....

Even the format of scientific papers is likely to be changed by the Internet. The rise of the blog and other short-form media has ushered in the era of the quick hit. While there are plenty of long-format bloggers, the traditional blog entry is short and sweet, peppered with references to other sources....Formal, polished communication is making way for simple, blunt data. And scientists are not immune from appreciating this. What’s going to happen is that more scientists, especially younger ones, will begin self-publishing their results before they bother to write a formal paper. They’ll put them on their websites or blogs to solicit comments, and turn science into a conversation the way only modern technology allows. How will all this affect traditional scientific journals? That depends on how long it takes the next generation of scientists to take the reins in deciding what’s more valuable - the information or the popularity contest. Judging by the Internet’s history, it won’t be too long before we have an answer.