Open Access News

Science journalists...have an infinite supply of subjects, renewed every day. What topic, from that torrent of information, should their piece be about? A glance at this week's newspapers and popular science magazines shows just how wide a range there is: global warming killing off frogs, new methods for generating stem cells, plants that make methane, and what space dust might tell us about the origin of the Universe. Those stories are interesting, varied and up-to-date; but they all share a hidden thread that links - or entangles - everyone who writes about science, for each of them first appeared in Nature....Nobody denies that Nature is a great journal, but why limit yourself to a single source? No writer on politics, or finance, or sport would dream of that....The problem with digging out less-publicised stories about science is the inaccessibility of the basic information. Most technical publications are expensive and, without a university library, hard to find. Now things have changed. The Web is opening up lots of once hidden gateways into the labyrinth of science, many of which do not charge an entrance fee....Type in the four letters PLOS - the Public Library of Science - and you reach a site that makes the latest research freely available to all. This month's issue has a piece on the rapid evolution of a gene in men compared with chimps that renders us susceptible to mind-altering drugs, as a hint that brain activity is what makes us human (a refreshing contrast to other new work hinting that the contents of the scrotum evolve more rapidly than those of the skull) and another on the dangers of minute amounts of lead or chlorine in the environment. Other organisations are almost as generous. Stanford University's online HighWire Press has a million free articles available, with access to almost a hundred current publications (there must be something for the hopeful author in the Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, or Textile Research). PubMed Central does the same for the latest news in medicine, while that American heavyweight the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (universally referred to as PNAS) also puts out free electronic versions of some of its own papers. The "Google Scholar" search engine has opened up another great gap in the financial wall around new scientific information. Plenty of researchers now put their papers online as soon as they appear in print, allowing the nosy to read the results without stumping up the journal's entrance ticket. Type in a topic you want to chase and you may find yourself in all kinds of unexpected (and once exclusive) places.

Comment. OA for scientists is also OA for journalists and the public. Some publishers have criticized the campaign for OA to research literature on the ground that unfiltered journal articles are unintelligible to the public. But this objection misunderstands the primary audience of the OA primary literature --other researchers-- and the best way to bring about filtered versions intelligible to lay readers. OA to primary literature is compatible with lay versions and even stimulates their existence.