Scholars Urge a Boycott of Journals That Won't Release Articles toFree A

Monday, March 26, 2001


http://chronicle.com/free/2001/03/2001032601t.htm

 

Scholars Urge a Boycott of Journals That Won't Release Articles to Free
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By FLORENCE OLSEN 


Several prominent scholars, including Harold E. Varmus, the former director
of the National Institutes of Health, are urging a boycott of scientific and
scholarly journals that refuse to make articles accessible online -- free --
soon after their publication.

The scholars also are making a demand that some publishers say is even more
challenging: that the publishers place their content in independent
repositories on the Web six months after a journal issue has appeared in
print.

In an essay in Science, the scholars urge their peers not to submit papers
to, write reviews for, or subscribe to journals that ignore the scholars'
demand. The scholars argue that it would be relatively simple and
inexpensive for journals to participate in open-archives projects, such the
National Library of Medicine's PubMed Central and Stanford University's
HighWire Press.

HighWire archives more than 230 journals in biology, physics, and other
sciences. The PubMed Central archive, which Mr. Varmus promoted while he was
at N.I.H., currently has about a dozen biology journals.

"As scientists," the scholars argue, "we are particularly dependent on ready
and unimpeded access to our published literature, the only permanent record
of our ideas, discoveries, and research results, upon which future
scientific activity and progress are based."

But in an editorial in the same issue, Science's editors say the scholars'
proposal would put nonprofit, scholarly publishers at risk because it would
"reroute an economically important source of online traffic for journals
that offer content and other products on their sites."

Science announced, however, that it would go part way toward meeting
scholars' desire for a free digital archive of life-science research. The
journal has agreed to make its reports and articles available free on its
Web site 12 months after the print issues are published. The journal is
published by the American Association for the Advancement of Science, a
nonprofit group.

Partly because of the controversy, The Journal of Cell Biology has made its
contents free on its Web site, without password or access controls, six
months after each issue's publication.

What makes the central-repository idea so distasteful for some journal
editors is that articles would have to be converted from each journal's own
format to whatever format the repository uses. Reformatting poses technical
challenges and usually requires that every article be painstakingly checked
for formatting errors.

The Science authors propose the GenBank, for DNA sequences, as their model
for a centralized repository of life-science literature. But journal
publishers who disagree say the GenBank material poses far fewer formatting
problems than scientific literature.

William Wells, the news editor of The Journal of Cell Biology, notes that
HighWire has staff members to handle each journal that it publishes. Those
people act as liaisons, fixing the myriad translation problems that come up
with each print journal.

"One of the questions we have is, Is PubMed Central willing to put in that
sort of manpower?" says Mr. Wells. "Are they going to compensate us for the
amount of time they'll be calling us up saying, What's this new special
character? It's not very interesting stuff to talk about, but it's the
practicalities," he says.

"Presumably, a lot of this can be overcome," adds Mr. Wells. "But we don't
think it's necessary to overcome it because there's a much simpler way to do
it, without having this huge centralized apparatus."

The Journal of Cell Biology issued a statement by Ira Mellman, the editor in
chief, saying that centralized repositories would soon be unnecessary: "The
ability to search across thousands of servers, as long as those servers do
not have access controls, is the very reason that the Web is such a powerful
tool."


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Copyright © 2001 by The Chronicle of Higher Education