Free Science

Wired article

On Father’s Day three years ago, biologist Jonathan Eisen decided he’d like to republish all his father’s papers. His father, Howard Eisen, a biologist and a researcher at the National Institutes of Health, had published 40-some-odd papers by the time that he died by suicide at age 45. [..]

How hard could it be? Howard Eisen had been a federal employee, so his work rightly lay in some sense in the public domain. And Jonathan, as an heir, presumably owned copyright anyway, along with his brother Michael (also a biologist, and one of PLoS’s founders). Yet to the brothers’ continuing chagrin, Jonathan has found securing and publishing his father’s papers to be far harder than he expected.

For instance, even though Jonathan has access to the enormous University of California library system, which subscribes to a particularly high number of journals, he often can’t even find some his father’s papers. And when he finds a paper in a journal the university doesn’t subscribe to, he is asked to pay as much as $50 to read the paper — even though his father did the work with public funds. He’s not alone; one recent study found that even most university researchers have access to only about half the papers they need to cite for a given bit of research. Just yesterday, in fact, Jonathan asked on Twitter if anyone could send him a copy of one of his father’s paper and confronted a paywall asking for his credit card number. “I ain’t payin’,” he replied.

So for now, his father’s work remains buried in an old structure — a calcified matrix. Though Jonathan bangs away at the surrounding rock, he knows he hasn’t really pried the work loose. This frustrates him on two fronts: It stops him from freeing his father’s work. And it confirms to him science, which should be a fluid medium, has much of its content still trapped in old structures.

Jonathan Eisen’s quest has solidified his conviction that science needs to radically rework the way it collects and shares its data, methods, and findings. He has plenty of company. A growing number of prominent scientists want to replace the aging journal system with something faster, cheaper, and richer. The current system, they note, grew out of meeting notes and journals published by societies in Europe over three centuries ago. Back then, quarterly or monthly volumes could accommodate the flow of ideas and data from most disciplines, and the printed journal, though it required a top-heavy, expensive printing and publishing infrastructure, was the most efficient way to share those ideas.

“But now,” says Jonathan Eisen, “there’s this thing called the Internet. It changes not just how things can be done but how they should be done.”

[..] ‘I want a poor student to have the same means of indulging his learned curiosity, … of consulting the same authorities, … as the richest man in the kingdoms,’ is today within reach. With the Internet, we have the means to make humanity’s treasury of knowledge freely available to scientists, teachers, students and the public around the world.” “The existing system worked well for quite a while,” says Jonathan Eisen. “But it was not designed by theory. It was designed by constraints.” In a world that provides communications conduits far larger and faster, those constraints have now made science’s traditional pipeline a bottleneck. [..]

Why don’t we do [open] science [..] all the time? Part of the answer, strangely, is the very thing at the center of science: the paper. Once science’s main conduit, the paper has become its choke point.

It’s not just that the paper is slow, though that is a huge problem. A researcher who submits a paper to a traditional journal right now, for instance, won’t see the published piece for about a year. She must wait while the paper gets passed around among editors then goes through rounds of peer review by experts in her field who might and often do object not just to her methods or data but to her findings and interpretations. Finally, she must wait while it moves through an editing, layout, and publishing pipeline that itself might run anywhere from 2 to 12 weeks.

Yet the paper is not simply slow; it’s heavy. Even as increasingly data-rich science has outgrown the paper’s ability to deliver and describe all that science has to offer — its deep databases, its often elaborate methods — we’ve loaded it up needlessly with reputational weight and vital functions other than carrying data.

The paper is meant to be a conduit for the real content and currency of the science: the ideas, methods, data, and findings of the people who do science. But the tremendous publishing and commercial infrastructure built around the academic paper over the last half-century has concentrated so many functions and so much value in the journal that the paper itself, rather than the information in it, has become science’s main currency. It is the paper you must buy; the paper you must publish; the paper you must cite; the paper on which not just citations but tenure, reputation, status, and even school rankings are built.