Sterling Stoudenmire, August 1, 1999

While the e-bio med proposal, in nearly any form, is an improvement over the existing system, several points clearly standout as lacking:

1. the copyright provision:

a. authors publishing at e-bio med should give up their copyright claims
b. all government funded research should be provided without copyright claim of either the author or the researcher.

Stevan Harnad, University of Southampton, July 31, 1999

On Fri, 30 Jul 1999, ransdell, joseph m. wrote:

> The responses to the E-biomed proposal are preponderantly affirmative
> and strongly enough so that if Varmus has been testing the waters for
> support he would seem to have no reason to hesitate in implementing a
> revised version whenever he thinks enough time has passed to do so.
> Hopefully, it will be modified in light of the flaws Stevan pointed out
> in his critique of it, chiefly by a correction of its mistaken aim of
> undertaking journal reform, as distinct from providing facilities
> supporting journals in going on-line properly.

This is incorrect. The correction was not just to drop journal (peer review) reform and "instead provide facilities for journals to go on-line properly"! The former is correct, but the latter is almost as garbled as the (remediably) garbled portions of the first E-biomed draft.

http://www.nih.gov/welcome/director/ebiomed/com0509.htm#harn45

My recommended correction was to drop peer review reform AND to make it explicit that a SELF-ARCHIVE was precisely what E-biomed was to be (in the first instance), exactly as LANL is a self-archive. AND, most important of all (and systematically not taken into account in any of Joseph's comments), a self-archive not only for the unrefereed preprint literature but for the REFEREED reprint literature (exactly as LANL is, and has been from its very inception, as Paul Ginsparg's recent posting has reminded us).

The effect of the latter is that the self-archive frees the refereed journal literature (i.e., makes it accessible to everyone online without they or their institutions having to pay Subscription/Site-License/Pay-Per-View [S/L/P/] access tolls to get it).

This effect is certainly not correctly described as "providing facilities supporting journals in going on-line properly"! It does, however, prepare the way for a later, collaborative stage of journal overlays, where the journals can officially authenticate the refereed drafts as such. I explicitly stressed, however, that this collaboration cannot be presupposed or even expected before the "subversive" effects of self-archiving have prepared the way (by bypassing S/L/P for this special literature, which is, and always has been, intended by its authors as a give-away literature, and not a fee- or royalty-bearing one).

http://www.arl.org/scomm/subversive/toc.html

Why does Joseph mis-state this? I think it is because of our disagreement about the catastrophic drop in quality standards that I believe would result if peer review were abandoned in favour of a self-archived "vanity press." This is not, and never has been, what I think self-archiving is all about. The simple proof is the self-archived REFEREED literature itself, which is simply a free give-away of the current S/L/P-based journal literature by its authors. This is NOT a vanity press! It is simply the journal literature, online, without a price tag.

Joseph's imagination is taken up with the OTHER side of self-archiving, the unrefereed preprints. These are a wonderful, indeed revolutionary supplement to the classical peer-reviewed canon -- and, as I have argued elsewhere, even THEY are not quite a vanity-press either, because of the "invisible hand" of peer review: it is in the expectation of being answerable to the peer review that virtually all of these unrefereed preprints have been drafted, and indeed most of them are formally submitted to journals simultaneously with being self-archived as preprints (and the refereed, accepted final drafts are swapped or added as soon as they are available in most cases).

http://www.cogsci.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/nature2.html

Nevertheless, a self-archive's unrefereed sector alone can be correctly described as a kind of "interim vanity press" -- but with the knowledge and expectation that it is only an embryonic stage along a continuum which will eventually be clearly marked by the quality-controlled/certified milestone of the accepted, refereed draft. (The current average latency in LANL is about 11 months, between the preprint and the reprint, as Les Carr will soon be reporting in a paper.) Nor does the continuous, interactive, and self-corrective process of learned inquiry come to an end with the certified refereed version, for there is still the possibility of self-archiving updated/corrected revised drafts, as well as critical commentaries and responses, all linked to that certified version.

http://cogsci.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Papers/Harnad/harnad90.skywriting.html

Not to mention subsequent self-archived refereed articles (by the author and others), citation-linked to the original one. All this is the world opened up by self-archiving (and not just the "vanity press" that Joseph mis-describes me as calling it!)

http://www.cogsci.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/citation.html

> But supposing that
> happens, will the journals actually take advantage of such facilities?
> Perhaps some will, but I doubt that this will happen to anything like
> the extent wanted if nothing more is done than to provide archival
> support for that as well as for self-archiving by authors.

As stated in the original critique, there will initially not be much incentive for journals (especially those published by commercial publishers) to collaborate with E-biomed (other than the need to plan ahead and face reality in the form of what is clearly the optimal and inevitable solution for science and scientists).

http://www.cogsci.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Papers/Harnad/harnad97.learned.serials.html

But if/when the subversive effects of freeing the literature through self-archiving begin to make themselves felt as declining S/L/P demand, then publishers will certainly want to adapt in such a way as to retain a niche (which I have predicted will be through downsizing to provide only the service of quality-control/certification, QC/C, funded not through access-blocking reader-institution end S/L/P charges but through up-front author-institution end publication charges -- leaving the archiving to E-biomed, and merely providing an official overlay to authenticate the archive's refereed sector).

So Joseph has missed the point here.

> More generally, in spite of increasing evidence of popular support
> across an impressive range of interested parties for what I will call
> "The Harnad Initiative" to free the professional literature, there seems
> to me to be little reason to think that the attempts to implement it by
> providing the archives for it will have the success hoped for.

Does the following evidence of the spectacular success of LANL not count as reason to expect success (if the desirability of a free online journal literature for science and scientists is not reason enough)?

http://xxx.lanl.gov/cgi-bin/show_monthly_submissions
http://xxx.lanl.gov/cgi-bin/show_weekly_graph

> The
> archives should be built, in any case, as they will have some use and
> significant change will eventually come about, no doubt, but I wouldn't
> bet on much immediate use of it that betokens a change in publication
> practices. Why? Because the migration on-line is conceived thus far as
> depending on self-archiving, and there is no reason to think that people
> are presently motivated to do that, nor has anything been suggested or
> planned that might provide some incentive.

If researchers are motivated to have their research read by all who want to read it, if they are motivated by the desire to make an impact with their research (on both subsequent research and on citations), and if their long-standing willingness to self-supply paper offprints to all who ask is still in vigour, then all disciplines will take to self-archiving, just as Physicists have done.

Of course, there's no second-guessing how quickly the rest of the scholarly/scientific thoroughbreds will stoop to drink from the waters of self-archiving: but that's no reason not to lead them there.

> The idea that if an archive is provided then it will be used has no
> evidence in its favor, as far as I know, and if there really was some
> general propensity for people to self-archive whenever the opportunity
> presented itself that would surely have shown itself by now.

Vide supra. I hope you are wrong about the scholarly/scientific community's agnosia about what is optimal for it, but of course there is a logical possibility that, historically speaking, Physicists will be the only ones who ever twig on this! (I rather doubt this, though; they may be smarter than the rest of us, but not THAT much smarter...)

> There are
> too many special considerations in connection with the LANL archive to
> make the continuing increase in use there evidential for some general
> trend toward going on-line across the board in academia, and I don't see
> any real indications of this happening elsewhere, with possibly some
> spotty exceptions here and there.

This sounds like a classical hedge; let us solemnly hope that those subversive spots keep growing!

http://www.acm.org/repository/
http://cogprints.soton.ac.uk/

> Of course, it doesn't help the cause of self-archiving for the chief
> proponent of the practice to label it as resorting to the "vanity
> press", but although Stevan keeps shooting himself in the foot with
> that, I don't think that is at the root of the problem.

Not only is it not at the root of the problem, it isn't even true! It is Joseph who is here calling self-archiving "vanity press," whereas I call the self-archiving of refereed papers "freeing the refereed literature" -- which is the antithesis and antipode of vanity press! (Only the self-archiving of unrefereed papers is vanity press, and only if it stops there, rather than going on, as most papers do, to pass through peer review into the journal canon.)

> What is at the
> root of it is, I think, a failure to understand the role of EDITORS in
> the publication process, which has been obscured by the mistaken
> conflation of the editorial function with the function of peer review.

It would be an odd circumstance indeed if I, who have been editing a major refereed journal for over two decades now, suddenly became agnosic to that fact (or confused refereeing with editing).

http://www.princeton.edu/~harnad/bbs/index.html
http://www.princeton.edu/~harnad/psyc.html

> Editors tend to be self-effacing, and there seems to be a common
> (mis)understanding that because editors only have a "service" function
> as mediators they are not important. But it would be much closer to the
> truth to say that editors are the true rulers of academic life because
> they are found everywhere, at all of the gates of communication, opening
> or closing them according to judgments which hardly anyone ever thinks
> to question. Not important? Hey, think again! But why, in all of the
> discussion of "decoupling" of functions are editors not discussed?

Because this discussion is not about peer review reform but about freeing the peer reviewed literature, such as it is!

Peer review and the role of editors is eminently ripe for empirical investigation, but that is a different topic:

"Neither the editor nor the referees is infallible. Editors can err in the choice of specialists (indeed, it is well-known among editors that a deliberate bad choice of referees can always ensure that a paper is either accepted or rejected, as preferred); or editors can misinterpret or misapply referees' advice. The referees themselves can fail to be sufficiently expert, informed, conscientious or fair." [Harnad 1998h: see references at bottom of this comment]

Joseph's commentary goes on to a display of animus against both peer review and university administrators:

> ... pseudo-glorification of the peer reviewer... Validating and
> certifying and putting stamps of approval on documents is the sort of
> thing they used to do at the Vatican -- or maybe they still do, since
> the Pope is still officially infallible -- and in Moscow, too, up to a
> decade or so ago. But in the secular sciences of the free world?...

> ... the administrative view that the research universities are knowledge
> factories, producing and selling knowledge, with the faculty regarded as
> workers on the production line.

I won't comment on any of this. I do think I recognize (from 20 years' of editing) the core of Joseph's grievance. It is the single aggrieved author's viewpoint (analogous to the single aggrieved student's viewpoint, when he feels that a test has not been a proper measure of his proficiency or performance).

Such grievances are not to be taken lightly, because the system (both peer review and tests/exams/marking) are indeed fallible and imperfect. But the real question is one of scale. Every student hopes to have his every thought and action weighed in a blind, omniscient and infinitely fair absolute balance. In reality, all population-based measures are approximate and have a margin of error and even bias. The objective is to minimize that error and bias, within available resources, and to remedy detected cases of error where possible.

The rest is down to testing and designing systems that work at least as well as the current ones (for a population at least as large). It is certainly no solution to focus on known or perceived cases of misevaluation, and to simply propose scrapping the evaluative system on their basis!

> A peer reviewer in any field is a presumptive equal of the person
> whose work is being reviewed, and that means that there is no
> presumptive superiority in status that makes the peer reviewer's view
> right and the reviewee's view wrong when they disagree. If the
> disagreement is a simple contradiction one is perhaps right and the
> other wrong; but there is nothing in the conception of a peer or of a
> reviewer that can justify regarding the peer reviewer as being in a
> favored position when disagreement occurs or which would turn an
> agreement in opinion of the two into a validation of the one by the
> other. The conclusion of a peer review is just a second opinion, that's
> all.

A competent editor knows all this, and is dealing with it in every case. It is only the aggrieved author who sometimes feels (and sometimes with justification) that he has been ill-used, and that an incompetent referee's judgment has blocked his submission.

Competent, conscientious editors (who cannot be specialists in all areas) are responsive to authors' rebuttals of referee reports. They may betoken a faulty choice of referees, or shortcomings in the referee reports. But they may also betoken defensiveness on the part of the author, or unwillingness to do the work required to make a paper ship-shape. I know of no way to automate or replace editorial judgment here, but we should certainly keep testing new ways of strengthening it. What is certain is that no concrete or practical alternative (let alone one that has been tested and shown to do at least as well as the present system) has been proposed by Joseph Ransdell here!

> why do we
> keep talking as if formal peer review is the key to legitimization in
> the sciences and elsewhere? Willingness of peers to criticize and
> openness and responsiveness to peer criticism is what provides the
> critical self-control of the process of inquiry through corrective
> negative feedback -- it is this process itself, not individual persons
> and judgments, that regulates inquiry overall and legitimates it as
> science or scholarship -- but there are many different ways in which
> corrective feedback loops can and do occur in the course of inquiry.
> Formal peer review, set up for certain special purposes, including
> journal publication, is one of them but should not be fixed upon so
> exclusively as to blind us to the other ways critical self-control
> functions in the professional communication of scientists, and should
> not be allowed to mislead us into thinking that the sciences depend for
> their validity on anybody wielding stamps of approval.

It is hard to extract the substantive point in all this: Peer review is certainly not the only self-corrective mechanism of Learned Inquiry. Informal peer feedback before publication, formal and informal peer feedback after publication, and the further march of Learned Inquiry itself, attempting to build upon published ideas and findings (especially in empirical science), are all parts of this collective, cumulative, self-corrective, and, one hopes (where appropriate), convergent system too.

But at the present scale of publication, if the classical peer review at its core were removed (at the point of formal -- i.e. refereed-journal -- "publication") and only the rest were left in place, I believe it would all soon devolve into anarchy, human nature being what it is (at the population level), when it is not directly answerable to quality standards -- until peer review was simply rediscovered or re-invented as the simple solution for the triage of all that growing body of unregulated and unnavigable human noise!

I could be wrong, but surely this all has to be tested first, locally, and in a controlled way! So, for the moment, as mentioned before, classical peer review should proceed apace, until further empirical notice, and we should focus instead on freeing the peer-reviewed literature, such as it is.

> If you re-read the Phelps document
> which is ancestral to the Caltech proposal, for example, you will find
> that Phelps' understanding of what is wanted in promoting on-line
> publication practices supposes that the "certification" function of
> publication (which he also regards as the "credentialing" of the author)
> can be cleanly decoupled from the distribution function, so that one
> need merely set up a pool of peer reviewers -- the first generation of
> which are Unreviewed Reviewers whose superior quality is guaranteed by
> The Self-chosen Chooser, apparently -- who can be called upon to perform
> the operation of quality control on documents submitted to them,
> assessing them as fit or not fit to print.

I don't wish to defend any untested armchair schemes for reforming peer review, whether Ransdell's or Phelps's (indeed I made the same recommendation for the Scholar's Forum archiving initiative as for the E-biomed archiving initiative: Dissociate them completely from peer review reform schemes). Joseph is, I think, just lapsing here into the conspiratorial view about both administrators and peer reviewers that he has repeatedly expressed in September-Forum. Again, he may have some legitimate grievances, but he has no realistic or relevant alternative to offer, let alone a tested one.

http://library.caltech.edu/publications/ScholarsForum/042399sharnad.htm

http://amsci-forum.amsci.org/archives/september-forum.html

> The editorial function was forgotten
> just as it has been forgotten in the ongoing discussion here by being
> reduced, in effect, to a stamp of authority wielded by the peer
> reviewers, who have been assigned the bogus task of being the official
> validators of the entire scientific process.

Nonsense. The function of a competent, conscientious, answerable editor is part of the very meaning of the classical peer review system! It never was a disembodied stable of "peers" to which papers were dispatched willy-nilly for their box-score votes.

> I suggest, then, that the reason nothing is happening in academia as
> regards the migration on-line...

The premise is false. A good deal is happening because of the LANL initiative, and, one hopes, a good deal more will be happening thanks to the E-biomed and Scholar's Forum initiatives.

> is that editors see no future for
> themselves in it and therefore are not about to change the
> communicational arrangements researchers live by; and nothing will be
> happening until the editors do see something worth running the risk they
> run in going on-line, which may very well result in a diminishment of
> their importance if attention is not paid to it.

I am afraid that this too makes no sense. It is up to AUTHORS, not editors, to self-archive; not even the journal's copyright policy on self-archiving is in the editor's jurisdiction -- although they can take a position on it, and have: cf. Editors Blume and Bloom of APS and AAAS, respectively:

http://www.cogsci.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/science.html

To repeat, journals are almost all "going online" already. That is trivial and a foregone conclusion. What is at issue here is whether the only online version should be the one held hostage behind the access-denying financial firewalls of S/L/P, or there should be an alternative give-away, author self-archive:

http://www.cogsci.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/nature.html

> That their fear of
> being diminished or even eliminated is a reasonable one is evident from
> the following remark of Stevan's in his response of June 27th to the
> immunologists:
>
> sh> Now there is no doubt whatsoever that this service
> sh> will force the established journals to restructure themselves
> sh> in certain ways. (My own prediction would be that it will
> sh> make journals scale down to providing only the service of
> sh> peer review and authentication, . . . .
>
> The editor has just disappeared, it seems.

Nothing of the sort. The Editor's role is PRECISELY the same as it always was in classical peer review, which is not changed by a single epsilon -- at least according to my own recommendations...

This ends my comment. The references promised above follow.

Harnad, S. (1979) Creative disagreement. The Sciences 19: 18 - 20.

Harnad, S. (ed.) (1982d) Peer commentary on peer review: A case study in scientific quality control, New York: Cambridge University Press.

Harnad, S. (1984d) Commentaries, opinions and the growth of scientific knowledge. American Psychologist 39: 1497 - 1498.

Harnad, S. (1985f) Rational disagreement in peer review. Science, Technology and Human Values 10: 55 - 62.

Harnad, S. (1986) Policing the Paper Chase. (Review of S. Lock, A difficult balance: Peer review in biomedical publication.) Nature 322: 24 - 5.

Harnad, S. (1990d) Scholarly Skywriting and the Prepublication Continuum of Scientific Inquiry. Psychological Science 1: 342 - 343 (reprinted in Current Contents 45: 9-13, November 11 1991). http://www.cogsci.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Papers/Harnad/harnad90.skywriting.html

Harnad, S. (1996a) Implementing Peer Review on the Net: Scientific Quality Control in Scholarly Electronic Journals. In: Peek, R. & Newby, G. (Eds.) Scholarly Publishing: The Electronic Frontier. Cambridge MA: MIT Press. Pp. 103-118. http://www.cogsci.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Papers/Harnad/harnad96.peer.review.html

Harnad, S. (1998) Learned Inquiry and the Net: The Role of Peer Review, Peer Commentary and Copyright. Learned Publishing 4(11): 283-292 Shorter version in 1997: Antiquity 71: 1042-1048 Excerpts also appeared in the University of Toronto Bulletin: 51(6) P. 12. http://citd.scar.utoronto.ca/EPub/talks/Harnad_Snider.html

Harnad, S. (1998h) The invisible hand of peer review. Nature [online] (5 Nov. 1998) http://helix.nature.com/webmatters/invisible.html

Stevan Harnad
Professor of Cognitive Science
Department of Electronics and Computer Science
University of Southampton
UNITED KINGDOM
http://www.cogsci.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/
http://www.princeton.edu/~harnad/
ftp://ftp.princeton.edu/pub/harnad/

Stevan Harnad, University of Southampton, July 30, 1999

For those who are following the ongoing online self-archiving debates, there are public archives of the discussion:

E-biomed: http://www.nih.gov/welcome/director/ebiomed/comment.htm

Scholar's Forum: http://library.caltech.edu/publications/ScholarsForum/

American Scientist September-Forum [1998 & 1999: largest Archive] http://amsci-forum.amsci.org/archives/september-forum.html

Forthcoming meeting on the universal self-archiving initiative: http://vole.lanl.gov/ups/ups.htm

There are also many relevant links on the home page below.

Stevan Harnad
Professor of Cognitive Science
Department of Electronics and Computer Science
University of Southampton
UNITED KINGDOM
http://www.cogsci.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/
http://www.princeton.edu/~harnad/
ftp://ftp.princeton.edu/pub/harnad/

Dr. Rosemary J. Redfield
Department of Zoology
Univ. of British Columbia
Vancouver, B.C., Canada
WWW site: http://www.zoology.ubc.ca/~redfield

Yehouda Harpaz, July 30, 1999

I think you will do much better if you divide the E-Biomed to two completely separate entities, one that deals with fully refereed papers, and one that deals with unreferred . These two entities should be discussed and implemented separately. This has several benefits:

1) It will make it easier to see through the smokescreens that are put out by publishers and some editors of paper journals, which in many (probably most of the) cases are based on the confusion between the two.

2) The final result is better, because it keeps the distinction between refereed and unrefereed papers better. I think everybody agrees that this distinction is essential.

3) Problems that affect one of these entities will not hinder the other.

4) It will make it easier to concentrate on the important part of the enterprize, i.e. the making ofrefereed papers avaialable freely and fast. With all the respect to unrefereed papers, it is the refereed papers that are important, and anyway, publishing unrefereed papers on the net is a trivial matter already.

In case it is not obvious, I fully support the enterprize. It is just pity this did not happen ten years ago.

Yehouda Harpaz

Glyn D. Jones, Executive Secretary, The Biochemical Society, July 29, 1999

29 July 1999

E-Biomed: response from The Biochemical Society

Dear Dr Varmus

Background information about the Biochemical Society and its principal publication, the Biochemical Journal

The Biochemical Society is one of the oldest learned societies in the life sciences in the world and has over 8000 members of which some 2000 are overseas, many in the USA. Since 1912 the Society has published the Biochemical Journal which is one of the premier life science journals and, certainly, the leading European journal of general biochemistry. Nearly a third of all submissions to the Biochemical Journal come from researchers in the USA, as do many of our Editors and members of our Editorial Advisory Panel.

In its field, the Biochemical Journal was second only to the Journal of Biological Chemistry in making its entire text, including figures, available online. The Journal Online contains multi-media adjuncts and is rapidly becoming the definitive version of the Journal. The Biochemical Journal has rapid handling times both from submission to decision and from acceptance to publication and already utilizes the Internet wherever possible in its peer-review process. The Journal Online is currently posted to the Internet one week before the issue date on the cover of the paper copy. Over the coming months we will be moving to a system of publishing "ASAP", or "continuous" publication, whereby accepted articles will be posted on the Internet as soon as they are ready. This will dramatically reduce the publication times for our authors still further. We will also be moving towards full electronic submission and peer review in the next 12 months, which will result in further considerable savings in time and cost. As you can see we are completely alive to the exciting possibilities offered by the Internet for enhancing the means of scientific communication.

The Society is also involved in the publication of a number of other journals, including one on behalf of the IUBMB. These journals are all online and two of them already offer "continuous" publication.

References in our online journals are hyperlinked to many other existing electronic journals. This has been made possible by your NLM via Medline and we are very conscious of the very great service to the dissemination of science throughout the world that this generosity on the part of the US Government has afforded.

In view of the above, it is not surprising that the Biochemical Society has a considerable interest in the future of your E-Biomed proposal. We have been following its progress on your home page and through the scientific media. Representatives of the Biochemical Society also attended the recent electronic journal summit in Washington to hear you talk about your vision of E-Biomed in person. This helped clarify matters considerably. We were also represented at the recent EMBO meeting in Heidelberg.

We accept that escalating journal subscription charges and shrinking library budgets have precipitated a crisis in the serials market throughout the world. However, the Biochemical Society believes that it has played its part in reducing costs by introduction of new technology and by forgoing the larger price increases which many publishers have imposed in recent years. For example, the Biochemical Journal Online is currently provided free to institutional subscribers and, in line with European tradition, the Journal has no page charges or other charges for publication. Usage of the Biochemical Journal Online has increased dramatically and we envisage a gradual shift, over time, towards a paperless journal. At present, however, most users of the Journal want both paper and electronic access and it is not clear when this situation will change. When demand is clear and the economics permit we will be able to reduce costs by making available an electronic-only version. However, for the present, there are many institutions, not just in the developing world, that require a paper version so this must feature in the overall costing of the Journal.

We can immediately see the potential benefit of easier access to published material and free access at the point of delivery. However, we are also apprehensive that too precipitate a move to a radical publication alternative might damage important elements of the current system which are still of value to a great many sectors of the scientific community.

The peer-reviewed element of E-Biomed

With regard to the peer review proposal, on the information currently available, we have found it a little difficult to envisage the operation in practice or to evaluate its likely impact. At first sight we are concerned that the establishment of a 'one stop shop' for scientific information could bring as many disadvantages as advantages. Certainly commercial models of extreme rationalization, reduction in consumer choice and tendency towards monopoly are not attractive. These are presumably matters which will be addressed in formulating more detailed proposals to implement E-Biomed? We also share the view of others who have commented that the limitation to biomedicine would be restrictive and a broader remit covering bioscience as a whole would be more appropriate.

Is it the intention (or the probable inevitable result) for E-Biomed to maintain its own peer-review mechanism or for it to be a means of presentation of data, free to all scientists, that have passed through the peer-review structures of existing journals? The former obviously gives rise for concerns about lack of variety and choice. In addition, if the intention is to replicate fully the varieties in collections of subject matter, level, speed of publication, etc., it is not easy to see how an extremely unwieldy and potentially inflexible monolithic structure can be avoided.

Despite the resources which we understand the NIH has at its disposal, it does not seem practicable that NIH could or should take on the responsibility of publication of all the scientific material currently published under the conventional system. Since publishers, learned society or otherwise, are likely to be unable to co-exist alongside a totally free system, this suggests that the end result will be a reduction in material published. There may be many who would say that this in itself would be a good thing, but on the other hand it is questionable whether the method of selection controlled by any monopoly, however benevolent, is in the long-term best interests of science.

A proposal whereby NIH provides a mechanism for the delivery of material, which has been already been peer-reviewed in conventional frameworks, is easier to comprehend and envisage in practice. If such a mechanism could also offer the ability of a single search engine to search all material, then this would be of tremendous benefit to the international scientific community. One could also envisage an important archiving function.

However, if peer-reviewed material is going to appear on the Internet free of charge there must be complete change in the economic model. Scientists and institutions will not pay by way of advance subscription for something that will be available free. We understand that you are proposing to shift the cost of publication to authors by way of submission, acceptance and page charges. We are concerned that in some parts of the world, or indeed in some cases within individual countries, this seems likely to distort the ability to publish scientific information. Depending on the availability of resources assigned to individual researchers or research groups with which to pay for publication, it will introduce, as a major criterion, the ability to pay rather than the quality of the science. Existing page charge models as currently applied do not offset the full costs of publication nor are they uniformly applied. At present, in some instances, page charges are often waived where it is clear that the researchers would not otherwise be able to publish what is perceived as being high-quality material. In a system where up-front publication charges are funding the entire review and redaction process, it is difficult to see how they could be similarly waived. Again, I understand that NIH would be prepared to meet the cost to its researchers of such charges, but who can predict what the funding bodies in other countries might decide?

It seems a real possibility that many publishers will find that it is impossible to raise adequate revenues from page charges. At the same time income from subscriptions will be eliminated because of free availability on the NIH server. The learned societies and commercial publishers will go out of business. In such a scenario presumably some new mechanism will have to be developed to carry out peer review or alternatively this function, as well as presentation, will have to be taken over entirely by NIH.

Unless sensitively handled, there is a real danger that the short-term gain to individual scientists of access to free material may be the precursor of a long-term loss to the international scientific community - as the infrastructure of meetings and publications currently supported by learned societies becomes undermined. If this did prove to be the result of the experiment, it would be impossible to reverse the process, as many learned societies would have ceased to exist.

Even though opinions may vary on the most appropriate means of funding learned Society activities, the replacement of the variety of publications and publishers by a single electronic entity would have implications far beyond publishing.

The Biochemical Society's objectives are to advance the science of biochemistry by meetings and publications. Both elements are central to its activities and it is the pursuance of those activities that entitle it to charitable status in the UK. You will gain an insight into the broad range of our not-for-profit activities if you visit our home page (http://www.biochemistry.org).

It is a fact that the great majority of learned societies throughout the world are, in large part, financed by income from their publications, either through a publication subsidiary of their own or contracts with a commercial publisher. We understand you are recommending that learned societies should seek to diversify their income streams. This is easier said than done. Given that the change could take place over a relatively short period, the only viable alternative would appear to be to substantially increase membership subscriptions and the registration fees for meetings. We do not honestly believe that individual scientists or research groups have sufficient funds available, or would be given sufficient additional funds, to replace the subsidy - the "science dividend" - that comes from learned society publications. Accordingly, it seems unlikely that the scientific community would continue to enjoy the same number and quality of scientific meetings as provided by the learned societies. Funds would no longer be available to subsidize the attendance of scientists at important meetings (in particular younger scientists and students) or to carry out various educational, policy and public understanding of science initiatives, etc.

The non-peer-reviewed or minimally screened element

With regard to the non peer reviewed element of the E-Biomed proposal, we can see the value in an experiment to see whether such a service is as popular in the life sciences as has proved to be the case within the physics community. We suspect that there may be fundamental differences between the cultures in the two disciplines that may make the pre-print approach less attractive to life scientists. Nevertheless, if authors wish to make use of this service, then mechanisms will evolve as an embellishment to the current publication possibilities. However, we would also wish to remind you that the announcement of non-peer reviewed material has caused considerable problems during the last year in the UK in the area of GM foods.

A number of organizations, with which the Biochemical Society is associated, are examining the practicalities of pre-prints, subsequent submission and the various potential citation problems associated with the existence of a number of different versions of substantially the same material. We would anticipate that various expert bodies in this field will succeed in developing sensible guidelines and the Society would certainly urge its own Editorial Boards to develop policies which would not unnecessarily obstruct the smooth and rapid flow of information. Indeed, we already permit authors to mount PDF of their articles taken from the Biochemical Journal Online on to their own home pages.

Conclusions

The Biochemical Society urges that NIH recognizes its responsibility to take into account the impact of its proposal on the whole scientific culture and not simply consider matters as a technical innovation in electronic publishing. There is, we believe, a real danger of fatally damaging the framework of learned societies which, we believe, still have much to offer to the scientific community and society as a whole.

We understand that you propose to approach EMBO in attempt to internationalize the proposal, but would point out that EMBO is representative of only one sector of the European life sciences scene. Against this background the Biochemical Society would be happy to participate in the further development of E-Biomed to help shape the many beneficial aspects of this proposal.

We look forward to receiving further details of E-Biomed as the proposal continues to take shape. We would be happy to provide further detail on any points regarding European learned societies and publishing costs which might require clarification - particularly where these might reflect customs and practice which vary from those of the United States.

Yours sincerely,
Professor Sir Philip Randle FRS
President
The Biochemical Society
London

Stevan Harnad, University of Southampton, July 28, 1999

The Editor of Science, Dr. Floyd Bloom has written an editorial about NIH's E-biomed initiative. http://www.nih.gov/welcome/director/ebiomed/ebiomed.htm

Floyd E. Bloom [Editorial] "Just a Minute, Please" Science 285 (5425) p. 197, 9 Jul 1999. http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/summary/285/5425/197

This is a reply to his editorial.

To summarize, Dr. Bloom is writing ex officio as the Editor of Science, published by the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Science is a hybrid journal. It contains articles by salaried staff writers and commissioned articles written for a fee. It is important to note that these articles are in no way at issue here.

But Science also contains refereed research reports, submitted by their authors for free, with the sole objective of making the research findings available as broadly as possible once they have met Science's rigorous standards of peer review. It is these refereed articles only that are at issue here, and the issue is a simple one: Should NIH/E-biomed provide a free public Archive, modeled on the NSF-supported Los Alamos Eprint Archive in Physics (LANL), in which the authors of these refereed research reports can self-archive them online publicly, free for everyone, everywhere, forever?

http://xxx.lanl.gov/

Dr. Bloom is arguing that they should not be, and we will shortly examine his reasons. But we can be confident that Dr. Bloom will revise his views when more fully informed of the objectives of E-biomed and the scientific potential of free public archiving of refereed research on the World Wide Web, for Dr. Bloom represents the American Association for the Advancement (not the secondary sale or suppression!) of Science.

At the moment, Dr. Bloom's reservations are motivated by two factors: Concern about the quality of the scientific research literature (and this concern is commendable, his journal being the representative of research standards of the highest quality) and concern about the revenue stream of his journal, which is the financial resource that is currently supporting those high standards of quality. It is here that I am afraid that Dr. Bloom is being somewhat short-sighted and perhaps even a little partisan too, unconsciously placing the interests of the maintenance of that revenue stream above the interests of the science that AAAS is dedicated to advancing.

It is undeniable that in the present PostGutenberg Era a conflict of interest has arisen between researchers and the current means of production of their published refereed research reports. There is a way to resolve this conflict, however, although it at first appears counterintuitive; and as the resolution is clearly to the benefit of science, and at the same time provides the revenue stream to sustain the essential service provided by the publishers of science -- quality control and certification in the form of peer review and editing -- there is every reason to believe that AAAS will find it fully compatible with its mission.

The resolution is a two-stage one.

First, it is necessary to identify and acknowledge the conflict of interest:

For scientific researchers, the reports of their (usually publicly funded) research findings are GIVE-AWAYS: They seek neither royalties nor fees; they seek only the eyes and minds of their fellow-researchers worldwide, present and future, so as to maximize the impact of their findings on the future course of research (and thereby also on the course of their careers and their livelihoods).

Researchers are accordingly interested in having their findings first quality-controlled and certified (QC/C) through peer review, and then made freely accessible to everyone. In the Gutenberg Era, the only way they could come anywhere near that goal was to treat their work exactly the same way trade authors (who wrote for fees or royalty) treated theirs, namely, to assign copyright to a publisher, who would then charge for access to the work in order to cover the substantial expenses of paper publication and distribution and to make a fair profit, where possible, for both himself and his author (in the form of royalties or fees).

But the scientists reporting their research findings in refereed journals were never interested in fees or royalties, for those would represent access barriers, restricting their findings to only those individuals and institutions that could afford to pay for them (via Subscription, Site License, or Pay Per View, S/L/P). Nevertheless, scientists had to live with these S/L/P barriers, for all the world as if they were trade authors seeking royalties or fees for their work, because in the Gutenberg Era there simply was no alternative way to reach even that privileged subset of the potential readership of their article (not a large populace even in the best of times).

In the PostGutenberg era of global digital networks, however, there is at last an alternative, and not only researchers, but research itself, and hence all of society, would be the losers if we failed to take full advantage of it. For now we no longer have to rely on the expensive, inefficient and access-limiting technology of print on paper to disseminate refereed research findings. They can be SELF-ARCHIVED by their authors in public online archives like E-biomed (and its spectacularly successful model, LANL) and thereby accessible to one and all without any financial firewalls.

http://www.arl.org/scomm/subversive/toc.html
http://www.cogsci.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/nature.html

Free public self-archiving, however, is only the first of the two stages of resolving the conflict of interest between research and its current means of publication. As long as there continues to be a demand for the paper version, it (and its proprietary online counterpart) can continue to be sold via S/L/P, which can continue to fund (among other things) QC/C (peer review). But meanwhile the worldwide research community will also have the self-archived online version on its desktops for free. And there is every reason to believe that they will grow increasingly reliant on it.

http://xxx.lanl.gov/cgi-bin/show_weekly_graph

Eventually, this is likely to shrink S/L/P revenues, and here it may look as if we are approaching a catastrophe point, for part of that revenue is paying for the maintenance of the quality standards of that literature (QC/C). But a very simple solution is available, once we recognize that the S/L/P revenues are largely being paid for by their researchers' institutions. Let us call this "reader-institution end" funding. All that is needed to continue covering QC/C costs is to switch from reader-institution end funding to author-institution end funding, covered fully by the S/L/P savings. The big difference is that reader-institution-end S/L/P is access-blocking, holding the literature hostage to access tolls, whereas author-institution end funding makes access completely free.

This is the second stage of the resolution of the conflict of interest, and it has the further advantage (although this is more controversial, because no one has the exact figures yet) that it will save institutions a great deal of money. For the cost of QC/C alone -- once publishers have scaled down to providing this essential service alone, leaving the access providing and preservation entirely to public online archives like LANL and E-biomed -- is likely to be much lower than current S/L/P expenditure. Indeed it is likely to be less than 1/3 of it, by current estimates. See the American Scientist Discussion Forum threads on this:

http://amsci-forum.amsci.org/archives/september-forum.html

Odlyzko, A.M. (1998) The economics of electronic journals. In: Ekman R. and Quandt, R. (Eds) Technology and Scholarly Communication Univ. Calif. Press, 1998. http://www.research.att.com/~amo/doc/economics.journals.txt

This means that researchers benefit (access to their findings is expanded, potentially infinitely), their institutions benefit (both from S/L/P savings and from their researchers' enhanced impact), and research itself benefits (in both productivity and pace). Refereed journal publishers will unfortunately need to downsize, but in exchange they will have a stable, permanent niche that is compatible with the new medium rather than at odds with it.

Now I proceed to reply to Dr. Bloom's editorial on a quote/comment basis:

> Proponents [of the E-biomed Archive] acknowledge that cooperating
> journals could lose subscription income and suggest that journals
> recover their costs through submission and acceptance fees charged to
> authors. E-biomed may be free to users, but it will not be free to
> taxpayers or authors submitting through peer review.

We can now understand that this passage is based on a misunderstanding. Tax payers are already sustaining our educational and research institutions, including their S/L/P budgets, which will be REDUCED rather than increased by the switch to up-front payment in the online-only era.

And the costs of providing public research archive facilities such as LANL and E-biomed will be minuscule compared to the size of the literature and the benefits conferred; moreover, most of the infrastructure is in place already, in this increasingly networked world, and pooling resources with the rest of the disciplines (after Physics and the Biomedical Sciences) will make the marginal costs even more minimal.

So there is nothing whatsoever in this passage to deter us from resolving this conflict of interest in the way just described.

> [E-biomed has] much support from quarters long known to advocate a more
> open scientific literature that would banish the alleged cabals of
> editors, biased reviewers, and expensive commercial presses with
> generally irrelevant content.

There are as always extremists around who want to banish QC/C, but leveler heads are bent on preserving it, and indeed the entire scenario just described is predicated on just that.

http://helix.nature.com/webmatters/invisible/invisible.html

So this objection too is invalid.

> Lurking behind the public discussions are some potentially troubling
> elements:

> What if the major journals choose not to cooperate out of concern that
> their ability to survive and maintain quality control and timeliness
> are threatened by the diversion of authors and competent reviewers into
> the NIH system?

There was a little confusion in the initial draft of the E-biomed proposal. The eventual goal is cooperation with the refereed journals, in the form of official "overlays" on the archive, authenticated by them. But in the first stage, author self-archiving of their refereed drafts will suffice to free the literature.

http://www.nih.gov/welcome/director/ebiomed/com0509.htm#harn45

Nor is there any "diversion of authors and competent reviewers into the NIH system." There is no "NIH system," merely a public archive in which authors can deposit their papers (both refereed reprints and, if they wish, unrefereed preprints).

There is only one respect in which the major journals need to "cooperate," and one certainly hopes they will do so, otherwise this will escalate the conflict of interest instead of resolving it to the benefit of science: Publishers must not attempt to use copyright restrictions as a weapon to continue to hold the literature hostage to access tolls by forbidding public self-archiving.

This is THE central issue, and at the heart of all of this. Science itself has published a collective call for the retention of such author rights

http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/281/5382/1459

along with a dissenting editorial by Dr. Bloom.

http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/summary/281/5382/1451

Some prior comments on that exchange in Science are appended at the end of this reply. Let it only be noted here that progressive publishers are already resolving this conflict in a fair and rational way, in the interests of the scientific community they serve, rather than their own S/L/P revenue streams. A model in this regard (and they will be duly recognized by historians for this) is the American Physical Society (APS), publisher of the journals with the highest QC/C standards and impact factors in Physics. Dr. Bloom's homonomyous APS counterpart, Dr. Blume, is one of the cosignators of the above copyright reform proposal in Science. For APS copyright policy, see:

http://www.cogsci.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Author.Eprint.Archives/

> Will societies whose members' future careers rely on NIH funding be
> willing to resist the cooptation of their journals' editorial and peer
> review systems?

Nothing is being co-opted. The NSF-funded LANL Physics Archive stands as a model for the kind of cooperative solution that will prevail. Journals, editorial boards and peer review will continue to exist, independent and intact. The only issue is whether they should be allowed to continue to try to hold this give-away literature hostage to S/L/P access tolls, against the interests of research and researchers.

> What will the real costs be to authors, peer-reviewed journals, and
> scientific societies?

Yes, what will they be indeed, once the obsolete Gutenberg "add-ons" are phased out and only the essential QC/C costs remain?

> Does a monopolistic archive under government control by the major
> research funder enhance scientific progress better than the existing
> journal hierarchy, which provides multiple alternatives to authors and
> readers?

Multiple journals -- indeed the entire hierarchy that currently exists -- will continue to exist for authors and readers. Nor will it be government controlled. (As always, quality will be controlled by peer reviewers, who, like the authors, do their work for free! QC/C costs are for IMPLEMENTING peer review, not for actually performing it.)

NIH will fund E-biomed, just as NSF funds LANL. The cost will be minuscule, and still smaller as more disciplines join in the self-archiving initiative. And once S/L/P expenditures shrink, savings will prevail, including savings on government-supported institutional serial budgets.

Pluralism will be, if anything, enhanced by a firewall-free global research literature. The objective is to free the literature from market restrictions that are no longer justified or necessary, not to take over a market!

(The word "monopoly," so clearly out of place here, will recur later in this reply in the context of certain collaborative firewall practises on the part S/L/P providers...)

> What about research in disciplines outside what the National Library of
> Medicine considers biomedical?

There are plans for vetting the unrefereed clinical preprint sector to safeguard public health, but no planned restrictions of any sort on the refereed sector, any more than there are any such restrictions on the LANL Archive. (One wonders what Dr. Bloom has in mind here?)

> What about research not sponsored by NIH or even U.S. federal funds?

The answer to this question is so obvious, one can only wonder why it was raised: What about research not sponsored by NSF in LANL? What about LANL's 14 mirror sites around the world? Why on earth would an archive dedicated to freeing access to the refereed research literature for the world scientific community through self-archiving have any interest in blocking access to any of it? (The only interests vested in blocking access to this corpus at the moment are certainly not governmental ones...)

> Without answers to these and other questions, it is hard to determine
> the feasibility of the proposal.

(The answers are in each case so trivially obvious that one can only wonder what the real source of the reservations about feasibility might be!)

> Science and other journals are eager to identify the advantages of the
> E-biomed proposal and are actively looking for changes that could
> benefit scientific publishing.

The advantage of the E-biomed proposal is that it will free the refereed journal literature, to the benefit of science, scientists, and humankind. The only change required at the moment is a copyright policy that clearly recognizes the no-royalty/no-fee author's right to self-archive along the lines of the APS policy.

http://www.cogsci.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Author.Eprint.Archives/0006.html

> For example, the E-biomed server would provide a venue for online
> publication of negative results and thus allow others to avoid
> experimental repetition.

Among the much more profound benefits of public online self-archiving of refereed reprints and unrefereed preprints there is also the more modest one of being able to self-archive negative results, both those that have been accepted by refereed journals, and those that were not.

> On the other hand, if NIH really wants to improve access to the
> literature, they could digitize the peer-reviewed literature published
> before 1995.

The retroactive peer-reviewed literature is most certainly welcome in the free public archives, and will most certainly be deposited there, both by individual authors and by digitization initiatives (neither LANL nor E-biomed is a digitization initiative: they are public self-archiving initiatives).

But exactly what is the benefit to science of restricting availability to the pre-1995 literature?

> In addition, all would benefit if NIH developed software for online
> journal submittals and provided access to a common search engine that
> could survey all peer-reviewed sciences across all journal lines.

The first benefit, though undeniable, is likewise not E-biomed's mandate. (Why should NIH develop submission software tools?) On the other hand, the practise of self-archiving will certainly help accelerate the development of such tools, and it will hasten and expand authors' using them. Moreover, once the second stage is reached, official journal overlays on E-biomed will allow automatic online submission to the journals via the archive, as is already being implemented on LANL in collaboration with the APS.

As to providing the capacity to "survey all peer-reviewed sciences across all journal lines," this will be trivially provided by E-biomed and any number of generic search engines as soon as the self-archiving initiative is well under way, and E-biomed is well stocked with papers searchably tagged as "U" (unrefereed preprint) or "R" (refereed reprint, together with journal name "Jx").

But the principal advantage of this free public archive will be that it will indeed be "across all journal lines" without any of the financial firewalls that criss-cross the proprietary online corpus as it now stands -- a state of affairs that some would like to see turned into a "click-through" monopoly governed by interpublisher S/P/L fee agreements!

http://www.cogsci.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/citation.html

> It may be instructive to recall an earlier congressional reaction, as
> Albert Henderson, editor of Publishing Research Quarterly did in his
> response to E-biomed on 6 May. In the Sputnik aftermath, an
> E-biomed-like proposal was made that Congress accelerate U.S.
> scientific research by establishing a unified information system
> similar to what had been created in the Soviet Union. The Senate's
> advisory panel responded: "The case for a Government-operated, highly
> centralized type of center can be no better defended for scientific
> information services than it could be for automobile agencies,
> delicatessens, or barber shops." Surely other creative solutions can be
> found to what NIH considers problems. Are they prepared to listen, or
> is this a done deal?

Both Dr. Henderson and Dr. Bloom might benefit from being reminded (if they will only listen!) that unlike the producers of cars, bagels and haircuts, the producers of refereed journal articles wish to give them away for free. And there is no earthly reason why any government should not wish to help them do so, to the eternal benefit of science and society worldwide.

This would have been as welcome in the Sputnik era as it is today, but we had not yet reached the PostGutenberg Galaxy at that time.

The only costs that remain to be paid are those for the SERVICE of implementing QC/C, costs that it will make incomparably more sense for the author-institution to pay up-front, out of S/L/P savings, thereby freeing the literature for one and all, along with a considerable institutional saving, rather than at the access-denying reader-institution end, for the reasons described above.

This is the end of my reply. I close with some unanswered prior comments on Dr. Bloom's earlier editorial on copyright. See:

http://www.cogsci.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/science.html

Bachrach S. et al. (1998) Intellectual Property: Who Should Own Scientific Papers? Science 281 (5382): 1459-1460. September 4 1998. http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/281/5382/1459

Bloom, F. (1998) EDITORIAL: The Rightness of Copyright. Science 281 (5382): 1451. September 4 1998. http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/summary/281/5382/1451

Some excerpts:

Intellectual Property: Who Should Own Scientific Papers?

Bachrach, S., Berry, S.R., Blume, M., von Foerster, T., Fowler, A., Ginsparg, P., Heller, S., Kestner, N., Odlyzko, A., Okerson, A., Wigington, R., & Moffat, A.

"...The goals and motivations of scientists writing up their research are very different from those of professional authors, although they may be the same people in different settings. The scientist is concerned with sharing new findings, advancing research inquiry, and influencing the thinking of others. The benefits the scientist receives from publication are indirect; rarely is there direct remuneration for scientific articles. Indeed, scientists frequently pay page charges to publish their articles in journals. The world of the directly paid author is very different. There, the need for close protection of intellectual property follows directly from the need to protect income, making natural allies of the publisher and the professional author, whether a novelist or the author of a chemistry text..."

"...The suggested policy is this: Federal agencies that fund research should recommend (or even require) as a condition of funding that the copyrights of articles or other works describing research that has been supported by those agencies remain with the author. The author, in turn, can give prospective publishers a wide-ranging nonexclusive license to use the work in a value-added publication, either in traditional or electronic form. The author thus retains the right to distribute informally, such as through a Web server for direct interaction with peers..."

"...[Some publishers, such as] Science, the New England Journal of Medicine, and the Journal of the American Chemical Society, have adamantly opposed authors' posting of their own articles on Web pages or e-print servers, whereas others, such as the American Journal of Mathematics, the Journal of Neuroscience, Nature Medicine, and Physical Review, have considered such distribution consistent with, and even advertising for, their own journals..."

--------------------------------------------------------------------

EDITORIAL: The Rightness of Copyright:

Floyd E. Bloom

"...[C]opyright transfer is critical to the process of communicating scientific information accurately. Neither the public nor the scientific community benefits from the potentially no-holds-barred electronic dissemination capability provided by today's Internet tools. Much information on the Internet may be free, but quality information worthy of appreciation requires more effort than most scientists could muster, even if able...."

Questions for Reflection [SH]:

(1) Is F. Bloom's a logical or even a practical argument for full copyright transfer to publishers by refereed-journal paper authors, ceding their right to archive those papers for free public access?

(2) Is it really true that the only options are either (a) free papers, with no quality control, or (b) quality-controlled papers, but only in exchange for copyright transfer and the ensuing blockage of free access by S/SL/PPV (Subscription/Site-License/Pay-Per-View) fee barriers?

"...A paper submitted to Science will undergo extensive review and, upon acceptance, extensive revision for clarity, accuracy, and solidity. A paper published in Science will be seen throughout the world by our 160,000 paid subscribers and perhaps two or three times more readers as issues are shared. More than 30,000 readers will be alerted to the new reports within hours of the appearance each week of Science Online...."

(3) How many other journals reach 160K subscribers (or even 1/100 % of that)?

(4) Free posting on the Web can reach all 160K (and 100 times that).

(5) Science magazine is a hybrid trade/refereed journal. It publishes refereed articles, contributed for free, plus commissioned and paid articles by staff writers and others, for fee. Hence it is in most relevant respects not representative of the vast refereed literature of which it (and a few other journals like it, such as Nature) constitutes a minuscule portion.

"...This degree of investment in the scientific publication process requires the assignment of copyright. This allows the society publisher to provide a stewardship over the paper, to protect it from misuse by those who would otherwise be free to plagiarize or alter it, and to expand the distribution of information products for the benefit of the society.

(6) Do we need this degree of investment? Is it worth the consequences (S/SL/PPV, fire-walls)?

(7) What is "stewardship"?

(8) What do copyright ASSIGNMENT (to the publisher) and S/SL/PPV tolls have to do with protection from plagiarism or alteration? (Doesn't copyright simpliciter already provide that, without transfer to the publisher?)

"...Permissions are granted freely to the originating authors for their own uses. Science holds the copyright of its authors because of our belief that we materially improve and protect the product we create together...."

(9) What if the "own use" is the provision of one's work to others, through free public archiving on the Web?

(10) Would payment for the true cost of the necessary "improvements" not be sufficient, without the need for copyright assignment, S/SL/PPV and firewalls?

[Again, this should all be considered in conjunction with the fact that Science magazine is far from representative of refereed journals, for the reasons noted above.]

Stevan Harnad
Professor of Cognitive Science
Department of Electronics and Computer Science
University of Southampton
UNITED KINGDOM http://www.cogsci.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/
http://www.princeton.edu/~harnad/
ftp://ftp.princeton.edu/pub/harnad/

T. Kendall Harden, Ph.D., Jerry R. Mitchell, M.D., Ph.D., American Society for Pharmacology and Experimental Therapeutics, July 27, 1999

Dear Dr. Varmus:

On behalf of the American Society for Pharmacology and Experimental Therapeutics (ASPET), we are responding to your E-Biomed proposal. It is clear that you have given serious thought in formulating this plan. Some elements of the proposal are beneficial to, and much needed by, our community. However, ASPET has very strong reservations and concerns about the value and utility of E-Biomed and therefore does not support this proposal. Our objections to E-Biomed are detailed below.

Need for E-Biomed

Many of E-Biomed's ideals and goals are already being pursued by ASPET.

• ASPET began publishing its journals on the Internet in 1997.
• ASPET's journals have adopted a wide range of new online functionalities as they have become available, including:
  • Interconnectivity through toll-free linking with other journals, both within and outside of the HighWire journals
  • E-mailed tables of contents and future tables of contents to anyone requesting them regardless of whether they are a subscriber
  • Customized alerting features that enable subscribers to be notified whenever an article is published that fits a particular personalized scientific profile.
• ASPET continues to expand its online journals and will soon offer:
  • "Layering" with the addition of data sets, multimedia, additional color >figures, and additional text and bibliographic material that cannot be provided in print
  • Online letters to the editor which will allow feedback and additional information to be appended to articles.
  • ASPET will soon offer online manuscript submission.

American Society for Pharmacology and Experimental Therapeutics
www.faseb.org/aspet

Cheryl S. Watson, Ph.D., Publishing Consultant, Sacramento, July 27, 1999

Dear Dr. Varmus: It seems to me that anyone thinking of starting a new journal should seriously consider making it a Web-only enterprise and that conversion of existing journals to that format would benefit the scientific community greatly. My comments below reiterate and offer support for some of the points you make in your proposal and I hope add some additional considerations.

My specific reasons for being very enamored of the idea of journal publications presented on the Web and some other considerations are:

1. Great unnecessary expense to authors and readers is involved in producing printed copies of journals. Much of this expense could be eliminated with e-journals.

2. Scientists are now very electronic-access competent so this should not be an impediment to most active researchers and educators.

3. For conveniently producing portable copies, printing out a copy of an article from an e-journal on a local printer provides a far better representation of most figures that involve shades of gray or color than do xeroxes of those articles.

4. Peer review and editing should be speeded up and made more convenient by electronic submission of papers and reviews. Mechanisms for keeping this confidential are now easily undertaken with appropriate computer expertise. I personally think that the scientific community will accept this medium far more readily if a confidential peer-review system is maintained. There can be different fora for peer reviewed traditional publications presented via the Web and non-peer reviewed more informal exchanges.

5. Organizational plans for new entries into this arena might be reviewed by an NIH-sponsored review committee in order to get their approval and support. This should keep the new medium highly respectable. That wouldn't prevent other kinds of entries, but provide a system of verification of publishing enterprises to inform the reader of which journals have been closely scrutinized for organization and intended content.

6. If a new journal were approved by a review system, this could be a mechanism for recommending that the publication be swiftly incorporated into the electronic listing services (Medline). This is essential if the journal articles are to be discovered by scientists who increasingly use this mechanism for locating papers of interest.

7. Foreign scientists from some countries where printed journals are not available because of expense would now be much more of an immediate part of our deliberations.

8. Any revenue generated from advertising in an e-journal controlled by scientists could be put to very good use. The universal access afforded by the Web should be very attractive to sellers of scientific and medical products. Some rather innovative means of using this advertising could greatly benefit both scientists and companies advertising products - I have some ideas on this. After administrative and computer expertise costs are met, the monies generated could support funding for scientific meetings in the area of the journal's purview. I am about to chair a FASEB conference in my research area and have found it exceedingly difficult to generate funds to support speaker expenses and trainee scholarships. A journal representing this area might legitimately provide such funds to further promote investigation and communication on the progress of the topic.

What I have in mind in particular: I am part of an emerging area in steroid action involving rapid effects thought to be mediated by membrane forms of steroid receptors, related transcription factors, and other steriod binding proteins. This area currently has no publication "home" and many people are interested in focusing attention on this rapidly evolving area by having a publication to represent it.

What I would need to make this happen: Currently there is no place that I can think of to apply for funds to start up such an enterprise. I have talked with individuals involved in reviewing grants both at the National Library of Medicine and the NIH's Small Business Innovation Review groups. Applying for funds to set up an e-journal outside the realm of traditional paper publishing seems to have no obvious abode. I anticipate that costs involved in start-up would be:

1. computer expertise to set up and manage the Web site with password-protected elements for submission and peer-review

2. administrative assistance in receiving manuscripts, organizing reviewers, and correspondence

3. possibly some salary support for the editor-in-chief to devote a large amount of time in the beginning to launching the project and setting up an editorial structure

4. some equipment to house the electronic operation such as a Web-server or space on a Web server, Web design and email software, scanners, printers, and office supplies

I assume that a proposal would contain a plan for generating revenue after everything is set up and going. It would probably take 2 or 3 years to accumulate advertising revenue to keep the journal afloat subsequently.

Thank you for providing a forum for discussion of this very important and timely topic.

Cheryl S. Watson, Ph.D.
Associate Professor
Human Biological Chemistry & Genetics Dept.
University of Texas Medical Branch
Galveston TX

http://cellbio.utmb.edu/watson/watson.htm

Tom Sklarsky, Publishing Consultant, Sacramento, July 26, 1999

Dear Dr. Varmus:

Your proposal is applauded. It is a steppingstone in the evolution of scientific publishing--it will be free to its readers and to libraries, as it should; it will provide rapid dissemination of the results of research, as it should; and it will be easily accessible to everyone around the globe, as it should. You have a good mechanism in place for the establishment of the Editorial Advisory Board. Despite a few negative comments from the competition, there is nothing illegal or unethical about this proposal. Probably, the only headache you will have to deal with is the ongoing management of the editorial process and its smooth and timely transition from author to editor and illustrator, to in-house approver, to peer reviewer, back to author, then back to editor, and on to the webmaster and the internet. This traditional process must be fine-tuned to match the online publishing process. This process may be a minor detail in your plan, but I assure you that if it is not managed by professional publishing managers with authority and resources, it will reverberate back to the competition, probably resulting in articles devoted to the utter failure of E-biomed. Hopefully, in the near future, the implementation of E-biomed will serve as a model for online publication of research by other agencies, such as EPA, Dept. of Agriculture, USGS, FDA, and so on. Your proposal, therefore, must not only be successful, it must also move forward soon (some of these agencies are already publishing exclusively on the internet [i.e., there is no dual publication] for certain types of publications). The best of luck to you and your team.

Tom Sklarsky
Publishing Consultant
Sacramento, CA

S. Tabibzadeh, M.D., Editor-in-Chief, Frontiers in Bioscience and Pediatric Pathology and Molecular Medicine, July 26, 1999

Dear Dr Varmus:

I welcome your efforts in making the E-Biomed. Such a valuable resouce will streamline the publishing of scientific manuscripts, which for years, has been in the realm of publishers. Despite great advancements in communication technologies, investigators still publish their manuscripts in traditional print journals and only after a long dealy. Investigators need the published literature for carrying out their scientific research and for writing manuscripts and grants. Unfortunately, the print journals, despite publishing manuscripts in an electronic form still do not make the manuscripts available to the public. This hampers the progress of science and formation of E-Biomed should eliminate this problem. It is for the same reason, that we have established "Frontiers in Bioscience" so that manuscripts are freely available to the public. Once created, we will be happy to deposit all the manuscripts published in this electronic journal at E-Biomed. We are looking forward to the creation of Biomed.

Cordially,
S. Tabibzadeh, M.D.
Professor, Pathology
Editor-in-Chief
Frontiers in Bioscience at: http://www.bioscience.org
Pediatric Pathology and Molecular Medicine