Electronic publishing: all talk and no action?

Suppose they gave a revolution and nobody came? We’re meant to be in the midst of a revolution in life sciences publishing but, for a revolution, it’s awfully quiet. For the moment at least, the ancien régime — in the form of traditional peer review and conventional commercial journals — seems to be winning. The latest fusillade came from Stanford University’s HighWire Press, which has just begun offering free online access to back issues of dozens of journals. The revolution was started early last year by Harold Varmus, then director of the National Institutes of Health. Urged on by those who wanted a freely accessible central online repository for biology papers and data, and who were also fed up with the staggering cost of journals and the vagaries of peer review, Varmus threw NIH’s weight behind a brand new idea. The plan was to develop a free online ‘e-print’ archive where life scientists could post papers without having to go through peer review. The idea may have been brand new to biologists but it was modeled on a highly successful preprint archive in physics and related fields, housed at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico since 1991. Scientists post draft papers there, then hunker down to endure trenchant analysis and the occasional catcall in the very public peer review by their fellows. The Los Alamos e-print archive seems to work really well — so much so that it has been expanded to include papers in mathematics, computer science, and “non-linear science”, whatever that is. Papers are ‘published’ with no lag time at all, revised on the basis of the posted criticisms, and republished quickly. By all accounts, the quality of the papers is good. Perhaps even more important, the archive is a perpetual scientific meeting without the jet lag, a constantly changing, often fruitful online dialog among members of a worldwide community of scientists. In short, it has been good for scientists and for science. So, Varmus and his colleagues reasoned, why not an analagous e-print archive for biology, free and open to all? They were quickly told why not. First, biologists seem to have faith in peer review. They concede its imperfections and its occasional evils, but seem to believe it is a bulwark against junk science. (Not to mention much better for promotion prospects than publishing unreviewed papers.) Second, a free archive is a mortal threat to commercial publishers and to scientific societies that depend on journals for income.