[DMCA-Activists] Freedom Fighter - Harold Varmus

[Seth Johnson]

(Forwarded from CPTech's Random Bits list)

-------- Original Message --------
Subject: [Random-bits] Freedom Fighter - Harold Varmus
Date: Sun, 02 Nov 2003 11:25:47 -0500
From: James Love <address@hidden>
To: address@hidden

"It must have been amazing news for Harold Varmus. More than 500,000  hits
on 13 October had crashed the servers as people rushed to log on to  the
debut issue of the pioneering science journal he had helped create.  The
furore caused by the journal shows no signs of going away. Luckily,  Varmus
is used to the heat: as head of the National Institutes of  Health, it went
with the territory. But what made him, now in another  high-profile job,
sign up for this particular controversy? Kurt Kleiner  was curious


http://www.newscientist.com/opinion/opinterview.jsp;jsessionid=GKOGIOLHOCEN?id=ns24191

Meet the people shaping the future of science

This interview was first published in New Scientist print edition,

Freedom Fighter - Harold Varmus

Interviewed by Kurt Kleiner

You are in the middle of a distinguished career, and the system has  treated
you well, so you don't seem a natural for an idea like this. Why  does it
strike such a chord?

Because publication is the heart of the scientific effort. Nothing glues  us
together as a community more than publishing. That's what people work  for.
It's the moment of revelation and potential embarrassment. You are  showing
your data and your conclusions and your way of thinking and the  heart of
your life's work to your critical and competitive colleagues.  So it's a big
moment in everyone's life.

But why open-access publishing? And when did the idea hit you?

I was converted by Pat Brown. Pat is a biochemist at Stanford and had  done
a presentation in his own lab on the work of a guy named Paul  Ginsparg, one
of the founders of the open-access movement. He set up a  website [now
developed into the arxiv.org site] that published physics  preprints, and
many of these articles eventually got published in  conventional journals.
But the preprints were all online and free  access. That movement began a
revolution. I was then the director of the  National Institutes of Health
and I realised there was incredible  potential to do something in the
biological sciences that would be  really, deeply important, not just for
the advancement of science but  for providing information that the public
really wanted to know. I have  a special interest in advancing science in
poor countries, and this was  obviously an important way to do that.
Open-access publishing requires  no subscriptions to use the digital
version, allows any use of the  material as long as attribution is
maintained, and involves placing the  material in a public digital database
that can be rigorously searched.  Many of us are doing so-called
high-throughput analysis that generates  much more data than we ever
interpret. Allowing others to mine that data  for new observations is
incredibly important and exciting. So I thought  about this for a while and
then wrote a manifesto called E-Biomed.

What happened next?

That was an interesting moment. I must have known that I was not going  to
be at NIH for much longer, because this caused a tremendous political 
argument: what the hell was I doing trying to destroy the publication 
industry? And actually I went too far. Politically I was naïve to  describe
the full vision rather than proceed one step at a time. People  in Congress
who had been, and who still are, my friends wanted me to  defend what I was
doing because they were being told by the lobbyists of  the publishing
houses that I was out to destroy the capitalist economy,  so I think I would
have done that differently. But it definitely got  people's attention. I
revised the manifesto and tried to make it more  targeted, and by the end of
the year we had PubMedCentral up and running.

So what is PubMedCentral?

It was a first step in what we hoped would become a digital repository  of
all the works in biomedical science. Though ideally those full texts  would
be deposited at the time of publication, or even before  publication, we
realised that for most journals this was not an option.  They would only
provide content after a delay of anywhere from two  months to a year, if at
all. But even faced with good evidence that you  are not going to harm the
personal subscriber base if you delay  deposition for six months to a year,
many journals were unwilling to  take the step. Frustrated by the slow
progress, we decided we would try  to generate interest in the scientific
community, saying: "We're not  going to submit our papers, provide
reviewing, or do editing for  journals that don't provide their content to
an open-access repository  like PubMedCentral."

And when the due date came around, what happened?

It was clear that not as many journals as we would have liked had gone  over
to the PubMedCentral model. That's when we realised we needed to do 
something a little more ambitious. One of the things we were interested  in
doing was creating journals that did it right. So three of us got  together:
Pat Brown, Mike Eisen [an evolutionary biologist at Berkeley]  and myself.
We were the founders, more or less. We decided we would  write a prospectus
and shop it around. And we finally got lucky with the  Gordon and Betty
Moore Foundation, who were very responsive and gave us  around $9 million,
which we used to hire extraordinary people.

But why bother? What's wrong with the established scientific publishing 
system?

Well, it doesn't live up to the opportunities that are created by the 
internet. The system as it exists has produced many good journals, but 
journals are expensive and increasingly people are reading and searching 
online. There's an opportunity here to eliminate boundaries between the 
individual and the information, and between pieces of information. I  think
all of us were startled by the incredible power that the internet  provided
for looking at and working with the genome. If we had published  pieces of
genomes paper by paper we would be much less far along than we  are. That
model has been a powerful force in helping people to think  about how the
scientific literature can be worked with. An important  issue is having
widespread searching through a public library. That's  why we use Public
Library of Science, PloS, as our name. We strongly  believe in this concept
to go to one place and look at everything. But  the issues are many. Most of
us who are of a certain age grew up at a  time when there was essentially no
science in the developing world  because there was very little access to
information. One of my prime  motivations is simply getting the information
that governments and other  philanthropic organisations have paid for into
the hands of the people  who have a vital interest in seeing it.

I can already buy scientific articles online. The access is there...

But is the access really there? You may say you'll pay for them, but it 
adds up pretty quickly. Imagine you are a doctor and have encountered a 
patient with an unusual disease, or a high-school student trying to  write a
paper. You could identify quite a number of papers you'd be  interested in
looking at. But until you look at them you don't really  know whether you
want to read them. The prospect of paying several  hundred dollars to
identify what you want to read is usually not very  appealing . Don't you
ask yourself when you do that, why should I be  paying for this when most of
this research was done with money I  provided to the US government as a
taxpayer?

What about those who say you are just shifting costs from library  budgets
to research budgets? You are now asking researchers to pay to  publish their
articles...

But that's fine. People criticise the business plan of open-access 
publishers because it involves authors - and that means usually the  funding
agencies the authors use - paying a fee upfront of $1000 or  $1500. They say
that is a new expense. But it's not. The  organisations--the funding
agencies and research organisations - paying  those costs will not change.
It's the way the payment is done that's  changing, and the total costs will
certainly go down. The research  environment has been sustaining the
publishing industry for years.  That's not a bad thing. Publishing is
crucial to research. In fact, one  of the things we are trying to get across
loud and clear is that  publishing has to be considered part of the cost of
doing research.

So have you got the cost basis right?

People legitimately argue about whether we have figured the best way to  do
this. We probably haven't gotten all the details quite right yet. We  wanted
to show how we thought it ought to be done by producing a journal  that
tested some of the principles of open-access publishing, including  the
business model, and attempted to make an open-access journal that  was
considered to be prestigious. This is an important point, because  when you
begin to study the culture of the scientific community you find  that people
are very, very sensitive to the place in the hierarchy  accorded to the
journals. So if you want a job at Harvard or  Sloan-Kettering or other
places, all too often it's the perception, and  probably the reality, that
publishing in only three or four of the  several thousand journals of
biomedical sciences - The New England  Journal of Medicine, Nature, Science,
Cell, a couple of others - is  virtually a requirement for hiring. Many of
the first open-access  journals published didn't have that kind of cultural
credibility. We  think we can achieve that for PLoS Biology by virtue of the
rigorous  review we are doing, the high quality of people associated with
the  journal, and our efforts to make it a journal of distinction.

Is there an inherent difference between science publishing and  publishing
per se?

Sure. All of us who do science for a living make an incredible effort to 
ensure that the scientific publishing industry works well. We provide  our
papers for free, and our tradition is to assign copyright to the  journals,
which was a huge mistake, in my view. We do editing,  reviewing, and we
provide these services which in journalism or book  publishing would be work
for which you would be compensated quite  nicely. We all think of this as
our civic duty. What most people don't  realise is that when they do this
for a for-profit publisher they are  actually filling the stockholders'
pockets.

I talked to someone at Science, and he said: "We wish them luck, we're  also
a scientific society, but we can't afford to experiment. Our  journal
finances all our good works, and I'm not sure that what they  [PLoS] are
doing is actually going to be sustainable"...

Sounds like Alan Leshner [Science's executive publisher]

It was...

Alan's a good friend of mine. We had dinner a few weeks ago and talked 
about all of this. I think that position is highly flawed for the  following
reasons. First, Science is actually a very special case. I buy  it and I'm
glad to get it every week because it's my weekly New York  Times for
science. It's the product of hard-working journalists who are  doing science
journalism, writing the book reviews and obituaries and  editorials and many
reviews and, most importantly for me, political news  about science. So it
is exceptional.

OK, so what about other journals?

Almost all scientific societies publish journals, which are usually very 
good. My own very strongly held opinion is that scientific societies are 
like guilds, they're like unions. They should serve the members, and  when
they don't there's no reason to keep them going. Most societies  provide
meetings, workshops, educational programmes, and these  activities should be
encouraged. On the other hand, I don't believe that  traditional business
plans that depend upon the sale - the inappropriate  sale from my point of
view - of subscriptions to these journals should  be how these societies
finance their activities. To best serve their  members they are simply going
to have to adapt to the opportunities for  much more efficient and useful
publications of science by the internet.

Do you want to show Nature and Science and everybody else that this is a 
better way? Do you want to drive them out of business?

No, no, we're not trying to put people out of business. The ideal  solution
from our point of view is to see journals convert to an  open-access form.

But you tried your petition and you didn't really convince these guys...

The petition was not useless. First of all it brought the open-access 
movement further along. Over 30,000 people signed. That's not to be 
ignored. And a lot of journals did sign up. We were hoping for a  thousand
journals and we ended up with about a hundred, and more are  coming on.

But you've drawn attention to the issue, and they haven't come around yet...

We're really working on several different issues at once. One big issue  is
the journals themselves. The private publishers are unlikely ever to  like
this, let's face it. I don't know yet what they are going to do. I  think
they could become open access. It's conceivable that a private  publisher
could be very successful by charging, say, $4000 an article  instead of
$1000. It's possible that journals will find other ways to  raise money in
open-access format. But in general I think you are going  to find that the
private, for-profit publishers are not going to like  this because the kind
of profit margins they've had, exceeding 40 per  cent - much higher than
that in some cases - simply aren't going to be  tenable in the long run.

Is it eventually going to be pressure that brings them around?

Yes, I think it would be. But our real target is the society journals. 
Those are the journals we think should move in the direction of open 
access. And the way I'd like to see that happen is by having the other 
journals say: "Look, PLoS journals are getting the best articles because 
people see that not only do they do an incredible job in the editing and 
the promulgation, but it's better to be published in a form that allows 
everybody to see it instantaneously." And if we, BioMedCentral and other 
open access journals attract the best articles and most of the articles, 
the other journals will have to come around because otherwise they won't 
get submissions anymore.

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