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Blood, 15 April 2001, Vol. 97, No. 8, pp. 2195-2196
EDITORIAL
Access to the biomedical literature: a stand against coercion
One of the loftiest purposes of scholarly biomedical publication
is the speedy dissemination of information that will help advance our
understanding of the etiology and treatment of the maladies of man.
Inherent in this pursuit is that their contents be accurate and be of
the highest quality, and that the information be used for scholarly
pursuits. A modern biomedical journal such as Blood strives
to achieve all of these goals through rigorous peer-review of
submitted manuscripts, rapid conventional and electronic publishing,
and the addition of value to the journal contents by
highlighting particularly insightful articles, soliciting expert commentary, and providing timely reviews. Very soon, an open letter to
the biomedical community will appear calling for all biomedical journals to transfer their contents to a freely accessible depository such as PubMed Central; the letter calls for the boycott of
noncomplying journals by authors, reviewers, and subscribers. To this
editor, coercion has no place in scientific discourse. The primary goal of the proposal is highly laudable: the elimination of
accessibility barriers to published biomedical research. Championed by
highly respected geneticist Dr Pat Brown, of Stanford University, the
proposal insists that all electronic biomedical journals
provide unfettered access a maximum of 6 months following their
publication by transferring the material to PubMed Central or similar
on-line public resources. Dr Brown makes several valid points:
electronic access is important because many clinicians and scientific
investigators are not geographically adjacent to libraries providing
free paper or electronic versions of biomedical research publications;
many large commercial publishers appear to make inordinate profits from
scholarly publication; and professional societies have become too
dependent on the revenues generated from the "nonprofit
publication" of their journals. Nevertheless, as for so many other
worthy goals, there are many unintended consequences of this proposal
that could seriously undo a system that has served the biomedical
community well. The electronic transfer of each issue of a biomedical journal is
not an easy task. Although it is little appreciated, there are quite a
few challenges in transferring data from one platform to another.
Problems can occur because of differing DTDs (Document Type
Definitions), sets of rules that define the SGML markup for the
published articles in a given document. Small data elements may get
"misconverted" when Blood data are sent from High Wire Press, the organization that publishes the electronic version of
Blood, to PubMed Central for reposting under a different set of rules. This requires time, money, and constant vigilance, lest a 250 µg dose be changed to a 250 mg dose of a drug or a biochemical reagent. Apparently, the transfer of scientific content to
PubMed Central has, at times, been very difficult and time-consuming, and this may serve as a painful reminder of this hurdle. The transfer of contents to PubMed Central or similar on-line public resources also
produces several other unintended consequences, including surrendering
protections guaranteed by author and publisher copyrights. The battle
over who should own a scholarly publication has been fought before. The US Constitution states, "The Congress shall have power to ... promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for
limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their
respective writings and discoveries." In the 19th century, Charles
Dickens made copyright protection a workable system in the United
States, protecting authors' capacity to make a living from their work.
Although this goal is no longer critical for biomedical authors,
present copyright protection as administered by society publishers
guarantees the integrity of the published work from plagiarism and
other infringements. Although it is argued that free and unfettered
access would allow more comprehensive data searches to be performed,
PubMed Central-hosted papers are also free to any commercial
enterprises interested in reassembling and republishing content for
their own profit ("unrestricted free distribution
rights," as the open letter reads; emphasis added). We would
completely lose control over our back issues because any server could
host and manipulate our content, with errors and omissions likely
to occur. Here again, the risks are enormous; drug dosing and/or other
patient care-related errors are inevitable. It is also not
difficult to envision that unprotected access will lead to drug
manufacturers attaching advertisement to reprints of selected
papers, the hijacking of segments of or whole papers for credited
or uncredited use, and their out-of-context manipulation to
support conclusions considered inappropriate by the biomedical community. Another issue that arises from transferring all issues of
Blood or other rigorously peer-reviewed journals to PubMed
Central is the gradual loss of reader and reviewer recognition and the quality assurance that comes from the exacting evaluations of experts
in the field. Our current concept of peer review began in the 16th and
17th centuries with the publication of books such as Isaac Newton's
Principia, which was "perused" by committees of the
Royal Society of London. In a recent editorial, Dr Adrian Johns
(Nature 2001;409:287) argued that peer review grew out of an alarming
growth in the number of books available after the invention of the
printing press. With the advent of the Internet and the seemingly
endless proliferation of new journals and information of all levels of
quality, one can easily argue the same phenomenon is occurring today,
making the need even greater for peer review to help us sort the wheat
from the chaff. Of the many lessons learned during my tenure as
Editor-in-Chief of Blood, none is so clear as the challenge
of recruiting an outstanding cadre of clinicians and scientists to
serve as reviewers to ensure the highest quality for papers
published in Blood. It is abundantly clear that our
community of reviewers share personal identification with the journal
and its mission. It is unlikely that such community allegiance will be
garnered for papers that originate or end up in PubMed Central next to
nonreviewed or minimally reviewed work, and the peer-review process is
almost certain to suffer. Nevertheless, all of these consequences might be worth enduring if they
were the only way to provide ready access of the results of biomedical
research to all. Fortunately, PubMed Central is not our only option;
the solution is already at hand. At present, the journal
Blood provides free access to all issues after a 12-month embargo period. We encourage all other journals to take this
opportunity to provide short embargo periods for their scholarly
publications. Access is readily available through multiple, searchable
platforms. Blood is hosted by HighWire; similar electronic
publication platforms such as Science Direct, LINK, and InterScience
also provide immediate links to search engines such as PubMed. The call
for a submission, subscription, and reviewing boycott of all biomedical
journals that do not conform to Dr Brown's vision appears far too
draconian to warrant consideration, especially when one appreciates
that numerous journals are already readily accessible through fully integrated electronic platforms. Does Dr Brown really want to set
neighbor against neighbor for the sake of an untested model of research
dissemination? He proposes to force others to participate, without any
idea about the viability of the plan. The editors and publishers of
Blood are proud of the contents of the journal and its
availability to the biomedical community, and they firmly believe that
the health of biomedical research and its dissemination has never been better.
Kenneth Kaushansky
Editor-in-Chief Seattle, WA
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