In a recent blog, Timothy Gowers, a prominent mathematician who has won the field’s equivalent of a Nobel Prize, wrote about his boycott of Elsevier, a major publisher of academic journals. Gowers is a proponent of “open science,” which promotes free Internet access to scientific papers. In contrast, Elsevier’s journal subscription costs are “so far above the average that it seems quite extraordinary that they can get away with it,” he wrote. Hence, the boycott by Gowers and, to date, 7563 other academics who have followed his lead.
The controversy highlights the cultural shift from print to digital media, and a few of the stumbling blocks of uncharted territory. For decades, researchers had no choice but to follow traditional methods of distributing new scientific information through print publications. The system is expensive, hidebound and time consuming. A protracted journal submissions process and high subscription costs delay or limit the public’s access to science. In contrast, the newly developing, “open science” makes scientific research more productive and approachable
Examples of open science are open-access archives and journals such as arXiv and the Public Library of Science (PLoS), collaborative blogs (e.g., MathOverflow) as well as social networking science communities like ResearchGate. Although open science is new, it has proved to be a promising evolution for the dissemination of scientific research in terms of cost, time savings and potential.
First, open science is a cost effective alternative to publishing scientific papers in journals. Subscriptions to traditional journals can be very expensive. “Most Americans would have to buy access to individual articles at a cost of $15 or $30 apiece. Taxpayers who already paid for the research would have to pay again to read the results,” PLoS co-founder Michael B. Eisen, a biology professor from University of California, Berkeley, wrote in a recent op-ed. Traditional journals insist that the critical service they provide is not cheap; however, most of the reviewing is done by researchers volunteering their time and effort.
The monetary issue can be avoided by the online open science system. For example, by linking papers to their own website profiles, which is allowed by most journals, ResearchGate creates a self-archiving repository. Researchers from ResearchGate share a platform housing 350,000 papers and connecting to 40 million abstracts and papers from other scientific databases. As a result, scientific resources are freely shared and accessed on Internet-based platforms.
Second, the Internet has significantly shortened the time it takes to share information. Peer reviews can take months in a traditional submission process, and a limited number of editors also restrains the information flow. The Polymath Project, a math experiment described in The New York Times, successfully proved the efficiency of open science. In 2009, by commenting on Gowers’ blog, mathematicians established a new proof for a complicated theorem in just six weeks.
The open science concept has great potential. “When a new system comes into being that has quality and trust ability, it will happen. That’s how science progresses, by doing scientific experiments. We should be doing that with scientific publishing as well,” Alan Leshner, executive publisher of the journal Science, has said.
We have already taken advantage of the Internet in various aspects of our society. For instance, people used to choose restaurants according to a few gourmet food critics’ reviews in newspapers or magazines. However, nowadays, everybody can read and write reviews as well as share ideas about restaurants via the Internet. This way of sharing knowledge and opinions also applies to cars, movies, stores and even websites themselves. Why can’t we transfer the public reviewing and sharing system to scientific research?
Is it hard to imagine open science taking over the traditional process? “If you said years ago ‘One day you will be on Facebook sharing all your photos and personal information with people,’ they wouldn’t believe you,” Ijad Madisch, who founded ResearchGate, said in an interview with The New York Times. “We’re just at the beginning. The change is coming.”
Zhou Zhou is a second year graduate student studying nanoscale physics in the Professional Science Master’s Program at Rice University, and a student of Kirstin Matthews, Baker Institute fellow in science and technology policy.