Floyd Bloom's SCIENCE Editorial about NIH/E-biomed

From: Stevan Harnad (harnad@cogito.ecs.soton.ac.uk)
Date: Wed Jul 28 1999 - 16:33:45 BST

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The Editor of SCIENCE, Dr. Floyd Bloom, has written an editorial about
NIH's E-biomed initiative (since renamed PubMed Central).
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
    http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/eletters/285/5425/197#EL12

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 two kinds of 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/DOE-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 NIH should not do this, 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).

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

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 made 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 institutional 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 only,
leaving the access providing and preservation entirely to public online
archives like LANL and E-biomed -- is likely to be much lower than
current institutional S/L/P budget. 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 their researchers' enhanced impact and from S/L/P savings), 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
what the new medium offers science, rather than at odds with it.

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

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

http://library.caltech.edu/publications/ScholarsForum/
http://cogprints.soton.ac.uk/

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

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

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

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

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

Nothing is being co-opted. The NSF/DOE-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.

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

fb> Does a monopolistic archive under government control by the major
fb> research funder enhance scientific progress better than the existing
fb> journal hierarchy, which provides multiple alternatives to authors and
fb> 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/DOE fund 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 of certain commercial S/L/P providers...)

fb> What about research in disciplines outside what the National Library of
fb> 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?)

fb> 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 public self-archiving have any
interest in blocking access to any of it? (The sole interests vested in
blocking access to this corpus at the moment are certainly not
governmental interests...)

fb> Without answers to these and other questions, it is hard to determine
fb> 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!)

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

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

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

The retrospective 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 alone?

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

The first of these two benefits, 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' use of 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").

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

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 commercial providers would like
to see perpetuated as a "click-through" monopoly governed by
interpublisher S/P/L fee agreements!

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

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

Both Dr. Henderson and Dr. Bloom might benefit from being reminded (if
they are prepared to 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.

http://www.cogsci.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Papers/Harnad/harnad91.postgutenberg.html

The only costs that remain to be paid are accordingly 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 adduced 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..."