Reinventing Discovery - Michael Nielsen [84]
This subscription-based business model has been used by scientific publishers for hundreds of years. It’s a model that has served both science and society well. But the internet makes it possible to move to a new model of open access to scientific papers, where those papers may be freely downloaded. This is part of the shift we saw in the last chapter, with all the world’s scientific knowledge gradually becoming accessible online. A caveat to that story, though, is that at present much of the knowledge is only accessible if you’re a scientist. In particular, scientists often work at universities that have bulk subscriptions to thousands of scientific journals. A scientist can freely download as many articles about breast cancer or any other subject as they wish, while other people are kept out by the fees. It’s as though there is a wall dividing humanity. On one side of the wall are 99-plus percent of the human beings who have ever lived. And on the other side of the wall is the world’s scientific knowledge. The open access movement is trying to break down that wall. Just as citizen science is changing who can be a scientist, the open access movement is changing who has access to the results of science.
One of the standout successes of the open access movement is a popular website known as the physics preprint arXiv (pronounced “archive”). A “preprint” is a scientific paper, often at late draft stage, ready to be considered by a scientific journal for publication, but not yet published in a journal. You can go to the arXiv right now, and you’ll find hundreds of thousands of up-to-the-minute preprints from the world’s physicists, all available for free download. Want to know what Stephen Hawking is thinking about these days? Go to the arXiv, search on “Hawking,” and you can read his latest paper—not something he wrote a few years or decades back, but the paper he finished yesterday or last week or last month. Want to know the latest on the hunt for fundamental particles of nature at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC)? Go to arXiv, search on “LHC,” and you’ll get a pile of papers to make you stagger. If you get a kick out of surprising people, it might make for unusual cocktail party conversation: “So, did you see the latest on the LHC’s hunt for the Higgs particle? Turns out . . .” Of course, it’s not all easy reading. Many of the papers are written by physicists for physicists, and they can get extremely technical. But even the most technical papers often have intriguing nuggets that are accessible to the layperson.
The arXiv site works like this. When a physicist completes their latest paper, they go to the arXiv website and upload it. A quick check is done by arXiv moderators to remove inappropriate submissions—you won’t see Viagra advertisements or too many obviously crackpot papers. A few hours later the paper appears on the site, where it can be downloaded and read by anyone in the world. Many physicists submit their papers to the arXiv as soon as they’re complete, and long before they’re published in a conventional scientific journal. More than half of all papers in physics appear in the arXiv, and in some subfields of physics the fraction is nearly 100 percent. Many physicists begin their working day by checking the arXiv to see what appeared overnight. It’s revolutionized physics, by speeding up the rate at which scientific discoveries can be shared. At the