Reinventing Discovery - Michael Nielsen [85]
The arXiv is one of the big successes of the open access movement. But in most fields of science, fields such as medicine, climate science, and the environment, humanity’s scientific knowledge is still mostly accessible only to scientists, and to whoever else can pay for access. Because of this, and inspired in part by the success of the arXiv, several organizations are creating open access solutions for fields other than physics. An example is the Public Library of Science, or PLoS. Founded in 2000, PLoS is in many respects more like a traditional journal publisher than it is like the arXiv. But rather than charging readers for access to papers, PLoS instead charges authors to publish their papers. That charge funds PLoS’s operation, making it possible for PLoS papers to be made freely available on the web. Using this model, PLoS has rapidly built journals regarded as among the best in their fields, journals such as PLoS Biology and PLoS Medicine.
The arXiv and PLoS are just two of many efforts aiming to make open access to the scientific literature the norm. Many other open access projects have been launched. These projects have been gaining traction, and in 2008 the US Congress signed into law the National Institutes of Health (NIH) Public Access Policy. The NIH policy requires anyone funded by the NIH to upload finished papers to an openly accessible archive within 12 months of publication in a conventional journal. With a budget of more than 30 billion dollars per year, the NIH is the world’s largest scientific grant agency, and so this policy is rapidly increasing the amount of openly accessible research. Many other grant agencies and universities around the world are implementing similar open access policies. For instance, all of the UK Research Councils now have policies along similar lines to NIH’s requiring researchers to make their papers openly available. Although much scientific research still remains locked behind publisher paywalls, we may be on the verge of a major shift toward open access as the norm, not the exception. If that happens, people in the decades to come will look back in amazement that there was ever a time we did not have universal access to science. It will be an institutional shift not unlike the introduction of the market.
The most obvious benefit of widespread open access is to individual citizens: no more restrictions on the ability of people suffering diseases to download the latest research! But over the long run an even bigger benefit of open access will be that it enables the creation of other institutions bridging science and the rest of society. We’re already starting to see this happen. For example, user-generated online news sites such as Digg and Slashdot routinely link to the latest research in the arXiv and PLoS and other open access sources. These news sites enable ordinary people to collectively decide what the news is, and provide a space where they can discuss that news. Often, what people choose to discuss includes the latest papers at the arXiv on subjects such as cosmology and quantum teleportation, or the latest papers at PLoS on subjects such as genetics and evolutionary biology. When people on the news sites post links to pay-for-access journals such as Nature and Science, complaints often ring out, and users sometimes point out pirated online copies as an alternative. (This is not something I endorse, but it does happen!) In a similar way, professionally produced online news sites such as ScienceNews offer their perspective on the latest research. They cover both open and closed access stories, but the open access stories often get more attention simply because people can click