Reactions

More debate on open access

Your recent editorial on the subject of open access betrays a fundamental misunderstanding of the real reasons why ACS should follow the lead of many other scientific societies in providing open access to reports of scientific research in its journals (C&EN, May 16, page 5). The goal of research is the generation, validation, and transmission of information. And the difficulty of transmitting such information has increased exponentially, owing to the growth of the scientific community and the scope and pace of science.

As a graduate student in the 1950s, I could keep up with the literature by spending some hours in the library reading a few journals like the Journal of the American Chemical Society, the Journal of Cell Science, and Helvetica, as well as by requesting reprints by mail. Today, that approach is as outmoded as the Studebaker I drove then. Today, I may need to read an article in the New England Journal of Medicine, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, or the Journal of Pharmacology & Experimental Therapeutics, and I need to be able to do it on the Internet. In the case of those journals, I can access articles either free or for a nominal charge of $10-$15.

But for an ACS journal, that is not possible--Internet access requires an expensive ACS Internet subscription. Unlike other scientific organizations, ACS--ostensibly a society dedicated to the advancement of chemical science--thus maintains a barrier to the transmission of chemical science generated (and peer reviewed) by its members, to its own members and to the rest of the scientific community. The barrier is erected even between the nonmember world community and the information contained in C&EN, even though C&EN is handsomely supported by advertising revenues and by the tax of $33.98 paid annually by every one of the 159,000 ACS members. If a nonmember biologist wishes to read "New Perspective on Enzyme Action" in the Science & Technology section of the May 16 issue (page 35) via the Internet, he or she is denied access. How do you justify that? Open access even for C&EN is not "socialized science" or a "shell game." Denial of open access even to C&EN is simple greed.

Manfred E. Wolff
Laguna Beach, Calif.

You claim in your editorial that "scientific information--peer reviewed, edited, packaged, and archived as a journal--and BMWs are both commodities," and proclaim that if journals were free, BMWs should be free as well.

Yes, this would be "absurd" (your word). But ACS is not making BMWs; it is advertising a product created with taxpayers' money. Indeed, its publications are clearly marked as advertisements by law. The layouts of the articles it publishes (its ads) are its property and protected by copyright. But the content, which is created with taxpayers' money, I believe, is not. If BMWs were made with taxpayers' money, I would expect to have one for free, and so would you.

You further state that "open-access advocates are ... in fact, advocating socialized science. In the more extreme open-access scenarios ... the federal government itself becomes the publisher and archivist of the scientific and technical literature."

To claim that the federal government, and especially this Administration, intends to compete with the private sector in publishing scientific literature is, indeed, absurd. But perhaps the federal government can foresee that creating and maintaining a free-access archive of text published worldwide would serve a tremendous purpose. At the least, it would advance scientific knowledge in the physical sciences in even greater ways than Medline has transformed the flow of information in the biological sciences. Besides, the federal government already is a repository and archivist of technical literature through the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office. Note that PTO offers free full-text access and hard copies by mail. Imagine a similar repository of published scientific text.

To fight the creation of such an entity on obscure slogans of "shell games" and "socialized science" renders a great disservice to the progress of science and your readers. In the long run, it will also damage ACS and its publications.

Nikos Panayotatos
Orangeburg, N.Y.

So you want to keep the status quo for the current system of paying for access to science journals. You want to keep me in prison, a prison that prevents me from reading papers other than in my core journal. A member of my family has health problems--I cannot go online to read the Journal of the American Medical Association or the New England Journal of Medicine, but have to find a library that takes these journals, which means I don't read the articles or references since I would have to travel 30 miles and find parking. I am concerned about a highlighted report from the press on the toxicity of a compound. Many are written by the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (funded by tax dollars) and published by their house journal; again, I have to buy it or find a library. And so on and so on.

Find a way to release me from my prison walls. And yes, I'm prepared to pay toward my escape.

Malcolm L. Watts
Kennett Square, Pa.

I read with dismay the article "Opening Access" about the "rough road ahead" caused by a socialist disease infecting chemistry publications (C&EN, May 16, page 40).

Those seeking to extort something of value to fellow chemists for free do so because they, one, do not respect the value of the work of other chemists and, two, value it to themselves as worthless since they do not know how to add their own value. They disapprove of the profit motive. Why else demand free information from others?

The main sources of the troubling and unfair demands for free, open access to research results cited by Sophie L. Rovner in her article are Nicholas R. Cozzarelli and Stevan Harnad. By what authority do these two get to bully others into giving their work away to strangers for free? Who finances them? They pontificate with claims that are not supported by evidence and are contrary to sound financial practice.

Cozzarelli is a biology professor at the University of California, Berkeley, and editor of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. NAS is a privately funded nonprofit charity. It naturally has difficulty relating the work of scientists to value for the public because it merely publishes information and advises the government. Just read their website pleas for support. NAS does not really create or build anything of value like for-profit corporations do. Just because Cozzarelli thinks chemical journals are too expensive and inaccessible--that is, that they are worthless--does not mean everybody else agrees. He provided no evidence that his proposal to change to free access would actually promote chemistry to the general public; I argue it would be harmful.

Harnad is a cognitive scientist, whatever that means, at the University of Quebec. He uses socialist rhetoric like "gold," "green" and "be on the side of the angels" because he has no quantitative financial evidence to support his demands that everyone have free access to the work of others. He never says what he would do with the free access he seeks.

Your editorial on this topic in the same issue of C&EN was correct. Hold your position.

My advice to ACS and C&EN: Know your customers. Provide value to them, support them well, and sell to them. If you do that right, they will pay for what they value. Think like a value-added business for lasting wealth creation. Chemistry is the means chemists choose to do this. Resist those who seek to take from ACS and its members without paying. There is no free lunch, remember?

Pierre R. Latour
Houston

I am becoming increasingly concerned by the actions of ACS.

First I read that ACS is suing Google for the use of the word "Scholar" in the Google Scholar search engine, claiming infringement on SciFinder Scholar (C&EN, Latest News, Dec. 10, 2004). Would House of Pancakes win a suit against House of Carpets over a name? How many hundreds of thousands of dollars in attorney's fees are going to be wasted on this?

Next I read in Science (May 6, page 774) that ACS is lobbying Congress to shut down PubChem, the new NIH-funded open-access database that has some overlap with Chemical Abstracts Service. This ACS action is fundamentally antiscience. New search engines and databases stimulate creativity, innovation, and healthy competition. If Bell Labs had kept all its information about transistors to itself, we wouldn't have laptop computers today.

Then I read the May 16 editorial that sees nothing good in open access and equates ACS publishing to marketing BMWs. This comparison betrays just how far the "corporatization" of ACS has gone. The society has strayed from its primary mission of serving chemists and chemistry, adopting the culture of a for-profit corporation when it should be adopting the ethics of a library. The protection of 1,200 CAS jobs in Columbus, Ohio, is one of the major lobbying arguments being used against PubChem. I am reminded of the corporate-style salaries, several in the $500,000 to $1 million range, that are paid to the top executives of our not-for-profit society (C&EN, Aug. 9, 2004, page 4).

The May 16 cover story on open access to the scientific literature nicely lays out the choices before ACS as scientists increasingly demand freer access to their science and libraries balk at the cost of the scientific literature. ACS has had several opportunities to take a leadership role in this arena, for example, by making the electronic backfile free after 12 months (as recommended by all the editors of ACS journals). Open access in any form increases readership; promotes the innovative use of information; and, if practiced by ACS, could promote membership loyalty and journal subscriber loyalty. The recent resignation of a Nobel Laureate from ACS is a warning (see https://mx2.arl.org/Lists/ SPARC-OAForum/Message/1977.html).

Unfortunately, ACS has so far made only trivial concessions to open access. This conservatism is increasingly making the society the target of criticism, when it is the commercial publishers who are truly price-gouging our libraries. What the C&EN story failed to emphasize is that the present cost of scientific publishing is unsustainable. ACS is living off library budgets, and living pretty high on the hog. With its greater than $1 billion in assets, ACS should put pressure on the commercial publishers by opening up access to its backfile, making the society into one we love rather than criticize.

Too much energy and too many resources at ACS are being used to protect existing knowledge bases and existing revenue streams rather than fostering innovation in the new arena of creativity that is the Internet. I am mindful of the need for sound business practices in a professional society, but ACS could easily change its access/publishing business model, be more proscience, and generate great public relations in the process.

Chris Reed
Riverside, Calif.

I am willing to go partway with your "free BMW" analogy for open-access scientific publishing. You are quite right that someone has to pay for the costs of publishing, and that it is unreasonable to expect ACS or any other publishing entity to give its product away for free. However, the analogy falls down when looked at in another way. Until very recently, any member of the general public could "borrow a BMW"--that is, he or she could read the literature at his or her local college or university library. After all, at least at publicly funded institutions, the taxpayer was the one who actually paid for the subscriptions. But no longer.

University libraries are shifting to online resources, partly in response to the rising costs of hard-copy subscriptions. Online services frequently impose contracts that prohibit access by people who are not directly connected with the university. For example, our library dropped Chemical Abstracts in favor of SciFinder Scholar, but as a result, we can no longer satisfy our mandate to serve as a resource for the general public, because we are not permitted to let them use the only up-to-date index to scientific literature that exists in the province of Manitoba, nor are we permitted to share the results of our searches with members of the public.

Your editorial ridicules public access, but you miss the key point. If the public pays for the subscriptions, the public should have the right to search the databases and read the journals.

Philip G. Hultin
Winnipeg, Manitoba

Waste not, want not

After reading the article about liquefied natural gas, I thought, "Why are we importing natural gas, when we could be producing it from animal waste?" (C&EN, April 25, page 19). Then I saw the short piece "Waste not" under the Newscripts column, which says that the Rosamond Gifford Zoo is considering doing just that (C&EN, June 6, page 48).

Why do we continue to import natural gas and diesel fuel when we could be making our own from renewable biological sources? The technology for these processes is well-known and relatively easy and would allow the U.S. to become less dependent upon those countries that control the petroleum industry. This is not a long-term solution, but it would certainly slow the consumption of the world's limited petroleum supply.

Amy Gran
Mechanicsburg, Ohio

Two-career marriages

Darleane C. Hoffman states in a letter that because "more women than men chemists are married to other Ph.D. scientists," fewer than 12% of the applicants for chemistry faculty positions are women (C&EN, May 23, page 2). This deserves more thought. It reflects a dilemma that confronts all married couples when both partners seek demanding careers. Could it be that there are so few women in top positions in any profession, not just in chemistry, because men may have found a solution by converting this two-body problem into a single-body problem? Can women do the same? Is it possible that one solution lies in marrying the right man, perhaps a non-Ph.D. or a nonprofessional?

Sanjeeva Murthy
Burlington, Vt.