How Early Dreams Of Online Publishing Have Changed

#1: Open Access Publication

Catriona MacCallum remembers the big ideas that people imagined in the early days of online science publishing. “To open up collaboration. To exchange documents. To have conversations. That was the miracle of the Internet,” says MacCallum, advocacy manager for the Public Library of Science (PLOS). Many dreamed that research papers would be available to everyone, without paying the high fees that traditionally plagued print journals.

PLOS wasn’t the first group to create open access research journals, but it became the most famous by trying to compete with top print journals such as Science and Nature. Entrenched interests made scientific publishing difficult to change, even for researchers who believed in open access, MacCallum says. For example, where people published—and what impact factor those journals had—was intimately intertwined with promotion and tenure decisions. So far open access journals haven’t been able to match the impact factors of traditional journals.

MacCallum thinks open access is still growing, however. Some funding foundations are requiring that their grantees make research publications available for free. The federal government has said its funded research must be freely available to the public within a year of publication. Even universities are putting together repositories containing free copies of their researchers’ papers.

Publishing itself is also changing; for example, many publishers are putting papers on the Internet as soon as they are edited rather than waiting for publication of issues. That leaves an opening for reform, she says. The question is, how are we going to capture and enable that very useful shift?

#2: Postpublication Review

When the Internet began moving mainstream, many people envisioned that scientists would one day be able to freely critique published, peer-reviewed research online. “People really did think it was going to be an overnight revolution and tip the balance of power and so on,” remembers Hilda Bastian, who helps run PubMed Commons, an online community within the National Institutes of Health’s PubMed site that discusses research articles.

But there were also major fears, which may have prevented online reviews of science papers from taking off. Some worried that “you would have comments that would get really aggressive and time-consuming,” Bastian says. “Or it would be trivial and a waste of their time.”

Neither extreme has turned out to be quite right. Bastian has found that even though PubMed Commons doesn’t see a lot of aggressive attacks, it also “is not being used very much.”

The reason might be that “there is still a great deal of skepticism among editors—and researchers in general—about postpublication peer review and online criticism,” says Philip Moriarty, a University of Nottingham physicist who works closely with chemists.

An example of this reticence can be seen in the slow early growth of the website PubPeer, which is devoted to reviews of scientific papers. The site didn’t have many critiques of papers until it allowed posts to be anonymous. But Moriarty hopes that won’t be true going forward. “Commenters should be willing to stand up and be counted, to put their name behind their opinions,” he says.

It’s too soon to say that online reviews aren’t going to take off, Bastian says. The biggest problem isn’t that people aren’t interested. “The Internet has meant this incredible information overload,” she says. “Where do you find the time?”

And how do you get the word out? When Moriarty speaks at conferences he finds that just a fraction of his audience has even heard about PubPeer or other commenting sites. “We’ve still got a long way to go in terms of visibility.”

#3: Prepublication review

Why wait for a journal to review your paper to find out what the scientific community thinks? Publishing data directly online or getting early critiques of your papers through a prepublication site was one dream inspired by the Internet.

For some disciplines, such as particle physics and astronomy, it has become a reality through preprint sites such as arXiv. Because those disciplines often have enormous research teams, their research is open to a large community before it gets published in a peer-reviewed journal.

Chemistry hasn’t yet embraced that level of openness. Nottingham’s Moriarty suspects that is because of entrenched traditions in the community about traditional journals being the more prestigious way to publish. “Opening up papers for online debate should be the norm and hopefully will be de rigueur for the next generation of research scientists,” he says.

Some amount of formal peer review might be helpful, though. Cognitive psychologist Jeff Shrager of Stanford University wanted to find out if prepublication review actually results in better research, so he created a computer model to identify the perfect level of peer review. His model showed that the ideal might be a happy medium between no formal reviews—the equivalent of a scientist unveiling her research prepublication—and the extensive reviews prevalent in top research journals (PLOS One 2010, DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0010782).

Peer review provides some sanity check on a paper, Shrager says. “I don’t think there is going to be a regimen where completely open science is ever going to happen or even be desired.”