Report on the Public Library of Science and Related Initiatives

Background

The Internet has had a revolutionary impact on many dimensions of academic life.  It has enabled the simple, speedy, and inexpensive dissemination of knowledge, and is showing the potential to undermine the traditional modes of print publication and scholarship that we have used for generations.  Electronic media now allow very broad access to our scholarship, in contrast to the limited and often very costly access imposed by their traditional gatekeepers, the academic publishing industry.  The core of our enterprise involves dissemination of and access to the products of our scholarship.  There is a growing realization that the electronic era in which we now find ourselves makes it possible to reinvent how we accomplish this.

One new initiative, the Public Library of Science (www.publiclibraryofscience.org) has as its goal "making the world's scientific and medical literature freely accessible to scientists and to the public around the world, for the benefit of scientific progress, education and the public good."  Their focus is on the "establishment of international online public libraries of science that will archive and distribute the complete contents of published scientific articles, and foster the development of new ways to search, interlink and integrate the information that is currently partitioned into millions of separate reports and segregated into thousands of different journals, each with its own restrictions on access."

The creators of the Public Library of Science have written and circulated an open letter threatening a boycott of any journal that by September 1, 2001, does not grant unrestricted and free access to its articles within 6 months of its publication.  This letter has been signed by almost 30,000 people around the world.

Unfortunately, the date in this letter has now passed, and we have seen at best only very modest changes in the practices followed by the publishing houses.  As a result, the Public Library of Science is now "working to establish a non-profit scientific publisher under the banner of the Public Library of Science, operated by scientists, for the benefit of science and the public."

The Library Committee applauds the goals of the Public Library of Science.  They have identified the core of the problem that we face, and have energetically tried to architect a movement to change one of the most important facets of how we conduct our work.

However, the gift of hindsight allows us to understand why their open letter has had only limited impact on the publishing industry.  First, although proposed as a Public Library of *Science*, its focus was very much on the life sciences.  For example, the first sentence of the open letter reads "We support the establishment of an online public library that would provide the full contents of the published record of research and scholarly discourse *in medicine and the life sciences*."  (Emphasis added)  The letter and proposed measures do not resonate well with many of those in such disciplines as some of the physical sciences, which often have different modalities for disseminating scholarly works.  For example, in physics and mathematics the Los Alamos National Labs preprint library (now located at Cornell) has become very popular and followed a very different model than that espoused by the Public Library of Science.  Other issues include the fact that their measures only address future publications, and leave the important question of archival access to earlier publications unaddressed.  It is also not very credible to expect young scientists to forego publishing in leading journals and threaten their promotion cases if the publisher of a key journal does not abide by the principles set out by the Public Library of Science.

Rather than endorsing the Public Library of Science, the Library Committee endorses more broadly support of any and all measures that can achieve the broader, cheaper, and speedier dissemination of and access to scholarly works, especially through the new opportunities made possible by computing technology and the Internet.  For example, the Budapest Open Access Initiative (http://www.soros.org/openaccess) proposes actions authors and editors can take to promote online access to published works.  They do not advocate a boycott of unruly publishers, but instead suggest that authors place their articles in open electronic archives, and also that editors and other scholars found new journals that publish papers electronically and charge no access fees and achieve financial solvency through author fees, advertising, or grant funding.  This, too, is an initiative that focuses on measures attuned to one set of scientists, especially in the physical sciences, who already are doing this.  However, within these communities, it, too, might have some impact.

Resolution

Be it resolved that the New Brunswick Faculty Council recommends that

• The University strongly encourage its faculty to take measures to foster the publication of scholarly work in media that enable broad, speedy, and inexpensive access via electronic means, as well as measures to foster the creation of such publication venues.

• The University should recognize as service to the research community and to Rutgers, including in promotion matters, actions by Rutgers faculty involving the creation or support of such publication venues, including publishing in them.

• The University should strive to find other means to encourage and  recognize faculty playing such roles in their disciplines, especially targeting senior faculty who have both the opportunity to have more significant impact in measures such as the founding of new top-tier journals that target broad, speedy, and inexpensive dissemination of scholarship, as well as whose careers will face less perceived or real risk than for those of junior faculty looking ahead to promotion.

• The University should strive to participate broadly in multi-institution efforts whose goals are to establish and support these new modes of scholarly publication, where the influence of multiple organizations may be able to achieve inroads legally where Rutgers's individual actions may not.

Final Comment: Events in this area are occurring rapidly and require careful monitoring.  The Library Committee believes it would be helpful for the New Brunswick Faculty Council to play a central role in this process, and the Committee would accept a charge for the future to follow these developments and report them to the full Council as necessary.