The simmering tension between commercial publishers and those who believe that scientific literature should be available free on the Internet boiled over last week — at a meeting held to promote dialogue between the two groups.

Disagreement was fuelled by the news that six months after the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) launched PubMed Central (PMC) — a forum for the open posting on the Internet of research results already published elsewhere — few scientists are so far using the site.

At a meeting held at the New York Academy of Medicine, Pieter Bolman, president of Academic Press, one of the leading commercial publishers, said that PMC had been “asking for trouble” by trying to change simultaneously both the dominant distribution and business models for the communication of scientific information.

In front? The publishers' CrossRef claims to be outstripping the NIH's PubMed Central. Credit: HTTP://WWW.CROSSREF.ORG

Bolman said that CrossRef, an information-exchange network agreed by publishers last November (see Nature 402, 226; 1999), contained a thousand times as much published material as PMC. He suggested that the latter, having “served its purpose” by helping to catalyse CrossRef (of which Nature is a member), should abandon its wider ambitions and join the publishers' network.

But advocates of PubMed Central say the site still has time to develop an audience. They express confidence that the participation of new publishing projects committed to open access — such as BioMedNet Central, part of the UK-based Current Science Group, which organized the meeting — will soon bring it new momentum.

Pat Brown, a geneticist at Stanford University and early advocate of PubMed Central, called on scientists to “take full control of the publishing process” and “insist that it is free, untaxed by the parasites in the publishing world”.

Harold Varmus, president of the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York and former director of the NIH, said that PubMed Central had met with more resistance than he had anticipated. He told the meeting that the project's basic vision was unchanged, but that “what we've retreated to, or I should say progressed to, is a short-term view” of the project as “a public vehicle, with government finance, to help distribute information that is in existing journals”.

Varmus says that researchers want to browse top journals — which he expects will survive — but to search systematically the material that currently appears in a vast array of middle-ranking journals. “BioMed Central is going to have a devastating impact on the mid-ranking journals,” he says.

Faced with the prediction that many scientific societies' journals will not survive the resulting fall in individual subscriptions, some speakers defended the editorial function of such journals.

George Lundberg, for example, former editor of the Journal of the American Medical Association and editor-in-chief of Medscape, an Internet-based medical database, said that the editor's role, “which much of [this] discussion is intended to abolish, sits at the middle” of scientific publishing.

And Marc Brodsky, executive director of the American Institute of Physics, predicted that BioMed Central, with its plans for ‘open’ peer review and its inclination to publish most of what it receives, would end up publishing material akin to conference proceedings — which, he says, are “not looked on very well” by the scientific community.

http://pubmedcentral.nih.gov