Marquee Scientists Challenge

Lee Hadden writes: “The Wall Street Journal has an interesting article on the high cost of
medical journals. See the issue for June 26, 2003, “Marquee Scientists Challenge
Expensive Medical Journals.” By SHARON BEGLEY, Staff Reporter of THE WALL
STREET JOURNAL. “In a challenge to the profitable business of science publishing,
a marquee group of biomedical scientists is trying to move peer-reviewed
research out of the exclusive world of expensive medical journals and make it
freely available to everyone.” “Hoping to facilitate that effort, Rep. Martin O. Sabo (D., Minn.)
Thursday is introducing federal legislation that would exclude from U.S. copyright
protection papers describing any research financed largely with federal
dollars. Journals such as Cell, Neuron and Nature wouldn’t own the papers they
publish, as is now the case, a situation that enables them to charge for access to
the documents. The bill also would require that all such papers be made
available to everyone, presumably electronically, at no charge.”
“The public is disenfranchised, as are scientists at less-wealthy
institutions,” says Nobel laureate Harold Varmus, former director of the National
Institutes of Health, and current president of Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer
Center in New York. Dr. Varmus is co-founder of the Public Library of Science,
or PLoS, a nonprofit group based in San Francisco that is leading the
open-access effort. PLoS, which also has the support of James Watson, co-discoverer of
the famous DNA double helix, aims to launch a series of free-to-all,
peer-reviewed biomedical journals beginning later this year, regardless of what happens
with Rep. Sabo’s legislation.