I was also at this meeting, and agree with Barry's assessment. There were only two people who argued forcefully and eloquently for radically revamping the copyright status and wresting control from publishers: Barry and Pat Brown.
A few other, personal, observations about the meeting. The PubMedCentral people were strangely muted and gave very little information about their actual plans. In one of the first talks, PubMedCentral was stridently attacked by Pieter Bolman of Academic Press who seems also to be a spokesman for the CrossRef project. CrossRef is basically a way to make it easier to access on-line articles, without in any way tampering with the S/L/P system, and seems to be the publisher's answer to PubMedCentral. The PubMedCentral folks had little to say in reply. I had the feeling that they are still licking their wounds from their initial foray into the field, which resulted in a vehement counterattack from biomedical publishers and a quick retreat to a more "acceptable" position. The assessment that made the most sense to me came from an editor belonging to the Physics organization AIP (I can't remember his name). He predicted that the major, leading journals will continue to flourish and be able to dictate their terms to authors, simply because of the power of their prestige. On the other hand, the majority of lesser-status journals, which currently exist mainly to enable authors to publish, will fall prey to various open-archiving projects and many will simply disappear. Pat Brown called upon authors to boycott all journals that don't behave like "good scientific citizens". I got up and said that I don't think there is a single scientist who would boycott the New England Journal of Medicine if it accepted an article, on the basis that the NEJM isn't a good scientific citizen. He disagreed with me, and said that he, for one, wouldn't publish in it. Made me feel young again, like I was at an anti-war rally in the 60's... The folks you have to feel sorry for are the academic society publishers. Their hearts are in the right place, and they're used to being on the morally "right" side of things, while making money for their organizations. Now, their economic viability is threatened by the new environment, and they just don't have the real capitalist competitive fire that commercial publishers do. Sort of like the not-for-profit hospitals in the US, that used to "do well by doing good", and are now struggling to survive in the waters of corporate medicine. Not easy. Michael Jacobson ------------------------------------- Michael Jacobson, MD, MPH Journal Club on the Web http://www.journalclub.org/ [email protected] -----Original Message----- From: September 1998 American Scientist Forum [mailto:[email protected]]On Behalf Of Barry Markovitz Sent: Saturday, July 08, 2000 2:03 PM To: [email protected] Subject: The July 6-7 NYAM "Freedom of Information" Meeting The New York Academy of Medicine meeting "Freedom of Information The Impact of Open Access on Biomedical Science" http://www.biomedcentral.com/info/conference.asp was fascinating. Although it was put on by BioMed Central, it had almost nothing about BioMed Central on the agenda. Fiona Godlee, after multiple requests, did explain their ideas and model to us, but for a meeting to bring visibility to themselves, they maintained a very low profile. You could claim that they set the agenda, literally, and could have or should have invited known proponents of other models. But very few of us actually stuck to our assigned topics, and everyone took the "bully pulpit" to state their positions. When Harold Varmus opened the program, he clearly outlined that we should be experimenting now with various models (and be sure to study what we are doing) - no one suggested there was only one model to follow. (Except perhaps the entrenched publishers! :-) I must say though that the issue of author self-archiving was not discussed in great length. I mentioned it certainly, along with the whole problem of copyright transfer, but the majority of the attendees (being from the publishing world) were focused on the questions of cooperation with PubMed Central, participation with CrossRef, and the economic uncertainties of the open access world. One fascinating point came across that we are all aware of but I suspect is more important than we'd like to admit, at least in the biomedical world. Pat Brown said the reason authors are not flocking to the open access alternatives currently available is because it is like a rat who has always lived in a cage. Just because the cage door is open does not mean the rat will immediately want to escape the only world they've known. Peter Singer (U Toronto) said the reason the rat will stay in the cage is that is where their food and water are and have always been. Until we ensure that scientists and scholars will receive the same level of recognition for publishing in open access worlds, e.g., BioMed Central, then they will stay in their proverbial cages. Despite the incredibly narrow view on this issue from the New England Journal of Medicine, few medical authors would turn down the chance to publish there, even with its restrictive attitude, compared to the unknown recognition associated with something like BioMed Central. We are all self-serving creatures in our own way. I'm told they will put the proceedings of the meeting on the web. Several people asked me for a copy of my "slides" (Powerpoint presentation on disk), so I will be making that available for downloading shortly. __________________________________________________ Barry P. Markovitz, MD Pediatric Anesthesiology/Critical Care St. Louis Children's Hospital, Washington University School of Medicine email: [email protected] WWW: http://PedsCCM.org voice: 314-454-6215 fax: 314-454-2296 ___________________________________________________
