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OPINION
Access all areas The momentum towards open publishing looks unstoppable but more still needs to be done to make science truly accessible, says Stephen Curry IF YOU would like to read the latest research from my lab, be my guest. Our report on a protein from a mouse version of the winter vomiting virus has just been published in the journal PLoS One and is available online for free – to anyone (vol 7, p e38723). Contrast that with my first paper, published in 1990, which you could only have read if you had access to a university library with an expensive subscription to the journal Biochemistry. Back in 1990 – before the world wide web – that was how scientific publishing was done. Today it is being transformed by open access publishers like the Public Library of Science. Rather than being funded by journal subscriptions, these publishers charge authors or their institutions the cost of publication and make their papers available for free online. Many scientists are passionate supporters of open access and want to see the old model swept away. They have launched a protest movement dubbed the Academic Spring and organised a high-profile boycott of journals published by Elsevier. And the tide appears to be turning in their favour. This week the Finch Report, commissioned by the UK government, recommended that research papers – especially those funded by the taxpayer – should be made freely available to anyone who wants to read them. Advocates of open access claim it has major advantages over the subscription model that has been around since academic journals were invented in the 17th century. They argue that science operates 26 | NewScientist | 23 June 2012
more effectively when findings ranking among them. Not all can be accessed freely and journals are equal – they are immediately by scientists around graded by impact factor, which the world. Better yet, it allows new reflects the average number of results to be data-mined using times that the papers they publish powerful web-crawling technology are cited by others. Nature’s that might spot connections impact factor is 36, one of the between data – insights that no highest going, whereas individual would be likely to make. Biochemistry’s is around 3.2. But if open access is so clearly Biochemistry is well regarded – superior, why has it not swept all many journals have lower before it? The model has been factors – but a paper in Nature around for a decade but about is still a much greater prize. nine-tenths of the approximately Unfortunately, it is prized for 2 million research papers that the wrong reasons. Impact factors appear every year are still “If open access is so clearly published behind a paywall. superior, why are ninePart of the reason is scientists’ reluctance to abandon traditional tenths of papers published behind paywalls?” journals and the established
apply to journals as a whole, not individual papers or their authors. Despite this, scientists are still judged on publications in high-impact journals; funding and promotion often depend on it. Consequently few are willing to risk bucking the trend. This has allowed several publishers to resist calls to abandon the subscription model. Another reason for the slowness of the revolution is concern about quality. Unlike many traditional journals, PLoS One does not assess the significance of research during peer review; it simply publishes all papers judged to be technically sound. However, this concern proved unfounded. PLoS One now publishes more papers than any other life science journal and has an impact factor of 4.4. The world of scientific publishing is slowly changing and the hegemony of established journals is being challenged. Shaken by the competition, more of them are offering variants of open access. At the high end of the market, Nature is about to face competition from eLife, an open access journal to be launched later this year. Adding to the momentum, UK government research councils are increasingly insisting that the research they pay for be published in open access journals. The European Union is poised to do the same for the science it funds. In the US, a bill now before Congress would require all large federal funders to make papers freely available no later than six months after publication.
Comment on these stories at newscientist.com/opinion
Stephen Curry is professor of structural biology at Imperial College London. To comment on his research paper, visit newscientist.com/article/dn21937
One minute with...
Linus & Sven Hovmöller Meet the child who, along with his father, solved a long-standing scientific mystery and co-authored a paper You cracked a puzzle about the structure of strange crystals called approximants that had gone unsolved for eight years. Tell us more. Sven: Approximants are related to quasicrystals, which are ordered atomic structures, but with symmetries that were believed to be impossible, for example fivefold symmetry. The approximants we studied have fivefold and 10-fold symmetry. The result was Linus’s name on a paper that was published in Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A this month. What did you make of that? Linus: It’s rare and strange and cool. I don’t know how many other 10-year-old kids have done this. How did this father-son collaboration begin? Linus: Me and my father did some sudoku. He was, like, ‘‘Let’s put this number here and this number here”, but I said that he was wrong. Then he was, like, “You’re better at puzzles than me”, and he asked if I wanted to help with this thing that he’d been working on for a few years. We sat down and found the solutions to some of these crystals.
Sven: We cracked it together. We cracked four structures out of six remaining. It was pretty much a 50/50 effort. Are there similarities between solving sudoku puzzles and piecing together diffraction patterns and electron micrographs to solve approximant structures? Sven: Quite a lot actually. Linus’s main contribution was coming at it with a clear mind, being smart and able to put the puzzle together. I sort of knew too many things, and when you try to do it yourself, your brain just gets exhausted by all the different things you keep in your head at the same time. With a fresh, empty brain, so to speak, you can do something. When solving problems, it is always good to have someone to discuss them with.
Linus: What we did was to solve a set of puzzles, where the pieces were “wheels” that could be connected in different ways.
Profile Linus Hovmöller Zou, now aged 11, is the son of Sven Hovmöller and Xiaodong Zou, structural chemists at Stockholm University in Sweden. A paper they have co-authored is in June’s Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A Did it take long? Linus: It took two days to find the solutions. Linus is obviously exposed to a lot of science. Does a career in research beckon? Sven: Because of our interest in quasicrystals, we had Daniel Shechtman [winner of the chemistry Nobel prize for discovering quasicrystals] here for dinner after he got his prize. He talked a little bit with Linus and said he could become an excellent scientist. But we are not pushing him, he can be what he wants.
Linus: I don’t know what I want to do yet. When you’re not solving crystal structures, what do you like to do? Linus: I like to play computer games with my friends. I have met a lot of people in different countries when playing games, for example Cyprus and Denmark. I also like to watch videos on Youtube. Interview by Jon White
23 June 2012 | NewScientist | 27
Xiaodong Zou
For UK science minister David Willetts, the motive goes beyond economics: “As taxpayers put their money towards intellectual enquiry, they cannot be barred from then accessing it.” I agree that access is a public good, but making journals open to all won’t be enough. Most scientific literature is written by researchers, for researchers. The dry, jargon-laden language is frequently impenetrable to scientists outside the specialism, never mind the general public – a barrier higher than any paywall. Open access could be the key to unlocking this information. The model is seen as disruptive to publishers; I hope it might also be disruptive to scientists. By expanding the readership of scientific papers, open access could stimulate demand for a literature that is intelligible as well as accessible. The difficulties of such a move should not be understated. The style of research papers has served its audience well for a long time, but a public-side pull on scientists would be no bad thing. If more of us felt motivated to pitch our findings to the public it could bring benefits to all sides: a society more engaged with science and scientists more engaged with society. The stuttering debates on genetic modification, climate, vaccines, drug policy and energy show that we need to find ways to build more meaningful dialogue. We can make a small start now. Have a look at my latest paper. It may commit a few jargon sins – I’m still getting my eye in – but it should explain why we worked out the structure of a protein from a norovirus that infects mice, and how that might help us tackle a human disease. I’m interested to know what you think. n
Access all areas The momentum towards open publishing looks unstoppable but more still needs to be done to make science truly accessible, says Stephen Curry IF YOU would like to read the latest research from my lab, be my guest. Our report on a protein from a mouse version of the winter vomiting virus has just been published in the journal PLoS One and is available online for free – to anyone (vol 7, p e38723). Contrast that with my first paper, published in 1990, which you could only have read if you had access to a university library with an expensive subscription to the journal Biochemistry. Back in 1990 – before the world wide web – that was how scientific publishing was done. Today it is being transformed by open access publishers like the Public Library of Science. Rather than being funded by journal subscriptions, these publishers charge authors or their institutions the cost of publication and make their papers available for free online. Many scientists are passionate supporters of open access and want to see the old model swept away. They have launched a protest movement dubbed the Academic Spring and organised a high-profile boycott of journals published by Elsevier. And the tide appears to be turning in their favour. This week the Finch Report, commissioned by the UK government, recommended that research papers – especially those funded by the taxpayer – should be made freely available to anyone who wants to read them. Advocates of open access claim it has major advantages over the subscription model that has been around since academic journals were invented in the 17th century. They argue that science operates 26 | NewScientist | 23 June 2012
more effectively when findings ranking among them. Not all can be accessed freely and journals are equal – they are immediately by scientists around graded by impact factor, which the world. Better yet, it allows new reflects the average number of results to be data-mined using times that the papers they publish powerful web-crawling technology are cited by others. Nature’s that might spot connections impact factor is 36, one of the between data – insights that no highest going, whereas individual would be likely to make. Biochemistry’s is around 3.2. But if open access is so clearly Biochemistry is well regarded – superior, why has it not swept all many journals have lower before it? The model has been factors – but a paper in Nature around for a decade but about is still a much greater prize. nine-tenths of the approximately Unfortunately, it is prized for 2 million research papers that the wrong reasons. Impact factors appear every year are still “If open access is so clearly published behind a paywall. superior, why are ninePart of the reason is scientists’ reluctance to abandon traditional tenths of papers published behind paywalls?” journals and the established
apply to journals as a whole, not individual papers or their authors. Despite this, scientists are still judged on publications in high-impact journals; funding and promotion often depend on it. Consequently few are willing to risk bucking the trend. This has allowed several publishers to resist calls to abandon the subscription model. Another reason for the slowness of the revolution is concern about quality. Unlike many traditional journals, PLoS One does not assess the significance of research during peer review; it simply publishes all papers judged to be technically sound. However, this concern proved unfounded. PLoS One now publishes more papers than any other life science journal and has an impact factor of 4.4. The world of scientific publishing is slowly changing and the hegemony of established journals is being challenged. Shaken by the competition, more of them are offering variants of open access. At the high end of the market, Nature is about to face competition from eLife, an open access journal to be launched later this year. Adding to the momentum, UK government research councils are increasingly insisting that the research they pay for be published in open access journals. The European Union is poised to do the same for the science it funds. In the US, a bill now before Congress would require all large federal funders to make papers freely available no later than six months after publication.
Comment on these stories at newscientist.com/opinion
Stephen Curry is professor of structural biology at Imperial College London. To comment on his research paper, visit newscientist.com/article/dn21937
One minute with...
Linus & Sven Hovmöller Meet the child who, along with his father, solved a long-standing scientific mystery and co-authored a paper You cracked a puzzle about the structure of strange crystals called approximants that had gone unsolved for eight years. Tell us more. Sven: Approximants are related to quasicrystals, which are ordered atomic structures, but with symmetries that were believed to be impossible, for example fivefold symmetry. The approximants we studied have fivefold and 10-fold symmetry. The result was Linus’s name on a paper that was published in Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A this month. What did you make of that? Linus: It’s rare and strange and cool. I don’t know how many other 10-year-old kids have done this. How did this father-son collaboration begin? Linus: Me and my father did some sudoku. He was, like, ‘‘Let’s put this number here and this number here”, but I said that he was wrong. Then he was, like, “You’re better at puzzles than me”, and he asked if I wanted to help with this thing that he’d been working on for a few years. We sat down and found the solutions to some of these crystals.
Sven: We cracked it together. We cracked four structures out of six remaining. It was pretty much a 50/50 effort. Are there similarities between solving sudoku puzzles and piecing together diffraction patterns and electron micrographs to solve approximant structures? Sven: Quite a lot actually. Linus’s main contribution was coming at it with a clear mind, being smart and able to put the puzzle together. I sort of knew too many things, and when you try to do it yourself, your brain just gets exhausted by all the different things you keep in your head at the same time. With a fresh, empty brain, so to speak, you can do something. When solving problems, it is always good to have someone to discuss them with.
Linus: What we did was to solve a set of puzzles, where the pieces were “wheels” that could be connected in different ways.
Profile Linus Hovmöller Zou, now aged 11, is the son of Sven Hovmöller and Xiaodong Zou, structural chemists at Stockholm University in Sweden. A paper they have co-authored is in June’s Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A Did it take long? Linus: It took two days to find the solutions. Linus is obviously exposed to a lot of science. Does a career in research beckon? Sven: Because of our interest in quasicrystals, we had Daniel Shechtman [winner of the chemistry Nobel prize for discovering quasicrystals] here for dinner after he got his prize. He talked a little bit with Linus and said he could become an excellent scientist. But we are not pushing him, he can be what he wants.
Linus: I don’t know what I want to do yet. When you’re not solving crystal structures, what do you like to do? Linus: I like to play computer games with my friends. I have met a lot of people in different countries when playing games, for example Cyprus and Denmark. I also like to watch videos on Youtube. Interview by Jon White
23 June 2012 | NewScientist | 27
Xiaodong Zou
For UK science minister David Willetts, the motive goes beyond economics: “As taxpayers put their money towards intellectual enquiry, they cannot be barred from then accessing it.” I agree that access is a public good, but making journals open to all won’t be enough. Most scientific literature is written by researchers, for researchers. The dry, jargon-laden language is frequently impenetrable to scientists outside the specialism, never mind the general public – a barrier higher than any paywall. Open access could be the key to unlocking this information. The model is seen as disruptive to publishers; I hope it might also be disruptive to scientists. By expanding the readership of scientific papers, open access could stimulate demand for a literature that is intelligible as well as accessible. The difficulties of such a move should not be understated. The style of research papers has served its audience well for a long time, but a public-side pull on scientists would be no bad thing. If more of us felt motivated to pitch our findings to the public it could bring benefits to all sides: a society more engaged with science and scientists more engaged with society. The stuttering debates on genetic modification, climate, vaccines, drug policy and energy show that we need to find ways to build more meaningful dialogue. We can make a small start now. Have a look at my latest paper. It may commit a few jargon sins – I’m still getting my eye in – but it should explain why we worked out the structure of a protein from a norovirus that infects mice, and how that might help us tackle a human disease. I’m interested to know what you think. n