Harold Varmus is a Nobel prizewinner and a founder of the Public Library of Science (), which works to make scientific research freely available. From 1993 to 1999, Varmus was director of the National Institutes of 91色情片, where he pioneered PubMedCentral, a full-text repository for scientific articles housed at the NIH. In 2001, in his current job as head of the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, he helped organise a petition asking journal publishers to make their articles freely available online by placing them in PubMedCentral. Last month, PLoS published the first issue of PLoS Biology, an online, refereed, open-access journal.
You are in the middle of a distinguished career, and the system has treated you well, so you don鈥檛 seem a natural for an idea like this. Why does it strike such a chord?
Because publication is the heart of the scientific effort. Nothing glues us together as a community more than publishing. That鈥檚 what people work for. It鈥檚 the moment of revelation and potential embarrassment. You are showing your data and your conclusions and your way of thinking and the heart of your life鈥檚 work to your critical and competitive colleagues. So it鈥檚 a big moment in everyone鈥檚 life.
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But why open-access publishing? And when did the idea hit you?
I was converted by Pat Brown. Pat is a biochemist at Stanford and had done a presentation in his own lab on the work of a guy named Paul Ginsparg, one of the founders of the open-access movement. He set up a website [now developed into the arxiv.org site] that published physics preprints, and many of these articles eventually got published in conventional journals. But the preprints were all online and free access. That movement began a revolution. I was then the director of the National Institutes of 91色情片 and I realised there was incredible potential to do something in the biological sciences that would be really, deeply important, not just for the advancement of science but for providing information that the public really wanted to know. I have a special interest in advancing science in poor countries, and this was obviously an important way to do that. Open-access publishing requires no subscriptions to use the digital version, allows any use of the material as long as attribution is maintained, and involves placing the material in a public digital database that can be rigorously searched. Many of us are doing so-called high-throughput analysis that generates much more data than we ever interpret. Allowing others to mine that data for new observations is incredibly important and exciting. So I thought about this for a while and then wrote a manifesto called E-Biomed.
What happened next?
That was an interesting moment. I must have known that I was not going to be at NIH for much longer, because this caused a tremendous political argument: what the hell was I doing trying to destroy the publication industry? And actually I went too far. Politically I was na茂ve to describe the full vision rather than proceed one step at a time. People in Congress who had been, and who still are, my friends wanted me to defend what I was doing because they were being told by the lobbyists of the publishing houses that I was out to destroy the capitalist economy, so I think I would have done that differently. But it definitely got people鈥檚 attention. I revised the manifesto and tried to make it more targeted, and by the end of the year we had PubMedCentral up and running.
So what is PubMedCentral?
It was a first step in what we hoped would become a digital repository of all the works in biomedical science. Though ideally those full texts would be deposited at the time of publication, or even before publication, we realised that for most journals this was not an option. They would only provide content after a delay of anywhere from two months to a year, if at all. But even faced with good evidence that you are not going to harm the personal subscriber base if you delay deposition for six months to a year, many journals were unwilling to take the step. Frustrated by the slow progress, we decided we would try to generate interest in the scientific community, saying: 鈥淲e鈥檙e not going to submit our papers, provide reviewing, or do editing for journals that don鈥檛 provide their content to an open-access repository like PubMedCentral.鈥
And when the due date came around, what happened?
It was clear that not as many journals as we would have liked had gone over to the PubMedCentral model. That鈥檚 when we realised we needed to do something a little more ambitious. One of the things we were interested in doing was creating journals that did it right. So three of us got together: Pat Brown, Mike Eisen [an evolutionary biologist at Berkeley] and myself. We were the founders, more or less. We decided we would write a prospectus and shop it around. And we finally got lucky with the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, who were very responsive and gave us around $9 million, which we used to hire extraordinary people.
But why bother? What鈥檚 wrong with the established scientific publishing system?
Well, it doesn鈥檛 live up to the opportunities that are created by the internet. The system as it exists has produced many good journals, but journals are expensive and increasingly people are reading and searching online. There鈥檚 an opportunity here to eliminate boundaries between the individual and the information, and between pieces of information. I think all of us were startled by the incredible power that the internet provided for looking at and working with the genome. If we had published pieces of genomes paper by paper we would be much less far along than we are. That model has been a powerful force in helping people to think about how the scientific literature can be worked with. An important issue is having widespread searching through a public library. That鈥檚 why we use Public Library of Science, PloS, as our name. We strongly believe in this concept to go to one place and look at everything. But the issues are many. Most of us who are of a certain age grew up at a time when there was essentially no science in the developing world because there was very little access to information. One of my prime motivations is simply getting the information that governments and other philanthropic organisations have paid for into the hands of the people who have a vital interest in seeing it.
I can already buy scientific articles online. The access is there鈥
But is the access really there? You may say you鈥檒l pay for them, but it adds up pretty quickly. Imagine you are a doctor and have encountered a patient with an unusual disease, or a high-school student trying to write a paper. You could identify quite a number of papers you鈥檇 be interested in looking at. But until you look at them you don鈥檛 really know whether you want to read them. The prospect of paying several hundred dollars to identify what you want to read is usually not very appealing. Don鈥檛 you ask yourself when you do that, why should I be paying for this when most of this research was done with money I provided to the US government as a taxpayer?
What about those who say you are just shifting costs from library budgets to research budgets? You are now asking researchers to pay to publish their articles鈥
But that鈥檚 fine. People criticise the business plan of open-access publishers because it involves authors 鈥 and that means usually the funding agencies the authors use 鈥 paying a fee upfront of $1000 or $1500. They say that is a new expense. But it鈥檚 not. The organisations 鈥 the funding agencies and research organisations 鈥 paying those costs will not change. It鈥檚 the way the payment is done that鈥檚 changing, and the total costs will certainly go down. The research environment has been sustaining the publishing industry for years. That鈥檚 not a bad thing. Publishing is crucial to research. In fact, one of the things we are trying to get across loud and clear is that publishing has to be considered part of the cost of doing research.
So have you got the cost basis right?
People legitimately argue about whether we have figured the best way to do this. We probably haven鈥檛 gotten all the details quite right yet. We wanted to show how we thought it ought to be done by producing a journal that tested some of the principles of open-access publishing, including the business model, and attempted to make an open-access journal that was considered to be prestigious. This is an important point, because when you begin to study the culture of the scientific community you find that people are very, very sensitive to the place in the hierarchy accorded to the journals. So if you want a job at Harvard or Sloan-Kettering or other places, all too often it鈥檚 the perception, and probably the reality, that publishing in only three or four of the several thousand journals of biomedical sciences 鈥 The New England Journal of Medicine, Nature, Science, Cell, a couple of others 鈥 is virtually a requirement for hiring. Many of the first open-access journals published didn鈥檛 have that kind of cultural credibility. We think we can achieve that for PLoS Biology by virtue of the rigorous review we are doing, the high quality of people associated with the journal, and our efforts to make it a journal of distinction.
Is there an inherent difference between science publishing and publishing per se?
Sure. All of us who do science for a living make an incredible effort to ensure that the scientific publishing industry works well. We provide our papers for free, and our tradition is to assign copyright to the journals, which was a huge mistake, in my view. We do editing, reviewing, and we provide these services which in journalism or book publishing would be work for which you would be compensated quite nicely. We all think of this as our civic duty. What most people don鈥檛 realise is that when they do this for a for-profit publisher they are actually filling the stockholders鈥 pockets.
I talked to someone at Science, and he said: 鈥淲e wish them luck, we鈥檙e also a scientific society, but we can鈥檛 afford to experiment. Our journal finances all our good works, and I鈥檓 not sure that what they [PLoS] are doing is actually going to be sustainable鈥濃
Sounds like Alan Leshner [Science鈥檚 executive publisher]
It was鈥
Alan鈥檚 a good friend of mine. We had dinner a few weeks ago and talked about all of this. I think that position is highly flawed for the following reasons. First, Science is actually a very special case. I buy it and I鈥檓 glad to get it every week because it鈥檚 my weekly New York Times for science. It鈥檚 the product of hard-working journalists who are doing science journalism, writing the book reviews and obituaries and editorials and many reviews and, most importantly for me, political news about science. So it is exceptional.
OK, so what about other journals?
Almost all scientific societies publish journals, which are usually very good. My own very strongly held opinion is that scientific societies are like guilds, they鈥檙e like unions. They should serve the members, and when they don鈥檛 there鈥檚 no reason to keep them going. Most societies provide meetings, workshops, educational programmes, and these activities should be encouraged. On the other hand, I don鈥檛 believe that traditional business plans that depend upon the sale 鈥 the inappropriate sale from my point of view 鈥 of subscriptions to these journals should be how these societies finance their activities. To best serve their members they are simply going to have to adapt to the opportunities for much more efficient and useful publications of science by the internet.
Do you want to show Nature and Science and everybody else that this is a better way? Do you want to drive them out of business?
No, no, we鈥檙e not trying to put people out of business. The ideal solution from our point of view is to see journals convert to an open-access form.
But you tried your petition and you didn鈥檛 really convince these guys鈥
The petition was not useless. First of all it brought the open-access movement further along. Over 30,000 people signed. That鈥檚 not to be ignored. And a lot of journals did sign up. We were hoping for a thousand journals and we ended up with about a hundred, and more are coming on.
But you鈥檝e drawn attention to the issue, and they haven鈥檛 come around yet鈥
We鈥檙e really working on several different issues at once. One big issue is the journals themselves. The private publishers are unlikely ever to like this, let鈥檚 face it. I don鈥檛 know yet what they are going to do. I think they could become open access. It鈥檚 conceivable that a private publisher could be very successful by charging, say, $4000 an article instead of $1000. It鈥檚 possible that journals will find other ways to raise money in open-access format. But in general I think you are going to find that the private, for-profit publishers are not going to like this because the kind of profit margins they鈥檝e had, exceeding 40 per cent 鈥 much higher than that in some cases 鈥 simply aren鈥檛 going to be tenable in the long run.
Is it eventually going to be pressure that brings them around?
Yes, I think it would be. But our real target is the society journals. Those are the journals we think should move in the direction of open access. And the way I鈥檇 like to see that happen is by having the other journals say: 鈥淟ook, PLoS journals are getting the best articles because people see that not only do they do an incredible job in the editing and the promulgation, but it鈥檚 better to be published in a form that allows everybody to see it instantaneously.鈥 And if we, BioMedCentral and other open access journals attract the best articles and most of the articles, the other journals will have to come around because otherwise they won鈥檛 get submissions anymore.