Publisher Perish.

• Author: THOMPSON, NICHOLAS
• Position: Science for free in the net

The coming battle over putting all scientific journals online for free.

RICHARD ROBERTS, A NOBEL LAUREATE for his work on nucleic acids, has become a major pain-in-the-butt for the scientific publishing industry. Like many highly successful scientists, Roberts has a reputation for being thoughtful, careful, and thorough. But he's now working on an idea that could turn scientific publishing on its head.

Along with a large group of scientists--including Harold Varmus, the acclaimed former director of the National Institutes of Health (NIH)--Roberts has been pushing the buildup of a massive repository of scientific literature called PubMed Central, hosted by NIH's National Library of Medicine. According to its advocates' vision, PMC would allow anyone in the world to freely search and retrieve the full text of any published scientific article, ideally with archives going back for decades. Want to know what the Journal of Cell Biology and all of its peers had to say about protein extraction last year, or in 1972? Log in; enter search terms; presto.

The way the system works now, anyone can log into a database hosted at NIH known as Medline, type in search terms, and retrieve article abstracts--a service currently used several hundred million times per year. But anyone who finds a useful reference has to trek over to the library, photocopy the article from the bound journal, and pore over it for the specific references. If there's no library around, too bad. NIH has a version of PubMed Central up and running, but with only about 50 journals on board, few people use it.

PubMed Central and Medline may not seem that different. But scientists and publishers alike agree that it would be revolutionary to pass from searchable abstract to searchable texts. People in the Third World would suddenly have access to the planet's great libraries; lay people interested in specific diseases would have the best information at their fingertips; all current medical researchers would save countless hours and could investigate their work much more thoroughly. An abstract can tell you the basic outline of an article--but it doesn't say what's in the data, what's buried deep, and what might have been discovered on the side, all potentially the difference between life and death. According to Varmus: "Think about hexamethonium, the drug that killed a student at Johns Hopkins. There's research out there that showed its danger. With PMC, people might have known that."

Or consider the case of Jens Mielke, a researcher at the medical school of the University of Zimbabwe in Harare, the country's leading health center. Mielke is part of a team desperately trying to diagnose and help treat cryptococcal meningitis, a form of the brain and spinal disease which afflicts HIV-positive men and women and is usually lethal if left untreated. The hospital treats about 500 meningitis-sufferers a year. But the medical school only has valid and up-to-date subscriptions to about 20 journals, compared to the thousands available in large American facilities. Consequently, Mielke lacks access to, or knowledge of, most of the current diagnostic work in his field. If his team could access PubMed Central, he says, it would "make an enormous difference. It would enable us to diagnose at twice the efficiency."

Death Be Not Proud

PMC would also have a revolutionary impact on the scientific publishing industry, and the thousands of journals catering to the medical-research community. According to Karen Hunter of Elsevier Science, a giant publishing...