Six proposals for freeing online access to the refereed literature and how the Cortex initiative can help.

Roberts et al., in “Building A “GenBank” of the Published Literature” (http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/291/5512/2318a), argue compellingly for the following three pleas to publishers and authors: It is imperative to free the refereed literature online. To achieve this goal, the following should be done: (i) Established journal publishers should give away their journal contents online for free. (In the biomedical sciences, they can do this by depositing them in PubMedCentral http://pubmedcentral.nih.gov/) (ii) Authors should only submit their work to journals that agree to give their contents away online for free (boycotting those that do not). (iii) In place of established journals that do not give away their contents online for free, new alternative journals (e.g., BioMed Central http://www.biomedcentral.com) should be established that do. The goal of freeing the refereed literature online is an entirely valid one, optimal for science and scholarship, attainable, inevitable, and indeed already somewhat overdue. But Roberts et al.’s proposed means alas do not look like the fastest or surest way of attaining that goal – particularly as there is a tested and proven alternative means that will attain the very same goal, without asking or waiting for journals to do anything, and without asking or waiting for authors to give up anything: (a) Apart from a few commendable exceptions, such as Cortex (http://www.cortex-online.org), publishers seem unlikely to decide pre-emptively to give away their contents online at this time. If researchers wait until many or most journals find a reason for doing so, it is likely to be a very long wait. (PubMedCentral has only about twenty willing journals so far, out of many thousand refereed biomedical journals). (b) Asking authors to choose which journal to submit their research to on the basis of whether or not the journal agrees to give away its contents online for free rather than on the basis authors currently use – journal quality, track-record, impact factor – is again an unreasonable thing to ask, and will result in a long, long wait. More important, it is an unnecessary thing to ask, as there is already a means for authors to achieve precisely the same goal immediately, without having to give up anything at all: by self-archiving their refereed articles themselves, in interoperable, University Eprint Archives (http://www.eprints.org) (Harnad 2001c). (c) Creating new alternative journals, without track-records, to try to draw away submissions from the non compliant established journals, is another very long uphill path, and again it is not at all clear why authors should prefer to take this path, renouncing their preferred established journals, when they can have their cake