Open Access to Research Is in the Public Interest

W ith very little fanfare, American science will make a sizeable leap forward in the coming year—if Congress and the National Institutes of Health deliver on their promise for public access to medical research. As scientists—one of us a Nobel researcher in biomedical science and one of us a recently tenured faculty member at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology—we may have much to celebrate for scientists of all generations. As scientists, scientifi c literature is our lifeblood, because only by reading our colleagues' work can we know where the cutting edge of knowledge currently lies and hence where our work should be directed. Yet increasingly, subscriptions to the very journals that we must read are becoming too expensive—often in the thousands of dollars. The availability of the information vital to our research is needlessly restricted by the publishers of the scientifi c literature, who are mainly large commercial entities for whom maximizing profi ts is their priority. Fortunately, help is at hand. The big " if " remains whether this will happen. The National Institutes of Health have championed their wish to maintain all federally funded medical research in a publicly accessible online archive maintained by the National Library of Medicine's PubMed Central. It stands to reason that taxpayer-supported science should be available to all. The Pew Trust recently reported that 93 million Americans searched for medical knowledge on the Web to fi nd the latest information for their health conditions, and more importantly, 58% actually took this information to their doctors. The public interest is clear. What about the interests of science? We know fi rsthand that faster, barrier-free access to scientifi c research fi ndings is equally good if not more compelling for science and scientists— senior and early-career researchers alike. It's good for science because knowledge is cumulative—it advances by building on previous knowledge. Research in a vacuum has little or no value; it is infi nitely more valuable when shared and used. Let's also be plain about the advancement of scientists, not just good science. When barriers to access are swept away, research is used more, and that equates to more citations. Scientifi c peers acknowledge our work more frequently, and as we all acknowledge, citations are the coin of the realm in all scientifi c fi elds. Citations demonstrate the signifi cance of a scientist's research and thus advance our careers as well as our …