An entry on scientific publishing may not be very fascinating, but I'm going to tell you how to get free access to cutting edge science, free access to slightly old science, and free access to science history.
In the U.S., much, if not most, of the science is funded through grants from public agencies. These include the National Institutes of Health, the National Science Foundation, and others. This means that taxpayer dollars go toward funding most of the research done in academic institutions.
Almost all of that science does get published in peer-reviewed scientific journals, and those journals are accessible to the public. However, they’re not free, and they’re definitely not cheap. It costs more to get a subscription to e.g., The Journal of Biological Chemistry (Printed journal is $2,625 per year and Online journal is $2,460 per year) than it does to something like People (a little over $50 a year). You can get individual papers, but you pay between $15-$30 a paper, depending on the journal.
It’s the law of supply and demand. More people are interested in the latest shenanigans of Britney Spears than say, the Mechanism of Transcriptional Activation by the Proto-oncogene Twist1. (yes, it’s a shame—the proto-oncogene is not as sexy, but it’s much more substantial; however, I doubt it can sing). (FYI, an oncogene is a normal gene, or piece of our DNA, that are usually inactive. When they become activated through some environmental cue or a mutation, they can lead to the formation of a cancer. A proto-oncogene is a normal gene that has the capacity to become an oncogene through mutations or something that leads to a very increased expression of that gene)
Most of us scientists don’t even have subscriptions to these journals. We get access because the institutions where we work buy the subscriptions.
About 10 years ago, I first heard of a movement to get access for regular taxpayers to the science they indirectly paid to have done. It makes sense. If the research is taxpayer funded, then don’t the taxpayers have a right to peruse it? At the time it was being debated, there was even short talk about having researchers save every scrap of paper on which they wrote results.
We joked in the lab about it because some people had results scribbled onto paper towels before they wrote them up more formally in their lab notebook. Would we have to save every scrap, and not only save it, but explain it in a format that anyone could understand? We would spend most of our time decipering the lab codes instead of actually doing the science.
Well, thankfully, we didn’t have to save used paper towels. A new trend in scientific publishing happened, however. I think the first to start it was the Public Library of Science (PLoS). This organization is committed to open access publishing that is free to everyone. The cost of publishing the papers are paid for by the researchers who publish in the journals. The concept of a “page charge” is not new. Most journals have them.
PLoS is committed to open distribution of research. They were smart when they started the venture. They knew that the only way such a venture could succeed is if they had great science there. So, a perusal of the Editorial Board shows respected scientists from many of the world’s top institutions. These are people who have published in Science and Nature, two of the most prestigious scientific journals.
At present PLoS publishes seven journals: PLoS Biology, Medicine, Computational Biology, Genetics, Pathogens, ONE, and Neglected Tropical Diseases. The PLoS journals have editorials and features in addition to the hard science articles.
There are other open access journals out there. You can find a directory here at the Directory of open access journals. At this directory you can get access to research in biology, chemistry, physics, health, as well as law and political science.
Additionally, some other journals, while not entirely open access have several articles each issue that are labeled open access. Most notably in this category is the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science of the USA (PNAS), which publishes many different types of science.
Granted, these are hard research articles. They’re not geared toward the lay public. They are written for other scientists. This is the scientific literature. But it’s out there for anyone to read. Think of it as a portal. You may not understand the papers (I don’t understand all the papers), but if parts of it are of interest, you can do more research on your own on the web about the topic.
I just think that everyone should know about this free resource to the knowledge of cutting edge science.
And just a note. While most of the other journals charge for access to their articles, many offer older articles in their journals for free online. For some, in as little as 6 months after publication the articles are available for free download. What's really cool about this is that some of the very old journals are getting all of their issues available digitally. This means you can read old science articles from the 19th century and early 20th century. Some are great fun. Nature hopes to have its entire archive digitized by early 2008. This means that articles from 1869 can be downloaded (but I don't know if access will be free). PNAS has free access back to 1915. So does the Journal of Bacteriology
So, we can read the cutting edge science and the history of science.
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