Publish or be dammed

PUBLISH OR be damned'' has long been the creed of scientists all over the world. But today could well mark a new beginning for scientific publication in the life sciences and medicine.

Over the last 10 months, more than 26,000 scientists from 170 countries, including many Nobel Laureates, have signed an open letter demanding that all scientific journals make available the original research which they have already published to a freely accessible international online public library. Some 335 Indian scientists, from research students to full professors, affiliated to a wide variety of institutions, have signed the open letter issued by the Public Library of Science.

But many leading scientific journals, including Nature and Science which, for instance, published the research papers relating to the human genome sequencing, have refused to oblige.

The supporters of the Public Library of Science initiative have therefore to make good their threat. From today, these scientists are to ``publish in, edit or review for, and personally subscribe to'' only those scientific journals which meet their free access conditions.

In a letter published on the Public Library of Science web site (www.publiclibraryofscience.org) , leading scientists behind the initiative agreed that ``the range of journals that have met our conditions is not yet sufficient to accommodate all the work that we and our colleagues must publish''.

Outlining further steps to overcome this shortcoming, including continuing to talk to publishers of journals, the scientists that it was necessary to establish a non-profit scientifc publisher under the banner of the Public Library of Science, operated by scientists, for the benefit of science and the public.

``We are beginning to assemble an editorial board of outstanding scientists from around the world who share this vision. We are already raising the necessary funds to cover the start-up and initial operating costs,'' they added, asking for help and support from the scientific community.

Journals such as the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Molecular Biology of the Cell, the British Medical Journal, Bioinformatics, Genome Biology, the Canadian Medical Association Journal, and the Journal of the American Medical Informatics Asssociation, as well as various online journals published by BioMedCentral, have agreed to make their published research reports available within six months at the National Institutes of Health's public archival site, PubMed Central.

Several journals have decided to allow full-text searching at PubMed Central and access to the articles at their web sites. Other journals will be allowing free access to back issues at their web sites.

Interestingly, physicists have been able to make their research work freely available for the last 10 years on a web server maintained upto now by the Los Alamos National Laboratory in the United States.

N.Gopal Raj

in Thiruvananthapuram

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