From the moment it was conceived, PubMed Central was
controversial, and it has remained controversial ever since. The brainchild of Harold Varmus — the then
director of the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) — the idea
for PubMed Central was first mooted in 1999, but originally called E-BIOMED.
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| Kent Anderson |
When Varmus published his initial proposal, publishers
quickly concluded that it posed a serious threat to their livelihoods.
Specifically, they were convinced that, if E-BIOMED went ahead, the US
government would become a publisher, and they would be disintermediated as a
result. So they launched a firestorm of protest.
Their protest delivered results. When the service was
launched eight months later it had been re-branded as PubMed Central, and was a pale shadow of the revolutionary new “electronic
publications” system that Varmus had envisioned. Significantly, Varmus had had
to concede that publishers would have final say on whether the papers they
published were put into PubMed Central — and most publishers chose not to
participate.
Varmus later conceded that he had been naïve not to have
anticipated the furore. “I must have known that I was not going to be at NIH
for much longer,” he joked to New Scientist in 2003, “because this
caused a tremendous political argument: what the hell was I trying to do to destroy
the publication industry.”
Nevertheless, it was soon apparent that NIH did not
intend to give up on its dream of having a large free full-text archive of
biomedical and life science papers, along the lines of the physics preprint
server arXiv. This resolve was only strengthened when, two years
later, the Open Access (OA) movement came into being. The tide of
history, it seemed, was flowing in NIH’s direction.
Socialized science
In 2004, therefore, Varmus’ successor at the NIH Elias Zerhouni published a draft policy entitled “Enhanced Public Access to NIH Research Information. The aim was to persuade researchers to post their papers in PubMed
Central.
One again, publishers objected. In a 2004 editorial
penned in the Chemical & Engineering
News, for instance, C&N Editor-in-Chief Rudy Baum complained,
“Zerhouni’s action is the opening salvo in the open-access movement's unstated,
but clearly evident, goal of placing responsibility for the entire scientific
enterprise in the federal government's hand. Open access, in fact, equates with
socialized science.”
For publishers the nightmare scenario was that
research funders would gradually squeeze them out of the process of
disseminating research. After all, the papers published in scholarly journals
are written by researchers, and the peer review process is conducted by
researchers — at no charge to publishers. In the age of the Internet, some were
beginning to conclude, the need for publishers was beginning to look moot. At
the very least, they reasoned, the role that publishers play could be reduced in
an online world. This would help ease the burden on the public purse, which many
believed was being gouged by publishers charging excessive journal prices.
But this time publisher opposition did not succeed. In
May 2005 the NIH introduced its Public Access
Policy. While this was initially only a request that researchers
post NIH-funded papers in PubMed Central, it was later upgraded to a demand,
and today researchers are required “to submit all final peer-reviewed journal
manuscripts that arise from NIH funds to the digital archive PubMed Central upon acceptance for publication.”
Publishers continued to mutter about the Public Access
Policy, but they had to learn to live with it. And faced with growing calls for
research papers to be made freely available, many also began to experiment with
OA.
But last year their fears of being disintermediated were
reignited, when three large research funders — the Wellcome Trust, the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) and the Max-Planck Society — announced plans to launch their own OA journal, eLife.
Since the funders indicated that they would not initially
be charging a publication fee, publishers complained that it was
anti-competitive. Writing on the Nature
newsblog on the day of the announcement, for instance, Nature’s Declan Butler commented, “[F]rom
what we know so far from today’s press conference, this new journal appears to
offer few tangible novel innovations and may indeed disrupt the thriving open
access environment. Its decision not to charge author fees, at least in the
journal’s short and medium term, in fact could risk setting back the cause of
open-access publishing by undermining — through what might be considered unfair
competition — economically successful open access publishers”.
And when at the end of October, eLife announced that it had published its first few articles, critics were angered to see that the papers had been hosted not on the
journal’s own website, but on PubMed Central.
