Harold Varmus

“ We believe that such unfettered access to a growing and secure database can be achieved without sacrificing the functions that have served the research community well for many years, including rigorous peer review and discriminating editorial decisions. ”

“ Of course, some readers may choose to ignore the entries in E-biomed that are not included in the listings of journals, especially the first-rank journals, just as many do now. But the option of seeing all available information in a field—including failed experiments, improvements in experimental methods, or unsuccessful clinical trials, often usefully annotated with commentaries posted by others in the same field—is a powerful incentive for those who are willing to look more broadly. ”

“ We envision a system for electronic publication in which existing journals, newly created journals, and an essentially unrestricted collection of scientific reports can be accessed and searched with great ease and without cost by anyone connected to the Internet. In a sense, what we are proposing is an electronic public library of medicine and other life sciences. Journals that participate in the E-biomed system would be expected to exercise expert review and editing functions. ”

“ Electronic publishing provides an opportunity to offer a third outcome to the review process, one that provides a novel solution to one of the most commonly encountered problems in current editorial practice. If a submitted report is deemed by an editorial board to be worthy of attention by some segment of the scientific community, but judged not to meet the criteria set for inclusion among a limited number of prime listings, the editorial board could still accommodate the report by choosing to maintain one or more additional listings. ”

“ The system we propose is intended to make knowledge and ideas in life sciences widely and freely accessible to the scientific community and the public, in the tradition of free public libraries. In no sense should E-biomed be interpreted as a proposal to interfere with, control, or restrict the activities of existing journals or other vehicles for transmitting scientific information. ”

“ Won't E-biomed place the scientific community at risk of losing vast quantities of published data because of inadequate provisions for archiving? We view this danger as very remote. New entries would be deposited at "mirror sites" and the entire collection would be in active use at multiple sites. We envision no difficulty in maintaining even the very large database envisioned in the E-biomed proposal, as long as there continues to be economical growth of space available on hard disks. ”

“ Before describing our proposal, it is important to acknowledge the strengths of the current system for published scientific work, because it has served the scientific community well for over 300 years. Printed journals, particularly the few hundred leading representatives, do more than just transmit results to our community. They subject the reports to peer review and editing, a process that reassures busy readers that papers have been carefully scrutinized and affords the authors an opportunity to improve their work based on the (generally anonymous) advice of their colleagues. ”

“ We acknowledge that several important scientific societies currently depend on their journals to raise the revenues that support the journals themselves and various other beneficial activities. But we can envision gradual changes in the operation of scientific societies that would allow them to continue their many functions, including editorial work, without compromising the development of an optimal general system for dissemination of research findings—an outcome that the members of any scientific society will strongly desire. ”

“ Nevertheless, since the life sciences constitute a wide range of fields, some of which have an immediate impact on public health and policy, careful attention to the deposition and retrieval of unreviewed reports may be advisable, especially in the early phases of operation. For instance, the E-biomed advisory board might restrict submissions to certain fields until the system has been tested, or search engines might be designed to survey subsections of the unreviewed component of E-biomed separately. ”

“ Other possibilities E-biomed is designed to evolve in ways that might affect the way we practice science.* In an electronic publishing system, it is possible to engage electively in a more open reviewing process—one in which critiques of the scientific reports are accessible and possibly signed. This development, if widely accepted, could offer many benefits: more responsible reviews, an instructive and ongoing public conversation about published work, and career rewards for useful commentaries about work done by others. ”

“ We expect that the vast majority of reports are likely to be submitted through editorial boards, since the biomedical research community relies heavily on the review process for discriminating among a large number of articles. But we also believe that much useful information will be communicated through the "minimal screening" route and that, with time, the community will learn to use this material effectively, in ways suggested in a later section. Such choices allow evolution. ”

“ Clearly, electronic communication has enormous advantages for people in all of these categories, because it is a democratizing force that makes distance and wealth nearly irrelevant. However, it is important to ensure that opportunities to enter reports into E-biomed are just as rich as the opportunities to access the reports filed by others. ”

“ Submission to E-biomed through editorial boards The first of the two mechanisms that authors would use to enter new scientific reports into the E-biomed database is closely aligned with current practice and retains scientific review as a prerequisite to publication. Authors would submit reports electronically to the central server, requesting review by the editorial board of an indicated journal in an appropriate field. ”

“ Recall that E-biomed is proposed to consist of two major components. The first will contain electronic refereed journals, some of which will also occur in print. Since these journals will operate with traditional peer review and editing, the questions that address the quality of the information in E-biomed do not apply to this component. The second, unreviewed component has the great value of putting on the public record a large body of potentially important data that might not otherwise be available to the scientific community and the public. ”

“ The perceived hierarchy of the journals can be useful for conferring status and grounds for career advancement on the authors of papers accepted by the most prestigious journals, and it provides a useful guide to readers besieged by the proliferation of published work. Moreover, current journals often present their reports in attractive formats, bound between colorful covers and accompanied by research commentaries, reviews, and various kinds of news, advertisements, and technical advice. ”

“ Inherent and prospective benefits of E-biomed We contend that establishment of the E-biomed system would deliver several powerful benefits to the scientific community, with very little risk and with the opportunity to supplement the system with further improvements in the near future. ”

“ But we believe that current practices also have many liabilities and that these can be addressed by an evolutionary approach that need not threaten most of the benefits attributable to the print-based publication system that is now in place. More importantly, electronic publication can offer several remarkable benefits that could never be achieved through the current system. Many of these benefits depend on low-cost, barrier-free access by scientists to all of the contributions of their fellow scientists in a conveniently displayed electronic format. ”

“ Coda The conversion of scientific publishing from a paper-based to an electronic format is occurring rapidly. The scientific community has a natural and powerful interest in helping to shape the new means by which its findings and ideas will be transmitted. It is in that spirit that we have made our initial proposal ”

“ Open access to scientific reports and assembly of personalized journals The single greatest attraction of E-biomed is that all of its scientific content will be available without barriers to any user with Internet access. This will maximize the dissemination and use of research results. ”

“ The most crucial effect of cost reduction would be the opportunity to remove price as a barrier to individuals seeking any of the vast information deposited in E-biomed. It would also offer savings to individuals, laboratories, institutions, funding agencies, and the editors and publishers who move to electronic formats. ”

“ It is also likely that more uniform electronic publishing will speed the review period, because electronic methods will probably be more generally employed to submit, transfer, review, alter, and edit the reports. In fact, those editorial boards that develop the most efficient and most accessible review processes will compete most effectively for the best reports.
Reduced costs Scientific journals are inherently costly. The price of publication and distribution is presently levied on users in a variety of ways: subscriptions to libraries and individual readers for print and electronic versions ”

“ For example, additional revenues could be raised from annual meetings, from workshops organized by the society, or from increased annual fees justified by the many valuable activities performed on behalf of the membership. In the future, additional fund-raising activities might include the production of specialized, annotated collections of material from E-biomed, selected by experts for their colleagues in a society. ”

“ Such access will allow all investigators to make the best and quickest use of the new findings that public and private funding sources around the world have paid for, and it will give citizens of all nations the greatest hope that new information will be efficiently used to understand biological systems and develop effective interventions against disease. ”

“ A larger scope, such as life sciences, might be more appropriate, but only a representative advisory board can make authoritative decisions about the disciplines that should be included at the outset. ”

“ The international interest has been especially noteworthy, since we are eager to insure that development of the E-biomed initiative proceeds as a collaborative effort involving many countries and many agencies. ”

“ Over the past decade, steeply increasing numbers of scientists on all continents have abandoned traditional mail and faxes in favor of electronic mail. Many log-on to GenBank and many other data repositories on a nearly daily basis. The titles and abstracts of papers published in most scientific journals are available "on line" from the date of publication and sometimes even before; some full texts can be accessed electronically and downloaded, with or without subscription fees ”

“ This latter component, however, is thought by some to offer tempting opportunities to disseminate information of marginal value or accuracy. But few scientists would knowingly put such information into the public domain, because it would soon diminish their reputations. (For example, according to Paul Ginsparg, in the several years of experience with e-print, the electronic pre-print file used by physicists, willful deposition of erroneous information has not been a significant problem.) ”

“ With appropriate design of the system's infrastructure and provisions for multiple electronic maintenance sites and hard-copy archives, we can also guarantee the stability of a system on which the entire research community will come to depend. ”