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Over the past decade the Internet
has been the battlefield for the dissemination of basic scientific
knowledge - from which any popularisation of science is ultimately
derived. Articles written by and for researchers are published by
specialised journals, but only after the process of peer review.
Stevan Harnad, professor of cognitive sciences at Southampton University's
Faculty of Psychology in the United Kingdom, estimates that 'there
are currently at least 20 000 journals with reading committees in
every discipline, publishing more than 2 million articles a year'.
No academic library, however rich, can acquire and archive such
a mass of information. Scientists therefore have unequal and always
partial access to what must be the basis for their work. The problem
is particularly acute in the developing countries (see box).
There is also, of course, the matter of the general public and science
communicators.
Success in physics
In response, recent years have brought a series of initiatives based
on Internet technology with the aim of providing 'free, universal
and immediate access to scientific information' for all, to quote
Frank Laloë, physicist at the Ecole normale supérieure
in Paris. In 1994, for example, Paul Ginsparg, a physicist employed
at the Los Alamos national laboratory in the United States, launched
a free server named Arvix, to which physicists send their articles,
sometimes even before they are published in a science journal. It
was an immediate success. 'Arvix now contains about 150 000 articles
and is consulted 120 000 times a day', says Frank Laloë who
heads the Centre pour la communication scientifique directe (CCSD),
inspired by Arvix, and set up in 2000 in Villeurbanne, France. 'We
want to generalise and internationalise Paul Ginsparg's idea, and
are working on the long-term conservation of archives which will
not be easy given the inevitable changes in technology', he explains.
Bio bargaining
In the field of life sciences, it was Harold Varmus, director of
the US National Institutes of Health, who got the ball rolling in
1999. His idea was for a website providing not just articles already
published in biomedical journals, but also texts submitted directly
by researchers, the site having its own reading committee. Launched
in 2000 with the support of the very popular PubMed/Medline service,
PubMed Central provides free access to the contents of several dozen
journals. However, the most prestigious among them are refusing
to co-operate. Frank Laloë encountered no such resistance in
the field of physics, however, where he believes that 'publishers
are onlookers and do not participate a great deal. Ultimately, this
kind of base will be a useful tool for them too.'
Last year, US biologists launched the idea of
a single computer base making available free of charge to everyone
all scientific and medical literature six months after publication.
The Public Library of Science campaign to boycott journals
which refuse to co-operate collected the signatures of over 30 000
scientists worldwide. The initiators set up a non-profit-making
organisation with the plan to publish electronic journals free of
charge, although this has yet to produce a concrete result. The
debate resurfaced again – less confrontational this time –
in December 2001 in Budapest. The Initiative for open access
to research, backed by the foundation set up by the billionaire
Georges Soros, wants to create archives open to all, including the
'simply curious', and to encourage researchers to place their articles
on the servers of their own institutions. A virtual global base
would be created by adopting joint indexing standards and developing
search engines.
Traditional publishers are now beginning to pay
attention to such initiatives, as witnessed by the electronic forums
opened by the two most prestigious general science journals, Science
in the United States and Nature in the United Kingdom.
'Changes to the system of academic publishing are inevitable and
necessary,' admits Declan Butler, Europe correspondent with Nature
and organiser of the forum. He believes that 'all those involved
in scientific information are now living in a phase of experimentation'.
Boxes
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| Information
for developing countries
'Those who could benefit
most from science and technology are also those with
the least access to information on these subjects.'
That is the view of the organisers of SciDev.Net (http://www.scidev.
net/), a website launched in December 2001 and financed
by the Department for International Development (DFID
– UK), the Research Centre for International Development
(CR - Canada) and the Swedish Agency for International
Development Co-operation (ASDI). The site is run by
David Dickson who used to work for the British magazine
Nature, and presents dossiers combining news
and more in-depth information on subjects 'at the science/technology/sustainable
development interface'.
While it is no doubt
essential to report on such subjects, isn’t the
priority to provide access to basic scientific information
for researchers and engineers in these countries, something
they are prevented from doing by the high cost of subscribing
to 'primary' journals? This is one of the arguments
put forward by scientists who have been calling for
several years now for free and universal access to fundamental
articles. The same thinking is behind the launch, by
the UN Secretary General in September 2000, of the Health
InterNetwork initiative (http://www.healthinternetwork.org/),
with the aim of providing equal access to health information.
It is managed by the World Health Organisation and supported
by a group of international organisations, NGOs and
private foundations. The Internet portal started up
in 2002, placing on-line and free of charge the content
of more than 2 000 medical journals, databases, information
systems and other tools, for use by universities, medical
schools, research centres and other public institutions
in some 70 developing countries. The initiative also
aims to establish or improve Internet access for public
or private non-profit-making organisations in these
countries.
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