At 200 years, fortress of medical research confronts the Information Age, Part II | The Connecticut Mirror

“During the past several decades, medical journals have come under fire for exerting too much control over scientific information.A new generation of publishers and researchers are challenging the traditional model of highly selective journals that charge hefty subscription fees. Instead, they say, their priorities are to get research out to the public as quickly as possible -- and to provide it for free. Some are even bypassing the journals altogether by posting preliminary results online. "The physical, technological constraints that led to that model are now gone," said Michael Eisen, who founded the nonprofit publisher Public Library of Science in 2001. The Internet and the demand for instant information, he said, means more scientific research should be easily available. The New England Journal of Medicine's current editor Dr. Jeffrey Drazen doesn't see it that way. Sure, ‘information and the amount of information is growing,’ he said in a recent interview. But he thinks the journal's publishing model should largely remain the same. ‘We're still being very select about what we choose to publish. And I think that that's the right thing to do,’ Drazen said. ‘To go through, sift through mountains of information, to find things which we think are going to make a difference to clinicians, so it can make a difference in patients' lives. That was the challenge of my forbears in 1812 (when the journal was founded) ... and it's my challenge now.’ Public Library of Science is perhaps one of the biggest challengers of the New England Journal's publishing model. One of its eight journals, called PLOS One, accepts 65 percent of the 20,000 submissions it receives each year. That's because it rates submissions based on the scientific validity of the research rather than the often-subjective measure of an article's impact in a field. The idea is to prevent good research from languishing in the editorial review process of several journals simply because it isn't considered high-impact enough for a ‘top-tier’ journal, said Eisen... The New England Journal's brand -- as with any top-tier journal -- lies in its extreme selectivity. It publishes about 5 percent of the 10,000 or so submissions it receives every year. But the new "mega-journal" approach is growing. The 172-year-old British Medical Journal, for example, has created BMJ Open, which had an article acceptance rate of 58 percent in 2011. The creators of PLOS also challenge traditional journals' restricted access models by posting all material online for free. Eisen said such "open access" policies are more fair to the public, which funds most science and medical research anyway. A significant portion of research is funded by the National Institutes of Health, for example, which received nearly $32 billion in taxpayer money in the 2011 fiscal year. Rather than charging for subscriptions, PLOS charges submitting authors $1,350 to $3,000 per accepted article, giving exceptions to those who can't afford it. The publisher collected $12 million in such fees in 2010 and waived or discounted fees for 11 percent of submitters. PLOS turned its first profit that year, of $3 million. NEJM editors say such a model would fail to support the intense editing and peer review of each article they publish. NEJM editors say such a model would fail to support the intense editing and peer review of each article they publish... The NEJM won't disclose its profits, but when asked if a Boston Magazine estimate of $88 million in 2005 was accurate, publisher Dr. Edward Campion said, ‘it's not off by a factor of 10.’ The journal's owner, the Massachusetts Medical Society, made $70 million in publishing revenue and $20 million in advertising revenue in 2009, according to its 990 tax form... Despite the resistance of some top-tier journals to the open-access model, Eisen thinks scientific publishing is moving in that direction. Three major research funders -- the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, the Max Planck Institute and the Wellcome Trust -- recently announced their intentions to fund a new online journal known as eLife, which will be freely available to the public... The international company Elsevier, which publishes more than 2,600 academic journals, has been boycotted by nearly 10,000 researchers -- including dozens at Yale and the University of Connecticut -- who say it  charges exorbitantly high subscription fees and prevents the free exchange of knowledge. But beyond calls for ‘open access,’ another trend in the world of research may be even more of a threat to the New England Journal. It's a movement known as ‘open science.’ In such a model, scientists simply post the results of their research on websites as it's in process, receiving instant feedback from their colleagues. Ivan Oransky considers this movement the best reflection of how science works. Executive editor of Reuters Health, Oransky runs the blog EmbargoWatch, which examines how journals control the flow of scientific information... Today, ‘open science’ models are used only by a small subset of researchers... Most scientists