‘A world where journals might just go away’

As the coronavirus outbreak puts open science under the microscope, the sharp divisions over how research is conducted and distributed are coming into focus.

Dr. Sue Biggins, senior vice president and director of the Basic Sciences Division at Fred Hutch, sees a certain inevitability in the rise of open science. “We have to think about a world where journals might just go away,” she said.

“Everything’s going to be on the internet. I want to see us focus on how to make things work for the next generation, and not just where we are now,” said Biggins.

Driving the movement for open science is a mounting resentment against the power of scientific publishing houses that charge high fees for access to the works they publish, and the lengthy and opaque peer-review processes they employ. With trained scientific editors and networks of academic volunteers who analyze submissions, the premier houses produce elite journals such as Cell, Science and Nature, whose selections for print can make or break academic careers.

“If you want to fly high with the so-called ‘high-impact’ journals, the review process can drag along for a year,” said Dr. Randy Schekman, a University of California, Berkeley cell biologist who won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 2013.

In 2011, he was named the founding editor-in-chief of eLife, which provides free access to papers that are published after a streamlined peer-review process, and he served there for seven years. Coincidentally, eLife recently launched a pilot project, Transparent Review in Preprints, by which its peer-review services will be offered to authors of bioRxiv papers.

Schekman also is a leading advocate for the University of California library system’s decision last year to break with Elsevier, publisher of Cell and nearly 3,000 other journals, over open access and subscription fees. More than 30 prominent UC faculty members have resigned from Cell Press editorial boards. Negotiations between the publisher and the 10-campus system are expected to resume.

“Being a public institution, they wanted more for their money. They want all the work published by UC scholars to be open access, and Elsevier balked at that. It would put a huge dent in their excessive profit margins,” Schekman said.