Stanford Biochemistry Prof. Pat Brown wants scientific research to be available to everyone, regardless of their careers, subscriptions to journals or aptitude for science.

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Sevgi Yuksel

Professor Pat Brown urges other scholars to publish research results online.

Brown and some colleagues are behind an initiative to publish research reports and scholarly articles online, making them accessible to the entire population — including the students and average citizens whose tax money funds over $50 million worth of scientific research annually.

“The fact that this information is currently the private property of publishers makes this impossible,” Brown said.

He added, “An important point is that our initiative is not about online versus print publication; it’s about putting the published record of scientific research in the public domain.”

Scientists contribute their reports to journals run by both for-profit and nonprofit organizations, which charge subscription fees that can cost up to thousands of dollars a year. This practice makes it unlikely that anyone not working directly in a certain field would get access to these materials, let alone at a reasonable cost.

A few years ago, Brown asked the scientific community to publish only in venues that made data available to the public within six months of publication. Although tens of thousands of scientists agreed, reluctance prevailed, because there were so few such journals, and scientists feared possible risk to their careers.

Brown and company envisioned launching an alternative non-profit organization to publish scientific papers without assuming ownership of published material. Although there is little opposition from scientific and medical colleagues to Brown’s proposal, the established publishing systems remain dominant.

Brown is now working on a new project, but he is waiting to elaborate on its details.

“We are in the final stages of raising money for this start-up and expect to be in business very shortly,” Brown said.

Under the traditional journal system, subscribers would pay publishers a hefty sum for access to the latest research results, which were provided to the magazines by researchers for free.

The online approach would allow for easier access to the whole of published scientific and medical information, consolidating it into an accessible online archive. In addition, peer review of research, an important component of published journals, would be available in greater detail in the online format.

Paul Berg, School of Medicine Prof. Emeritus, agreed that getting “scientific information as widely disseminated as possible” is a laudable effort.

“There are many places where [people] can’t afford the journals,” Berg explained, such as third world countries, where the internet would make research results accessible.

An effort on the part of publishers to accommodate this would be to publish privately and then allow the information to be distributed online after six months. This would establish the “economic base” of the publishers who pay for printing, Berg said, thus maintaining their industry but also making the internet an “archival source.”