Abstract
The transformation from print to digital media for scientific communication, driven in part by the growth of the Internet and the tremendous explosion in the amount of information now available to everybody, is creating fundamental changes in institutions such as publishers, libraries, and universities that primarily exist for the creation, management, and distribution of information and knowledge. Scientific, technological, and medical journals are the first publications to be completely transformed from print to digital format but monographs are beginning to appear in digital format as well and soon all communication and publishing of scientific information will be entirely electronic. In fact, this change is affecting all components of the scientific enterprise, from personal correspondence and laboratory methods to peer reviewing and the quality assessment of scientific research. Along with these radical and rapid changes in information presentation and distribution are coincident changes in the expectations of both the public and other scientists, with both groups demanding ever more rapid, open, and global access to scientific information than has been available in the past. The consequence of this revolution in the mechanics of communications technology is threatening the very existence of a number of highly regarded institutions such as intellectual property, commercial publishers, scientific societies, and academic libraries and might soon begin to threaten even the traditional university.
Keywords
THE STATE OF THE CURRENT TRANSFORMATION
Standing in the middle of a revolution makes it difficult to grasp the entirety of the changes that are occurring around us, but the last 20 years, particularly those following the invention of the Internet browser in the early 1990s by the recently knighted Sir Tim Berners-Lee, has surely been one of the most transformative periods in human history in the realms of person-to-person communication and information management. Just the transformation from silver to digital photography during this period is a remarkable change. In 1945, Vannevar Bush (Bush 1945) brilliantly conceptualized a future machine that he named the Memex, which was based on the principle of idea and fact selection by association. Sixty years later, just such a wonderful machine has very nearly been fully realized in the form of the Internet, with its linked Web sites and integrated search engines. Indeed, in a recent New York Times (NYT) article Joseph Janes, from the University of Washington, is quoted as saying, “The nature of discovery is changing. I think the digital revolution and the use of digital resources in general is really the beginning of a change in the way humanity thinks and represents itself” (Hafner 2004). Unlike the many overwrought prognostications concerning the new economy that was supposed to have been created by the Internet, Janes’s assessment actually has some demonstrable merit to it. In fact, not only would I agree with him but I would further point out that the rate of such change is increasing daily, especially with the rapid spread of wireless communication networks linking laptop computers, cell phones, and other devices to the Internet and to one another.
These largely positive changes have, however, come at a price, for they put considerable strain on institutions such as universities, publishers and libraries that depend on the creation, management and exchange of information and knowledge.
THE END OF PRINT
Is print truly dead? Well, I would be the first to admit that you wouldn’t know printed materials were in any danger of disappearing if you looked inside my office, but I can assure you that the piles of paper you see on my desk will soon be considered no more than archaeological artifacts. Outside of my office, in the real world, print is absolutely dead, with a wooden stake, or rather its first cousin, a paper dagger, driven through its heart.
There simply are no more print journals in academic scientific, technical, and medical (STM) libraries. The digital publication has suddenly become the copy of record and those few print copies that still remain merely provide a lingering convenience for those who, like me, haven’t yet been willing to cut the ties to print entirely. With this transformation, we also face the sure demise of the academic library, an event that has been predicted for years but that is only just now finally coming to pass. And once these two underpinnings of the traditional instructional enterprise are gone, will universities disappear as well? Quite likely. Suddenly traditional universities and their libraries have been transformed from venerable to vulnerable institutions.
The disappearance of print materials—today journals but tomorrow books as well—is having a profound effect on the academic library and the community it serves, forcing changes that are, in turn, accelerating the library’s demise. Many staff duties are being drastically transformed and many traditional activities, such as receiving, cataloging, binding, and distributing each new journal issue, are rapidly disappearing. Also, faculty members have begun to perceive the academic library as an online gateway to information rather than as a physical place and, as a consequence, librarians no longer enjoy the face-to-face contact with our patrons, when we have any residual contact at all. The library that most people now visit is an entirely electronic one, a Web site that may or may not be managed by the library. Even more threatening to libraries, as a consequence of the loss of print journals from their shelves, administrators have begun reallocating the free space that this change has made available. This problem is exacerbated by the fact that commercial journal archiving services, such as JSTOR (http://www.jstor.org/), are rapidly digitizing the back issues of many journals, which makes the print issues of these journals that are left on the shelves redundant and unnecessary. In some cases, libraries have begun discarding the print copies of journals that have been digitized. This means, of course, that now that the digital revolution has begun, there is simply no going back.
There are a few remnant print STM journals left. Some of these titles are published by small foreign societies or other such publishers that don’t yet have an electronic version available. Another small group, however, and one that may be increasing in size, is made up of those journals whose editors, for reasons that I will describe below (see “Why Does Print Persist At All?”), will not allow libraries to have direct electronic access to their contents.
Most of the faculty and all of the students in universities have adapted to this sea-change from print to electronic with surprising alacrity and, rather than complaining about the change that has been forced upon them, have come to embrace it gladly and now largely prefer electronic over paper versions of their favorite journals. Even I, a relative conservative in this area and someone who still experiences a strong visceral feeling of pleasure at the physical arrival of paper copies of the too many journals and newspapers I subscribe to, have come to realize that if it were possible to obtain a high-quality reading device with a color display and an affordable 24 hours-a-day, 7 days-a-week, wireless link to all of my favorite journals and newspapers from any location on earth, or at least anywhere in urban America, I would be willing to entirely give up my reliance on print in an instant, with very few regrets.
Faculty and others who have learned to live with entirely digital editions of journals, even when these are only accessible from their offices, find that the speed and convenience of digital access far outweighs nearly all other concerns. Another practical consideration that makes this change attractive to individuals is that it removes any need to find room for the steady accumulation of print copies that once inundated us, and still does, at least at my home, a deluge that necessitates carrying unending weekly armloads of discarded paper to the trash bin.
EBOOKS
The next major transformative event that the academic world, and the world in general, awaits with bated breath, and one that would certainly deal the definitive death blow to libraries, and quite likely to many universities as well, is the switch from print to electronic books (ebooks). The arrival of a popular and useable ebook system has been 5 years ahead of us for at least the last 15 years, but, in fact, the final 5-year period may really be about to start at last as the first true epaper-based ebook has finally appeared on the market, albeit only in Japan and admittedly not in a form with optimal functionality or design.
Unfortunately, the arrival of widespread ebook publishing depends on the development of a truly functional electronic paper (epaper). Two first-generation proprietary epaper products are now being marketed, Xerox’s Gyricon and a product called Eink, the second of which is based on an Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) invention. Both of these products consist of thin layers of very small hollow spheres with transparent shells, each sphere containing differentially charged solid or liquid black and white ink. These tiny spheres, each about 25 μm in diameter, lie over an electrically charged, computer-controlled grid. This allows the display on each page to be changed in a few milliseconds from one pattern of text or graphics to another. In the Gyricon version, each tiny ball is filled with differentially charged black and white solid ink and the balls themselves rotate inside a liquid-filled container in response to changes in the electrical charge below them. In the Eink model, the spheres are fixed inside the plastic sheet and the ink inside is liquid, with the electrically charged white ink flowing up or down inside its fixed spherical container, either covering the black ink or letting it be seen, in response to the electrical charges placed on the electrical grid below.
The three main features that make epaper displays different from images seen on computer or TV screens is that, first, they are reflective displays that depend on the brightness of ambient light for viewing, just as text on the page of a book is made visible; second, that the display is bistable, meaning that power is only needed to change the display pattern, not to retain the image or text once it is displayed; and third, that the displays are thin, flexible, and paper, so they can be rolled up or bound together like pages in a paper book. The bistable nature of the display means that a pair of AA batteries can power an ebook for thousands of pages of viewing or reading.
A new product, called Oligotron, that is based on conducting plastic looks far more promising than either Gyricon or Eink and a preliminary report on this technology that appeared in the Economist predicted that this invention may mark “the final days of dead-tree displays” ( Economist 2004).
A more recent review in Computerworld (Rosencrance 2004) was rather pessimistic about the near-future commercial prospects of epaper technology based on either Gyricon or Eink and it seems likely that it will take a significant technological breakthrough, one such as Oligotron promises, to produce a fully functional epaper; a flexible, high-resolution, charge-addressable material that displays both color and black and white graphics and text. Although such an ideal material may not appear on the market this year or next, the ultimate development of such a product is inevitable.
However, the first-generation of scientific ebooks is not waiting for the perfection of epaper to make its appearance and a significant number of science reference works, such as the McGraw Hill Encyclopedia of Science and Technology, the CRC Handbook of Chemistry and Physics, and the Physician’s Desk Reference (PCR) have already been converted to fully searchable digital format. Like most other resources that have been converted from print to digital, these electronic copies are proving to be far more popular and more generally used than their print precursors ever were. They are also easier to update and can be linked to other online resources, even to primary literature when access rights to such material are available.
Ebooks in general, including some science works, are appearing in ever-greater numbers on our desk top and portable laptop computer displays. Using a new generation of book scanners that can transform printed works into photoperfect, fully searchable replicas of the original at a rate of over 1000 pages per hour, companies like netLibrary and Ebrary are amassing very impressive stores of books that are still under copyright but can be read at any terminal.
Sitting in front of a desktop computer is not ideal for long stints of leisure reading, but it is quite adequate for presenting material from many nonfiction scientific works, which are frequently only consulted briefly for specific types of information and not read from cover to cover. For this sort of fact retrieval, ebooks with fully searchable contents work very well on desktop or laptop computers.
In fact, with the advent of the Internet and the increase in the quantity and, often, even the quality of online information, the container in which information is delivered to the consumer, whether a member of the lay public or a scientist, has come to be of little interest (OCLC 2004). As consumers become increasingly “format agnostic,” it matters not whether they find what they want in an online ebook or ejournal article, on a blog, or simply stored on a Web page. All that matters is whether the information is both trustworthy and relevant to their needs.
Of course, the trustworthiness of information varies tremendously from location to location on the Internet, but many consumers trust their own ability to separate the good from the bad, with results that, as you might expect, vary wildly.
Although the technology of epaper is not yet mature, and its current lack of ability to handle color is a significant drawback to its immediate market penetration (Rosencrance 2004), what might prove to create an even bigger hindrance to the spread of ebooks is the fear by publishers that releasing an electronic version of a book will lead to significant copyright infringement and intellectual property theft. This, however, is “only” a social, legal, and economic barrier, not a technological one, and there are technologically based preventative safeguards under development that can overcome this problem, so theoretically, at least, the issue is solvable.
In fact, of course, the advent of digital photography and ever more efficient scanning systems have made print materials as vulnerable to intellectual property theft as digital publications are. For example, however it escaped its publisher, pirated copies of Garcia Marquez’s latest book, with a controversial title that I won’t bother to repeat here, appeared for sale by street vendors across Mexico even before the official version came out (Rice 2004).
Ebooks are appearing with increasing frequency all over the Web. Ebooks (http://usa2.ebooks.com/help/contact.asp), for example, an American-Australian company, already offers more than 30,000 ebooks over the Internet and is currently adding over 1000 new titles each month.
Many more ebooks will be appearing soon, as it has been reported, or at least rumored, that Stanford and Google are collaborating on a project to scan all of the pre-1923 monographs in Stanford’s library into digital format, their entire collection of public domain materials, with the possible aim of releasing this database to the Web. If it turns out that Stanford is not involved in such a project, then this obvious task will be undertaken by other libraries, probably working cooperatively. [Note added in proof: of course now we know that Google is planning on scanning the entire contents of Stanford’s library and a number of other major research libraries into the digital format, which will have have the effect of further diminishing the role of libraries as the primary source for information discovered and delivered.] Similarly, Amazon.com’s remarkable Search Inside the Book feature now provides access to the full contents of thousands of books that are still under copyright, and in Fall, 2004, Google announced a very similar product containing the text of over 100,000 books. In addition, entrepreneurial companies like netLibrary and Ebrary have begun to make quite significant amounts of access-controlled full-text monographs available.
Nevertheless, ebooks probably won’t begin to displace paper books in popularity until a high-quality portable reader based on epaper technology becomes available.
ON-DEMAND PRINTING
Once ebooks become fully established and largely replace those in print, if we continue to need paper copies of books or journals for specific reasons, most will probably be printed on-demand from what will soon become ubiquitous print-on-demand (POD) printers, http://www.printondemand.com/ (Yee 2004). Such devices have already begun to appear in book stores and photocopy service centers in test market areas and could find their way into even your neighborhood drug store, where they will probably sit beside movie DVD–burning kiosks, which, in turn, will no doubt soon replace local video stores.
Once licensing and copyright issues are sorted out (not a small matter), each POD printer could provide instantaneous access to a virtually unlimited database of digital works, both academic and popular, each of which can be printed out at a production cost of as little as $1 apiece, although the cost to the consumer would, of course, be much higher than that.
BENEFITS OF ALL DIGITAL
Data Mining
Clearly computers are faster than people, at least in activities such as data searching, manipulation, and comparison. Applying the power of computers to spreadsheet and database operations, for example, have allowed one person to replace literally hundreds of workers and produce virtually error free results.
Indeed, the combination of astronomically large and free life sciences databases, such as GenBank and Medline, and the numerous commercial bibliographic and journal databases that our users now have access to, like the Web of Science bibliographic databases and Elsevier’s ScienceDirect journal databases, increase the data available for analysis so drastically that it has become impossible for mere analog humans like ourselves, poor featherless bipeds that we are, to manage and make sense of this wealth of material without the help of analytic machines and software. Search engines help some, but they don’t begin to do the really hard work of managing and manipulating numeric or other data-rich resources.
This has led to a new growth industry: data-mining, which, of course, requires a variety of data mining tools (http://www.the-data-mine.com/; http://www.kdnuggets.com/; http://www.dataminingresources.info/). Most pharmaceutical and other biomedical researchers are certainly acquainted with some of the data-mining tools commonly used in bioinformatics, such as BLAST, which facilitates searching for and comparing DNA and protein sequences (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/Tools/). Comparable tools are now being developed for searching the whole of the Internet, including the USPTO Patent database, which, now that it has been made freely accessible, has grown in importance to scientists (Shanbrom 2004). Some STM databases, like Medline, are so rich in valuable data that some research faculty are already designing specialized data-mining software to help them find particular types of information (Flaxbart 2004). As an example of the useful projects that might be undertaken using this methodology, Eric Buenz (Buenz et al. 2004), a Mayo Clinic researcher, has proposed using data-mining techniques to do bioprospecting within digitized copies of the hundreds of unstudied herbal texts that date from Ancient Greece to the modern age. He has begun to apply such techniques to these volumes in order to identify plants that merit further testing for useful herbal products.
Navigating the digital world is soon going to get even more difficult. ComputerWorld writer Jeff Wacker (Wacker 2004) predicts that we will soon find ourselves swimming in petabytes of data, a petabyte being a million gigabytes (1015 bytes). That is because so much more information is suddenly becoming available to the world’s computers, in part from the many environmental sensors that are beginning to proliferate—including implantable chips in people (Webb 2004) and proliferating RFID tags, a technology WalMart is pushing—but also from the vast sea of unstructured text that continues to flow into the Internet, information that potentially can be mined and given meaningful organization through the use of context-sensitive text mining software.
Cost Reductions
In my library we have a whole floor filled with aging, seldom-used paper journals that are taking up space in an section of campus that is being crowded by new buildings for nanotechnology, life sciences, and engineering. It is frankly absurd to reserve such expensive real estate for materials that are little used and could easily be stored off site, with their contents scanned and sent to scientists’ computers as PDF files as needed.
Improved Security: Passwords and DRMs
Although paper files can be stored in locked cabinets for security purposes, this also makes them hard to use and even find. In the digital world, materials can be stored online where they are always accessible and easily searchable and yet can be kept secure behind password protected gates or within containers secured by digital-rights-management systems (DRMs) software.
Links and Text Enrichment
The majority of online journal articles today come in a choice of two formats: HTML and PDF. The HTML format often contains links from that article to others or even links to other Web pages outside of the journal database. This increases the richness of the primary journal material quite substantially and allows the reader to immediately check the accuracy of an author’s claims against the actual text in the cited journals from which he or she might be drawing their conclusions. Gone will be the day when authors casually copy citations from other authors’ papers, knowing that almost nobody ever checks the original paper. Again, such enriched systems mirror Vannevar Bush’s dreams of an operational machine that assists in the making of associations.
Data Sharing Enhanced
Finally, digital information combined with networking systems makes it possible to instantly share material not just locally but with peers in any part of the world. It means you can simultaneously confer with experts in Russia and Australia while providing them with current data, graphics, or the contents of a paper you are writing or reading. This is a stunning capability and because of it a recent Science editorial found that “Better and better science is being done around the world” (Leshner 2004).
DRAWBACKS OF ALL DIGITAL
At the same time that it becomes possible to better secure digital materials, this technology also opens up new threats to security, not the least of which being the presence of the Windows operating system and Internet Explorer. Constant attacks by viruses, worms, Trojan horses, and now spyware programs can make the digital world quite treacherous for those with proprietary or financial data that they need to protect. Well, that’s one reason why information technology (IT) departments provide pretty stable employment opportunities in most information-dependent companies.
In addition, however, the proliferation of personal copying devices such as cell phones, with their ever higher resolution cameras, provide substantial security threats as well, and unless every visitor or employee is going to be searched on entering and so blocked from carrying in such devices, it is always going to be possible for those intent on theft of intellectual property to succeed at times. That is especially true now that material can be captured on a cell phone camera and instantly sent by wireless connection to another location, and then erased locally. The fact that digital materials can be copied any number of times without suffering any of the attendant deterioration in fidelity that was introduced by photocopy machines and other such outdated analog devices makes it all the more difficult to guard against intellectual property theft.
Potential Impermanence of Digital Data
The malleability of digital records introduces other problems. Before the advent of electronic journals, it was very hard for publishers to purge articles from their journals. At best, they could publish a later retraction. Once paper copies and reprints are distributed widely, it is virtually impossible to re-acquire all copies of embarrassing, fraudulent, or libelous articles that a publisher might like to recall. I can remember such a case some years ago when a mushroom hunter’s handbook was published that incorrectly identified a picture of a highly poisonous mushroom as one that was edible. Every publisher’s nightmare, I’m sure.
Now, however, with publishers controlling their own digital archives, and print copies no longer being produced, it has proven to be entirely too easy for some publishers to purge these archives of unwanted articles, much to the dismay of those who, like me, fear for the long-term integrity and trustworthiness of the published record of science and our intellectual heritage. In addition, if such materials can be removed, it often means they can be modified after publication as well.
Elsevier, for example, has removed about 30 articles so far from its ScienceDirect journal article archive, just since the year 2000, for various reasons. One case concerned a published journal article that was plagiarized pretty much in its entirety from one published in a book several years previously, but in other cases no reason whatsoever was given (Foster 2003). The fear that many of us have is that individuals, corporate entities, and even governments, including ours, will begin to use such techniques to control the published record for political purposes or in order to cover up embarrassing information. In fact, that has already occurred (Sniffen 2004).
An example of the ease with which unwanted information can be removed from published databases was demonstrated by the NYT after the Tasini v. New York Times Supreme Court case was decided in favor of freelance writers, who the court agreed should be remunerated for the materials they had published that had been transferred by the NYT to its commercially sold database of full text, online newspaper articles. However, rather than pay these authors, the NYT simply decided to remove the articles written by freelancers from the database. This resulted in the loss of these articles from the online public record and so led to a significant and most regrettable loss of this valuable information from easy access and use by researchers.
WHY DOES PRINT PERSIST AT ALL?
The drawbacks, however, are far outweighed by the benefits that accrue from the digitization of text and this format will soon be the way in which virtually all media are delivered, including radio and TV broadcasts. That being the case, why do even a minority of print-only journals still exist in science libraries? Digital copies, after all, have become the preferred access method for scientists. It can’t be simply the fear of copyright infringement because there has been little intellectual property misuse of science journals—although that can happen. In one case we had somebody come into a library at Northwestern University and proceed to download a significant fraction of the online contents of a physics journal database for some possibly nefarious reason. But such cases are very rare and there are now safeguards in place to prevent the reoccurrence of such potential malfeasance.
No, the reason can be found in socioeconomic issues that surround digital publishing. I think I can best answer that question by recounting the experience that Duke University Press had in 2004 with Muse, one of the subscription journal archiving services that we and many other universities use to make both the current and the back issues of a number of different journals freely available to our users. What Duke found was that the ready, free availability of the current issues of these journals to members of university communities across the nation and in Europe led to the serious erosion of their subscriber base, because these users were also their primary subscriber clientele. This, in turn, led directly to a rapid decline in the income that sustained these publications. As a consequence, they had no choice but to withdraw 16 of their scholarly journal titles from Muse (Cohn 2004) and make them only available directly from Duke University Press.
There are other types of economic concerns that have arisen as print journals have been transformed into digital format, especially among not-for-profit publishers. Elsevier is an example of a commercial journal publisher that has very successfully transposed its print business model into the digital sphere. That is because Elsevier mainly depends on the publication of expensive journals that only libraries subscribe to, so it has simply shifted the same model that supported its print enterprise into the digital marketplace and then continued to raise the subscription rates at the same rate it did for print. Libraries, being a captive market, really had no choice but to continue to pay these increased costs. Elsevier’s annual profit from libraries is typically above a billion dollars and at one point, in the early 2000s, they were considered to be the only truly profitable Internet company.
However, other types of publishers are running into trouble in the digital marketplace, especially those that depend on individual subscribers rather than library subscriptions for most of their income. These include both society publishers and publishers that depend on advertising revenue to cover a good part of their profit and operating expenses, such as Science and Nature. The problem comes from the loss of incentive that people have for subscribing to such journals as individuals when they find they have full online access to these publications through their campuses’ subscription.
Similarly for societies. A large part of the reason most members of a professional society join is to receive a convenient copy of that society’s journal. If you are a graduate student, the group from which future subscribers are typically conscripted, and you find a society’s journal already readily available for free on your campus network, there is very little incentive for you to join the society. Science, which is both published by a society, the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), and depends on advertising, is suffering some significant problems right now in the erosion of their subscriber base, which, in turn, is resulting in a drop in what Science can charge advertisers for publishing in its journal. There simply isn’t an easy answer to this dilemma. Science and other such publishers are trying to separate out some material of significant interest to personal subscribers and make it only available to this group as a means of enticing individual subscriptions, but this has had limited success. Nature is the latest journal to begin such a policy with their Premier Subscription service that provides individual subscribers access to materials that those who depend entirely on campus subscriptions are denied access to.
EXPECTATIONS OF THE PUBLIC
In spite of its spotty, incomplete nature, simply the overwhelming amount of information available on the Internet, combined with the speed and ease of use of search engines such as Google over broadband networks, have fueled some very unrealistic expectations from the public. In particular, people have come to believe that they deserve immediate access to all information, all of the time, and for free! We have suddenly all become members of a society with a search, find, and [instantly] obtain mentality (OCLC 2004, see the “Freedom of Choice” section there). This is very similar to my expectation that I somehow deserve to be able to find a parking place no more than 100 feet from my final destination. Surprisingly, peoples’ Internet expectations have actually turned out to be significantly more realistic than my hope of finding a good parking spot with any predictability.
This has produced a sea-change in the way in which publishers and others in the information industry view the landscape in which they operate. Slow response times are simply not acceptable in any medium (with the peculiar exception, for some reason, of the absurd length of time it takes for Windows-based machines to boot-up).
SOCIALLY CONSCIOUS AND SOCIALLY ENGAGED PROJECTS AND SOFTWARE
Blogs
Blogs provide a remarkable new way of communicating on the Internet and potentially provide a wonderful way for even scientists to share their research as well as other experiences with their peers and colleagues, and there are a number of science blogs already functioning.
http://www.scienceblog.com/community/
http://www.blogsearchengine.com/science_blogs.html
The influence that blogs have acquired should not be underestimated by industrial leaders and politicians. Their open visibility, coupled with the willingness of their creators to discuss such delicate private topics as their personal experiences with various medicines and medical treatments, combined with the authors’ tendency to publicly criticize specific institutions and companies, make this group one of the more volatile, in-fluential, and unpredictable forces on the Internet and one that companies and politicians ignore at their peril. This is particularly important because “Big brands are particularly vulnerable to attack, whether justified or not, and the likelihood of their being targeted has increased with the speed and ease of communications” (Maitland 2004), and blogs are one of those outlets where such criticisms are likely to emerge and be widely distributed.
Their impact during the last presidential election is a case in point. Dan Rather may well never even have heard of blogs until he presented as originals what turned out to be faked memos concerning Bush’s National Guard service record, an error first disclosed by various bloggers, a disclosure that became a major reason for his decision to retire when he did. Whether he was fully aware of bloggers or not before this incident, I can assure you he will never forget them now.
Wikis
One of the many interesting innovations that the global shared networking the Internet provides is the introduction of collaborative writing projects called Wikis, a name borrowed from the Hawaiian word for fast. One good example of this is the Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page), a popular free online encyclopedia written entirely by those who use it. Anybody who wishes is invited to add or edit the articles in this resource. Accuracy is policed by this same body of users and the writing style varies, but there is no clear limit to its size or breadth and it has become a very useful product for those looking for general introductions to a wide variety of topics. It is already three times the size of the Encyclopedia Britannica with over a million articles, only 40% of which are in English (Stone 2004).
It strikes me that this provides a trusted resource, a type of outlet that is in short supply for pharmaceutical and other high-profile industries, and it is something that could serve a role as an excellent educational tool for distributing information to the public on any number of new technologies and medical or pharmaceutical topics, as long as these are presented in an unbiased, informational manner. It’s true that a company loses some control over material posted on such a publicly shared outlet, but that is why the information presented in such a venue is considered trustworthy by those who discover it there.
Open Computing Movement
One of the more fascinating movements that the Internet has given rise to, and one with long-term social, political, and economic consequences, is what I will call the Open Computing Movement. This movement is characterized by several independent initiatives that share a common philosophy of open sharing and distribution of digital products. None of these could have gained the influence, widespread membership, and support they have achieved without the existence of a socially interactive communication medium like the Internet.
Open-Source Software
I will give only a small amount of space to the open-source computing and software and bring it up mainly because of its seminal historical role in the origin and development of the socially conscious philosophy it promoted that has led to the concept of shared projects on the Internet. The open-source movement refers particularly to any communally developed software whose use and programming code are made freely available over the Internet. This movement began, not surprisingly, as far back as the 1960s but it really became a seriously influential force only with the introduction of the Internet and the distribution of Unix as a freely shared open-source operating system. In the late 1990s, it was officially named the Open Source Initiative (http://www.opensource.org/). The increasing popularity of Unix has made it a serious competitor to the more expensive, and much less secure, Microsoft Windows platform. The latest boost towards respectability for this movement came in late 2004 when the government of Great Britain came out in support of open-source software as a reasonable replacement for Microsoft Windows on all government-owned computers.
Open-Access
Of far more immediate interest to scientists is the emergence of the open-access movement, which is lobbying quite strongly to make all published research freely available on the internet 6 months after publication. This is a suggestion that about 50% of scientists have never even heard of, yet one that has suddenly become very important to biomedical researchers and publishers because of the adoption of the open-access community’s aims and philosophy by the NIH. In fact, a bill supporting open access passed the U.S. House of Representatives this year by an overwhelming majority and although it won’t get through the Senate this time around, it is likely to continue to be a contentious issue for at least the next several years.
The open access movement was borne out of the frustration of scientists, libraries and the general public with the very high cost and associated inaccessibility of many STM journals. Not only are they increasingly expensive, with some subscriptions costing in excess of $20,000 a year, which means that fewer libraries can afford them, but now that they are appearing in digitized format they are usually only accessible through an institution-linked computer terminal, including those in the library. However, many libraries are now beginning to require some form of authentication before users are given access to online journals and other proprietary digital resources through their computers. This means that those who are not members of the primary community that the library serves can and are, in some cases, being refused access and this trend toward outsider exclusion is likely to escalate.
During the period when most journals were in print format, the majority of libraries allowed open browsing of their collections of journals and books and anybody who was allowed into the library was given access. In the digital age, such access privileges are no longer assured for library walk-ins.
The Springer Publishing Company, which publishes a number of significant science journals, has called the bluff of the open-access movement by offering its authors an Open Choice option: For a $3000 contribution from an author, they will make any article published in a Springer journal openly accessible to the public. So far, I don’t believe they have had any takers.
Above, I discussed the negative effect that the provision of library-subsidized open access to members of the campus community has had on publishers like Science, which has seen AAAS membership and advertising income plummet as a result. For that reason, Science, Nature, and other such journals are opposed to forced open-access release of their published articles.
Open-Source Biology and Collaborative Science
Only very recently there has emerged an interesting and promising movement along the lines established by open-source software, but with the philosophy being applied specifically to scientific software. This movement is named the Biological Innovation for Open Society (BIOS) initiative and it “will seek to make information and technologies such as plant-breeding tools freely available” (Dennis 2004). The founders of this movement compare research tools, which they believe should be freely available, to the operating systems, programming languages, and standards that are shared by the open-source software community. According to the recent report in Nature on this group, this type of program should benefit entrepreneurs as well as scientists as it helps develop a new commons of technological innovation, and, in fact, a number of companies, such as Du Pont in St. Louis, see this movement as complementary to their purposes rather than as a threat. Although this movement began in Australia, the MIT BioBricks project, which is attempting to design an open archive of standards and processes for research, is very similar in spirit. According to the Newsweek article where BioBricks was recently discussed (Miller 2004), “an open system would … work when the payback is too small to entice Big Pharma” and “Open innovation also makes sense in industries where patents aren’t relevant—for example, finding new uses for existing drugs.”
Sir John Sulston, for example, on accepting the Noble Prize for Physiology and Medicine, along with Sydney Brenner and Robert Horvitz, for their work on the nematode Caenorhabditis elegans, is reported to have said that “The worm worked so well because the community held an ethos of sharing—just as the public genome projects have—from the beginning. We gave all our results to others as soon as we had them. From sharing, discovery is accelerated in the community. Research is hastened when people share results freely” (Meek 2002).
The acceptance of the general utility of this idea seems to be spreading in today’s scientific and medical research cultures and there was an intriguing article by Sharon Begley (Begley 2004) that described the salutary effects that the forced sharing of information between normally competitive research teams can have on the speed of scientific research and discovery. Several private research funding agencies and foundations, e.g., the Fox Foundation for Parkinson’s Disease and, in particular, the Myelin Repair Foundation, are taking a more active role in the projects they fund and are beginning to require that the scientists they fund collaborate closely with one another and openly share information on new findings, rather than keeping the information secret until it is published or patented, as is more typically the case in science, especially as it begins to be treated more and more as a commodity.
INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY AND THE INTERNET
If there is any major block to the future success of the Internet, it is the growing enforcement of copyright protection of its content and the disallowance of such previously acceptable uses of material as have been guaranteed to academics and others by the rules for fair use and with the rights transferred at first sale, which includes the right to sell, loan, or give away an item. Unfortunately, neither of these covenants is proving workable in the digital environment. This is because digital copying, unlike that done with analog methodologies, such as photocopy machines, photographs on silver-based film, or facsimile machines, can be done without any loss of fidelity and is exceedingly inexpensive. So the fears of publishers that infringements will derive from such copying have more than a little merit to them. I would have to concede that the behavior we have seen from the use of person-to-person software like Napster and KaZaa does not exactly feed the confidence of publishers that people will share text files any more responsibly than they have shared music.
However, overly restrictive controls on the use, reuse, and sharing of copyrighted digital material greatly suppresses innovation and creativity, because it inhibits the exchange of some types of ideas and even access to them. Ebooks, for example, may not be released to libraries at all in many cases and some early ebook publishers claimed that the distribution of their products in libraries was tantamount to theft.
The Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act that was passed in 1998 is said to have been passed at least in part to keep the Mickey Mouse from entering the public domain and the result of this act is that all newly published works are excluded from entering the public domain for about 100 years into the future. In this rapidly changing world, such a time span is right next to infinity in extent and rigid copyright protection has become a virtually insurmountable block to the introduction of some new technologies, such as the widespread release of ebooks on a variety of platforms at a reasonable cost, and to many of the forms of creativity that might build directly on published materials.
That said, the fact is that attempts to control property theft more completely, even as that theft becomes easier, is an inevitable and understandable trend and is due in part the increased value that digitization had added to such property and to the ease with which digitized materials can be illegally copied and distributed. And much of what is true for copyrighted materials is also true for patented works. “The trouble is that intellectual capital is a very plunderable good: it can be stolen quite easily, copied and then sold without authorization. This sometimes happens in the pharmaceuticals industry, where drugs are imitated and marketed at cut prices, particularly in poorer countries” (Moïsé 1999) (http://www.oecdobserver.org/news/fullstory.php/aid/86).
THE RELENTLESS FUTURE
In closing, let me briefly review those technologies and initiatives that will most affect scientific communication over the next few years: It is worth knowing something about just what we are in for in the near future.
There will soon be a complete disappearance of print and the new digitized text products that replace printed ones will be potentially available globally through optical fiber and wireless broadband networks. Access to most of this information, however, is likely to be tightly controlled by copyright owners and it will only be easily available to those who can pay for this privilege.
Ebook devices will appear—certainly within 10 years—and will replace the need, or even desirability, of printed books, newspapers, magazines, and other such comfortable and friendly reading materials. To emerging generations, however, digital media will no doubt become as natural an accouterment to their lives as print is to ours. A parallel increase in the popularity and accessibility of print-on-demand will provide local access to hard copies of nearly any book for which we need a print copy (Yee 2004). Even newspapers, which are already decreasing in circulation, will be replaced by their digital counterparts. I can only hope that I will be lucky enough to die before this change impacts me directly, as one of my great pleasures in life is reading the morning newspaper in a local café before I start work each day.
Technological advances will allow access to copyrighted digital materials to be controlled far more completely than printed works ever were, even during periods of active censorship. Ironically, this means it will may become more expensive and difficult to get copies of many books than it is now, especially those with economically valuable information. Also, the used book market will disappear, a change many publishers will be very pleased with. Indeed, in our digital future and you probably won’t even be able to give a digital book you have purchased to a friend. Clearly, not all future changes are guaranteed to be for the better, at least for the consumer.
Context-sensitive data mining will likely enable the extraction of real knowledge from where it is hidden in the proliferating mass of unstructured text and other materials on the Internet. In some fields, this could prove to be a very powerful technique. In others, probably not. Data mining will improve the correlations and links that can be found in data, but it isn’t going to create new facts, at least not at the outset, but it will help make the potential links that already exist more visible.
Much of our privacy is already gone and most of the rest of it is destined to disappear soon. I can only hope that better safeguards over the use of personal data will make this transition somewhat less painful than I fear it will be.
The consequences of movements like open access are impossible to predict, especially the effects of such changes on the credibility of scientific and technical articles and information in an environment where everybody is a publisher and where behaviors like self-archiving by authors of all of scientific publications could become the norm. It’s hard enough to sort out the good from the bad when most publications of consequence are peer reviewed and published through well-controlled gateways such as society or commercial publications. Should peer review become less important and new means of assessing quality develop, as the Faculty of 1000 (www.facultyof1000.com) experiment is attempting to do, it is possible that much of the current scholarly communication system and network will collapse entirely. It is possible, of course, that a better system might emerge from this wreckage, but it is also possible that the new system will be found wanting.
Digitizing scientific methods and record keeping will certainly increase the speed and reliability of some forms of science: Look at its effect on genome sequencing. But in other cases, its effect will be minimally useful, for example in the study of physiology and development, both of which always require time-consuming hands-on experiments to be performed. Similarly with the testing of drugs on human populations, which is the type of research program that simply can’t be replaced by computer modeling.
Two major benefits that I see coming from these new communications technologies is the way in which they inform scientists internationally and simplify collaboration on projects between people in widely separated places.
Predicting the consequences of the combination of the digitization of communication, the growth in wireless technology, and the rapid improvements in technology, especially with the invention of such promising new fields as nanotechnology, are impossible to predict but one thing remains certain: For the foreseeable future, the rate of societal, technological, and scientific change will continue to increase and all components of society, from individual behaviors to the institutions in which we operate, will have to learn to adapt or they will simply be replaced. It seems inevitable that many of the institutions we now take so much for granted and depend upon, including libraries and the morning printed newspaper, may soon disappear entirely. It will be our challenge to take advantage of these changes and exploit them in ways that benefit ourselves, the institutions and companies we work in, and the world as a whole.
And one last major prediction: Regardless of what else occurs with relation to intellectual property, Micky Mouse will never enter the public domain.