Good piece today in Wired on the transformation of scientific journals. There’s a general feeling that commercial publishers like Reed Elsevier enjoy unreasonable control over an evolving body of research that should be freely available to the public. With exorbitant subscription fees, affordable only for large institutions, most journals are effectively inaccessible, and the authors retain few or no reproduction rights. Recently, however, free article databases have sprung up on the web – The Public Library of Science (PLoS), BioMed Central, and NIH’s PubMed – some of which, like PLoS, have begun publishing their own journals. It’s a welcome change, considering how much labor and treasure is poured into scientific publications (from funders, private and public, and from the scientists themselves), and yet how little is gotten in return. Shifting to a non-profit model, as PLoS has done, preserves much of the financial architecture that supports the production of journals, but totally revolutionizes the distribution.

PLoS journals are free and allow authors to retain their copyrights, as long as they allow their work to be freely shared and distributed (with full credit given, naturally). They also require that authors pay $1,500 from their grants, or directly from their sponsors or institutions, to have their work published. These groups pay the bulk of the $10 billion that goes to scientific and medical publishers each year, and what do they get in return? Limited access to the research they funded, and no right to reuse the information.
“It’s ridiculous to give publishers complete control of an invaluable resource that they had an extremely limited role in creating,” Eisen said (Eisen teaches genetics and is a founder of PLoS).

But what is in many ways the tougher question is how to shift the architecture of prestige – peer review – to these new kinds of journals.