... one large step for mankind?
The world of science has taken a much-needed and critical step - that of changing the mechanisms by which scientists publish their research and findings.
For any out there, like me, who spent their youth in university checking in periodicals into their university library's computer systems, you'll remember not only the periodicals, but the prices on them: universities often spend thousands on getting a single serial publication in through the door. Most universities get the big ones - Science, Nature, etc., and even the more obscure ones, like the venerable Astronomy and Astrophysics Letters. Companies like EDP Sciences do provide a valuable service to the science community - but they do so at a high price, a price growing ever more prohibitive for the university communities dependent not only on publishing their results through these journals, but on keeping up with the work of their peers by reading the journals, and the papers therein, of their contemporaries in other communities.
No community I can think of is as dependent on publishing as the science world; the daily work of every scientist is dependent on not only reading these expensive periodicals, but their tenure is dependent on publishing in them, their future dependent on breakthroughs related directly to their ability to gain insight into the workings of a field and come up with something new.
So it is no small thing that the PLOS (the Public Library of Science) has kicked off. It's an attempt to provide a 'public service' for the world's medical and scientific literature, the life's blood of the modern scientist upon which the whole present and future of science is dependent.
Three hundred years ago, a man could learn all that science had to teach him about the world not just in a single lifetime, but within a reasonably small chunk of your education. You could, as was fashion amongst the intelligentsia at the time, become steeped in the knowledge of *all* of science by the time you were in your middle years, and could argue with the best of them about current events with little difficulty except in that core difficulty - your ability to get access to that information.
Fast forward three hundred years, and it's no longer possible for any one person to know the body of science - not within their own lifetime of study. Specialization - seen as unnecessary then - is now vital to not just the study of a given science, but in one's ability to carry it forward: breakthroughs in science are, more and more, coming from specialists in the most minute areas of study of a given field.
Thus is born the fundamental problem of this knowledge: as people become more and more specialized, the ability to get specialist information out to wider physical distributions (due to the rarity of specialists within specific vertical studies) and populations (due to the sheer number of scientists performing research in broad fields) yields a historic problem for publishing; and access to information becomes the foundation on which not only current and future science is dependent, but the limiting factor preventing research from doing more, faster.
More importantly, publishing is big business; the large journals don't suffer financially; their limited space results in a huge amount of competition to get into that limited space, and small publications must either become highly specialized - taking their work out of the wider scope of visibility to those in indirectly-related fields - or risk remaining a 'second tier' of publication which exists solely to catch the chaff from the real journals' inability to print all that can be printed.
A funnel. A very expensive funnel. And what comes out of the funnel at the "Science" and "Nature" level isn't the best of what goes into that funnel - it's the most accessible, in many cases, or the most sensational; most often, it's what will be the best business for that journal. Add to this the whole messy 'peer review' process, and that other end of the publishing side - the micro-specific journal - looks more attractive, where your peer reviewers are people in your niche, and your readers are more directly related to your day to day research; yet these lack the pomp, circumstance, and glory of publishing in Nature.
The return of science to the lands of public knowledge, back into the reach of everyday man, is a critical step in the re-evolution of science. As the body of knowledge grew, it was inevitable that information and the people who learn it would become more specialised; now, the specialisation is a growing hindrance to the further evolution of scientific study. Throwing open the doors on that information, and finding new mechanisms to distribute, publish, share, and locate research is critical to shoring up that inherent weakness.
During my days in university, these publications accidentally opened my eyes to the world of science; during the time that the CICS system would go down, and prevent us from adding more periodicals, I got the chance to read through some of the most fascinating research I have ever had the pleasure of reading, and over time, the pleasure of understanding. It inspired within me a fascination not just for the hard sciences, but an appreciation of softer sciences like psychology. The opportunity to read and learn from this research, and the realization that I could choose to do so, was the most important gift I recieved from my short university education.
I look forward to a future when the opportunity is available to more, on wider topics, and without the fiscal restrictions and burdens.
