Medicine, biology take lesson from Los Alamos electronic physics archive

Contact: Jim Danneskiold, slinger@lanl.gov, (505) 667-1640 (00-092)

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LOS ALAMOS, N.M., July 3, 2000 -- Paul Ginsparg of the Department of Energy's Los Alamos National Laboratory, who started the world's first free-access electronic archive for physics research, will join leaders from the biomedical community at a conference in New York July 6-7 to discuss how free access to biomedical research on the Internet will change biomedical science.

The conference, "Freedom of Information: The Impact of Free access on Biomedical Science," is organized by online publisher BioMed Central and will be held at the New York Academy of Medicine.

A key speaker at the conference is Dr. Harold Varmus, President of the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center and former head of the National Institutes for Health.

"Electronic communication is making dramatic changes in the way information is exchanged among scientists," Varmus said. "Within biomedicine the full potential of electronic communication has yet to be realized.

"Now we have the opportunity, and the imperative, to distribute scientific findings in a fashion that allows free access and serves the scientific community and the public in a highly responsible way," Varmus continued. "We need to know how this will change the way we, as scientists, go about our business."

The conference also will examine the impact of free access publishing on the working lives of scientists, publishers, librarians and the public, as well as its impact on science itself.

Influenced in part by the success of the e-print archives at the Department of Energy's Los Alamos National Laboratory, Varmus last year proposed the creation of PubMed Central, an archive for research published in the biomedical sciences. The recently launched PubMed Central archive <http://pubmedcentral.nih.gov> and other open-access publishing initiatives promise to transform the biomedical landscape by making research available for free to all.

Initially, however, PubMed Central won't work the same way as the physics publishing model established by Ginsparg in his physics e-print archive, where research is submitted to the open-access archive before peer review and publication to encourage rapid distribution of research results. PubMed Central, by contrast, will only archive articles that have been peer-reviewed.

Ginsparg represents Los Alamos as a member of PubMed Central's national advisory committee.

"It is thrilling that the biomedical community is beginning to join the 1990s," Ginsparg said.

"The physics community was well ahead of the curve, having moved much of its informal communication to the internet by the mid-1980s. In the 1990s Los Alamos provided the resources needed to create a new model for research communication infrastructure, with the hope that it might eventually generalize to other forward-looking research disciplines," Ginsparg said.

Ginsparg launched the pre-print archive of physics research <http://arXiv.org> in 1991 at Los Alamos. Today the physics e-Print archive regularly processes between 1,000 and 2,000 electronic transactions per hour and has revolutionised the way physicists communicate research findings by allowing them to distribute articles rapidly, efficiently and before they are printed by a commercial publisher.

Another conference speaker, Jan Velterop, Director of Publishing at Nature magazine, said, "Not all publishers and librarians are adding enough value to the information they handle. If they are going to continue to earn their existence, they must find new ways to serve the scientific community. But does "freedom of information" mean information for free? This conference will be a very important forum to discuss this issue."

Open access publishing in biomedicine could also change the way science impacts on the general public who regularly interface with the produce of medical research in hospitals or when visiting their doctor or pharmacist.

Jean Hoffman-Anuta, herself a clinical pharmacist, will discuss the issue of access to research information in the light of her own experience as a member of the general public who turned to the latest medical research papers to improve her medical treatment. The conference will also include sessions on how publishing and librarianship are changing and on the technology shaping the open-access publishing initiatives of the future.

Full conference program and registration details are available on-line at

<http://www.biomedcentral.com/conference.asp>.

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