When a molecular biologist or a biochemist has made a discovery¿often after many months or even years of tedious experiments¿they tell the rest of the world by publishing their results in a scientific journal. So far, these journals have controlled who can read them and who cannot¿but maybe not for much longer.

E-mail, Internet discussion groups, electronic databases and pre- or e-print servers have already transformed the way scientists openly exchange their results. And in the life sciences, researchers are now demanding that their work be included in at least one free central electronic archive of published literature, challenging the traditional ownership of publishers. The demand has sparked widespread discussions among scientists, publishers, scientific societies and librarians about the future of scientific publishing. The outcome may be nothing short of a revolution in the scientific publishing world.

It all started last fall, when an advocacy group called the Public Library of Science distributed an electronic open letter urging scientific publishers to hand over all research articles from their journals to public online archives for free within six months of publication. To add weight to their demands, the authors threatened a boycott starting in September 2001, pledging to "publish in, edit or review for, and personally subscribe to, only those scholarly and scientific journals" that agreed. As of April 21, some 15,817 life scientists from 138 countries had signed the letter, among them several Nobel laureates.

The authors of the letter feel they have every right to make these demands. After all, it is the scientists who supply the journals with their products¿the manuscripts¿for free. Scientists also help journals by reviewing and judging the quality of each other¿s work, a process called "peer review," without pay. Publishers, in exchange, edit the articles, organize the review process and provide news items and other content. Finally, they produce, market and distribute a printed or electronic journal.

In the eyes of Michael Eisen, one of the initiators of the Public Library of Science initiative, the work that publishers do, however, does not justify that they then own the copyrights to the articles. "We think of the publishers as being like a midwife," he says. "They are paid for their role, and at the end of the day, they give the baby back to the parents."

Publishers argue that unless they own the copyright, they cannot protect articles from misuse. And scientific publishing is big business: like other scientific societies, the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), for example, finances most of its activities with income from its publication, Science magazine. "I think scientists all over would be shocked to realize what a phenomenally lucrative business scientific publishing can be," Nicholas Cozzarelli, editor-in-chief of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the USA (PNAS), says. "There are huge sums of money to be had in this field."

Journals Don't Play the Game

What urged the authors of the open letter into action was the slow progress of PubMed Central, a free electronic full-text archive of research articles started by the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) at the NIH in early 2000. By storing articles in a common format on a single site, PubMed Central wants to facilitate sophisticated literature searches¿for instance, those restricted to certain parts of a paper, such as the figure legends. Ultimately it also wants to link the literature to other online databases.

PubMed Central asks journals to contribute their articles voluntarily as soon as possible after publication¿at most after a year¿giving the journals time to offer exclusive access to make a profit (studies have shown that the demand for research papers decreases sharply after only a few months). But so far, only seven journals, including PNAS and a collection of e-journals, are participating, and a few additional journals have signed up. Even though some journals make their back issues freely available at their own Web sites, they are reluctant to give them away elsewhere. "Journals have just not wanted to play the game," Eisen says.