Harold Varmus

Bio

"Varmus, a Nobel Laureate, President and CEO of Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, and member of the Academy’s President’s Council, led the team of biomedical scientists who set out in October 2000 to liberate access to scientific research in their field by petitioning publishers to post peer-reviewed papers in free, public online archives. Varmus and his cohorts ultimately launched a nonprofit open-access publishing venture, which achieved financial sustainability this year. The Public Library of Science journals—there are now seven of them at www.plos.org—make scientific papers immediately available online, with no charges for access and no restrictions on subsequent redistribution or use, as long as the authors and source are cited, as specified by the Creative Commons Attribution License." (http://seedmagazine.com/content/article/science_2.0_pioneers/)

More Information

Interview on Open Access at http://seedmagazine.com/content/article/science_2.0_pioneers/

Excerpt:

NYAS: Have scientists been slow to embrace submitting their work to open access journals?

Varmus: There’s now pretty wide acceptance of Public Library of Science journals, but most of my colleagues are still tormented by the need to publish in Nature, Cell, and Science, which are not open access journals. This is about much more than just publishing; it’s about values in the scientific academic community. Biomedical trainees are completely obsessed with the idea that they can’t get a job unless they publish papers in Nature, Cell, and Science. This is unfortunate, because those journals are going to be the last to go completely open access.

NYAS: PLoS is now publishing far more research than any of those journals, isn’t it?

Varmus: Yes. We publish over 600 articles a month. The only way you really can change the culture is to take on those top journals, so we decided we would publish two journals, PLoS Medicine and PLoS Biology, to compete with the very best. We’ve achieved a high level of credibility for PLoS Medicine and PLoS Biology. They’re so-called high-impact journals. But to do that means rejecting a lot of articles, which gets expensive because of the costs of reviewing articles that do not get published. We afford those two journals because we make very modest amounts of money from other higher volume journals and we cover the cost of the whole enterprise by balancing things out.

NYAS: What about the importance of the impact factor in scientific publishing?

Varmus: The impact factor is a completely flawed metric and it’s a source of a lot of unhappiness in the scientific community. Evaluating someone’s scientific productivity by looking at the number of papers they published in journals with impact factors over a certain level is poisonous to the system. A couple of folks are acting as gatekeepers to the distribution of information, and this is a very bad system. It really slows progress by keeping ideas and experiments out of the public domain until reviewers have been satisfied and authors are allowed to get their paper into the journal that they feel will advance their career.

NYAS: What are some ways PLoS is taking knowledge-sharing to the next level?

Varmus: One of the most important developments is not particular to open access journals, and that is the addition of online commentary. Here’s our opportunity to make every article an occasion for conversation and a way to have another kind of evaluation. I can imagine search and promotion committees of the future spending more time looking at the kind of commentary that a paper has elicited than calculating impact-factor scores.We’ve tried another experiment in the last few months called PLoS Currents. We’ve done this with one subject so far—influenza, a topic of great interest with a need for rapid publication.

We invite people to post in PLoS Currents anything that can be looked at by a board of curators in 24 hours. The point is to get an article or an idea or a single result into the public domain quickly so people can build on it. Look at PLoS Currents: Influenza on our Web site and you’ll see it’s been quite a nice experiment. Some postings look like full-fledged articles, others look much more primitive, but most have anywhere from a few to 10 or 20 commentaries attached to them. This is a way for scientists to get others to comment while they’re still working.

Information can also be aggregated and put together in very useful ways on sites that we’ve been calling Hubs, a project still in development. The idea is to try to wrest deeper ideas out of aggregated material without violation of copyright. We hope to create communities that migrate to these sites every day and then use them as platforms for fostering their field. This is another way to make science more energized." (http://seedmagazine.com/content/article/science_2.0_pioneers/)