wet ae “oL, Oi nec Proceedings of the Joint ICSU Press/UNESCO Expert Conference February 1996 Conference Chairman: Roger Blliiott Steering Committee Chairman: Kai-Inge Hillerud Programme Committee Chairman: Dennis Shaw Local Committee Joint Chairmen: André Authier and Howard Moore Edited by Dennis Shaw and Howard Moore Options for the future Joshua Lederberg Sackler Foundation Scholar and President Emeritus, Rockefeller University, New York, USA First I wish to review what the scientific literature is all about and. in all my remarks. I'm making a very explicit distinction - as my colleague [de Kemp] did before - that our discussion concerns principally the primary scien- tic literature, the original reporting of scientific data and theory, formulation and assertion of claims with respect to priority, and the like. I think a very different set of rules applies to that literature than to the dissemi- nation of monographs, textbooks, novels, biographies and so on. It is a special characteristic of that primary hterature that its authors, on the whole, are totally uninterested in roy- alties, which indeed have generally not been available to them. Their gain from publication is recognition by their colleagues and the dissemination of knowledge in the spirit of science. Primary literature constitutes, as it stands on the shelves of libraries and in other formats. an incrasable public archive. ] think it is of the utmost importance that we not take fluidity too lightly. that there be a point of con: mutment when the author savs: “These were my words; this is what I said we have done in the laboratory; these are the claims that Iam making and they should not be tampered with at any further stage? Obviously they may be modified, there can be links to corrections addenda, further disunctions. but it should always be possible to reconsuuct what the author is to be held accountable for. The registration of claims is a very important point - what drives science is the possibility of making a novel discovery. It’s not a novel discovery if somebody else made it frst, and we get very scant credit for even being 122 hard on the heels of others, who had managed to get there a few minutes before. There are many implications of the allocation of scores for achieving success in that regard, but it’s built into the structure of science as inno- vation that there be a system of registration of claims for what is new, what is different, what is distinctive, that was ‘my contribution’ to the growing corpus of scientific knowledge and understanding. A scientific publication is a grave act to be undertaken with the utmost seriousness; it’s an inscription under oath. To lie in a publication is de facto perjury, and, when ‘that is discovered, there are consequences no less serious than perjury in court and so it should be. We shouldn’t have to worry about whether an assertion of data from an experiment or other claims was made with other than the utmost scriousness on the part of the author. Otherwise, we would be eternally confused whether the matters presented deserve our attention. And the litera- ture is a historic repository where the record of our sci- entific culture can be refreshed and re-examined for the purposes of history, for the purposes of rediscovering ancient matters, whose significance was not fully under- stood before, the establishment of links between differ- ent disciplines, and so forth. So you see, I take the literature very seriously. To me it’s holy writ and I want to be sure that, in whatever format it 1s distributed, it will be accessible, its veracity can be attested by its being observable by everyone at will, and it should be an achievement that cannot be altered. But it’s also a dynamic place, as it should be, and effectively is an open forum. It could be more open than it is. We don’t have enough dialectic in our current modes of publication after the fact. There has to be almost a OPTIONS FOR THE FUTURE federal case before you can have a comment published on a prior article, and the electronic media will help to lower the threshold in that regard. It’s a ‘rumen’, which is a place for fermentation, for digestion, for re-cxami- nation of the given truths over a period of ume, and it certainly has a dynamic quality taken in its totality, even if every brick of the edifice has been put firmly into place in a severcly qualified process. And then, of course. a very important social function - perhaps the most important function that the print jour- nals now have and would be difficult replacing with the electronic media — this is the dignity of the work, having a physical representation of clear type on durable paper. That goes along with the attributes that I mentioned car- lier, being a definitive act of publication in its original form, and so forth. That dignity is attested by the impri- matur of the editors. There’s no reason in the world why that intrinsic function cannot be transferred to the electronic forum. This question has consequences for the accumulation of prestige, for competition for tenure, for grants, for attraction for students — all of the things that are involved in the social system of science and that make science work. We have to be very careful in guid- ing the evolution of the electronic journal. to be sure that the positive valucs of our current system are preserved while maintaining lively access to information — which is the primary asserted advantage of this new form. We have a community of actors concerned with scien- tific publication. They have sometimes convergent, sometimes divergent interests. The authors above all want to make their work known to others. That is their superordinate goal in publication. In order to achieve it, they are certainly interested in having their work avail- able at the lowest price and cost to their readership and, with varying success, this has been internalized in the practice of page charges, which arc negative royalties. These are payments that authors are willing to make in order to help lubricate the system. in order to help have their work made available to the community and to oth- ers. They're concerned about speed, for a wide variety of reasons: to be sure there are no artifacts in the com- petition for priority or just to accelerate the process of dissemination so that others can most promptly take advantage of and build on the work that has been pub- lished. One is really quite irked at having to wait SIX, eight, ten months from the time of submission of an arti cle - those are typical intervals of delay - and we all believe that whatever we have just done and just sub- mitted is of the utmost importance and that the world is holding its breath waiting for it. Sometimes it is! We look for places that have a reputation for rehability, so that people don’t have to waste an undue amount of time just ina first order assessment of whether the statements that are made are to be taken at face valuc. As part of that process, the author is as interested in casy retricvability as is the reader. Ifthe reader’s scarching for matcrial is facilitated by the system. the author knows there will be more readers who will be able to make use of a given contribution. And, yes, one of the things that authors can often profit from is good advice from good editors about their modes of expression. I will never for- ect the first manuscript that I wrote that was seriously edited. It was covered with blue pencil marks, and I wish I still had a copy of that markup because there was a les- son in every line of tt. ‘Libraries and publishers are increasingly at odds with one another. Pricing policies are leading to a black hole - especially with journals with an already limited sub- scription - the subscription base goes down, the sub- scription feces go up and there’s a necessary reaction of further retrenchment. The reductio ad absurd will be a single subscription that will cost a million dollars and we will rely on interlibrary loan subject to rules of access for fair use to get copies of it. We're approaching chat situa- tion with some journals and of course, it’s pure silliness and why print it at all in this case? In other words why not make the transition to the clectronic medium forth- with, when we're heading that way anyway? The reader wants access but not to be flooded with information and, of course, it’s hard not to be inundated with material, even just that which 1s essential and important to one’s scientific existence, not to mention everything clse that comes to one’s attention. We want quality assurance so we look for assistance, we look for filters, we took for peer review as a method of assisting us in navigating through the blizzard of available infor- mation that will only worsen. It will worsen anyhow with the accelerating pace of scientific activity, and the ease of deposit on the Internet will aggravate it further. So readers are going to need that kind of filtering assis- tance more than ever, and that’s the big argument for the TOSHU A LEDERBERG peer review imprimatur in some form or another. roughly analogous to what we have with print journals, If we don’t get it by a formal method. we will simply have a universe of readers who will have no time to read and they will wait for the equivalent of the book reviews and the commentaries of others ~ a sort of ex post facto review, so you will ev entually eet around to being told by your col ‘leagues that so-and-so was the article you should have read. : The producers. the publishers and the editors, of course. have had their very important part to piav. and their role in quality improvement and quality control has been indispensable. They have established the mechanisms for editorial review on which we rely for the kind of fi- tration that I have described. And then - not sufficiently mentioned - there are other people who have an interest in the substantial outcome of scientific work. the sponsors and the beneficiaries. These are the people who pay for the scientific work and the public which is the ultimate beneficiary of that activ- ity. They pay the bill and have ever y right to expect that we scientists have organized systems which will operate with reasonable smoothness and efficiency: that we don’t waste time doing work that’s already been done, that we are properly informed about our colleagues’ work. That is the assertion that we have made in apply- ing for our research m grants and which ensures their worth to the community. Now there are other functions of literature for the future which are based, on but go beyond, the concept of the intelligent agent for retrieval. I foresee the point at which it will be both 1 possible and necessary to have intelligent agents examining the content of literature and assisting us in drawing of inference, in finding relationships between facts. in truth maintenance — in other words in consistency-checking among the data that are present in the literature - the kinds of things that we exercise by cerebral management with some assistance today, The scientific world has become so complicated - certainly in the biological area - that no single mind can encomipass it all properly and we > will need conceptual models that involve some computer assistance in dealing with it. Without direct access to the hterature on the part of these intelli igent agents, uc process is quite hopeless. I Spent several years in a progranune at Stanford with Ed Feigenbaum, Bruce Buchanan and Carl Djerassi on art- ficial intelligence in chemistr y - the Dendral pr ogramme - and by far the most arduous part of that was the knowledge transfer from the factual information from the mind of the chemist — mainly Carl Djcrassi - into the set of rules for the computer programs, and that simply is not workable as a practical mode of developing com- puter systems in other disciplines. We said then and still have to stress that, until the day comes that we have intelligent agents capable of abstracting that knowledge directly from its existing repository, namely from litera- ture, we are going to be in a ead de sac for really serious further dev clopment in that field) Now all of my remarks so far have come from the journal as the start- ing point ~ the existing framework of scientific commu- nication. I'm going to take a slightly different tack at this point. Recall that the Scientific Journal began as letters of cor- gregated in order to make it a bit more convenient for a given scientist to respondents. They were then ag communicate with his colleagues in those days and so the journals were then founded. We are seeing a re- enactment of that process today with electronic mail, bulletin boards, discussion groups and lists and they're here to stay. I’m not making any exhortations or predic- tions about the future. I’m talking about current circum- stance. Scientists and other scholars are on a rising wave of exercise of that intercommunication ca pability. Most of it is rather informal. I’m a litte worricd that, if this process gocs on without some discipline, that it will be all too fluid and some of the virtues of accountability and of seriousness, of freedom from pollution and from exploitation by individuals who have nothing better to do than run their mucky fingers over the typewriters all day long and so forth, will create such a blizzard of junk that we will not be able to find our w ay through it. So, if we had never heard of the Scientific Journal in its print form, and were just watching the manifestation of this communication as it is operating today on the net, I think we would very quickly come to the conclusion we had better invent something like a pecr review journal in order to provide some modicum of order and of disci: pline in that medium. 124 OPTIONS FOR THE FUTURE My recommendation is that we, as professional scien- tists. really have got to get together and work out a code of conduct about what we regard as responsible scien- ufic communication through the electronic media. What are the appropriate modalities? What are the appropri- ate forms of submission, examination, tagging. labelling? In asking such questions I think we wall dis- cover something very close to what has evolved in the print journal system, The professional societics have a uniquely important role to play in this process. Now what are some of the foresceable consequences? I really have nothing to ask of the print publishers or of the ‘for profit’ electronic purveyors. Unless they are very selective - and they someumes will be - about their value added, they will fall of their own weight as scien- tists become empowered to manage their own commu- nications without the benefit of intermediarics. Yes. I'm echoing Paul Ginsparg. If publishers insist, as some of them have been, on defying claims of fair usc to mitigate access to material through copyright, they will only accelerate the resentment of the creator-authors, whose primary purpose is dissemination of knowledge and easy access by others to their intellectual output. Some journals, print and otherwise. will be so invaluable, so difficult to replicate, have such a fine customer base, that they will still be wonderful bargains and they will thrive: Scence, Nature and a dozen others that could be named are outstanding examples. But the publishers no longer have a captive audience that has no place else to go. It used to be that subscriptions were automatically taken for every journal by every library, regardless of price and. of course, we know that world has changed irrevo- cably at this time. These issues will just work out in future of their own accord as scientists manage their affairs in their own best interest. but one certain source of conflict. regrettably bound to be exacerbated. is the disposition of historic copyright - the many decades of copyrighted scientific material which is now the property of corporate pub- lishers, to whom copyrights had been transmitted, as part of the routine contract that few of us ever stopped to look at, in order to get our papers published. Obviously, much will depend on the definition and applicability of fair use. We were told that moral argu- ments plaved a considerable role in the judicial process in Michigan, so my second recommendation is for an ICSU/UNESCO-Industry Conference to try to map out some standards of definition that may be more con- vereently acceptable to both the academic and the com- mercial communitics involved in this process and wv to munimize some of the rancour which is otherwise bound to be exacerbated. Not to mention government funders of the underlying research, So T foresee the evolution of a mixed system in which there will be communications over a broad range of for- mality, from private to public. I fear that we will see a few invisible colleges that will be closed enclaves. I hope that that can be discouraged as contrary to the true spirit of science. Obviously, there's room for very specific and short-lived collaborations but we none of us want to sec an exclusive model develop, and that could be an issue to be taken up under the codes of conduct that I had indicated earlicr. There will be people who post their own data and own images from time to ume, without authentication through peer review, and these same indli- viduals will try to acquire a little more dignity at other times in presenting their more formal results for the peer review process. Scientists are moving rather quickly in this field andl I think we should, sooner rather than later, av to get some explicit agreement on these codes of conduct. One of the issues to be addressed is the dignity to be given to the stamp of approval. The process seems fairly obvious and will resemble very much our current one - posungs that are submitted through this process deserve a man- date to be acknowledged and cited by others. They should get full credit in the various gate-kceper systems. and we haven’t turned the corner on that just vet. Az this point, few of my academic colleagues would. by prefer- enee, submit an article to an all-electronic journal as opposed to the print journal because they are not vet ‘assured that that has the printed journal’s prestige when it comes to academic review, when it comes to visibility in other regards and when it comes to grants. It shouldn't be long before that’s turned around bue I think it would lielp to have some formal endorsement of that process. Electronic materials need to be archived — the formuda- ble technical problems of retrieving data from ‘dead media’ have been eloquendy put forth at this conier- JOSHUA LEDERBERG ence. Here again, I can really see no other reliable place where that commitment is likely to be enforced over any substanual period of time but the professional socicties themselves. There may be functional agents acting on the socicties but I think the moral and contractual com- mitment for that preservation and perpetuity will have to come from within the scientific community itself. There will be a second tier of publication and perhaps we ought to acknowledge what somebody - I think Dr Pulhnger — remarked that Nature sees a lot of articles and they all get published somewhere else anvhow. that nounng 1s ever really rejected. Well let's admit that. Let's at least examine one possibility Qwhich I haven't really thought through). The result of a review process might be: “Well. by all means this belongs in our premier jour- nals’ or “This is so obviously faulty that it can’t appear anywhere. It is full of slander, it is full of lies. We would- nt dare touch it with a ten-foot pole. But the majority of submissions would probably fall somewhere in berween and I would say: why not accept them but not put them in the premier site? We will not call it Grade B but every- one will know that is what it means; if you did not make it in the first one, yes, you can have more or less auto- matic accessibility to the second one. Who will ever read it, who will ever want to look at it? That is another 126 stary, but at least it will be part of the available public record with the advantage of open accessibility, and we will have, I think, saved a lot of churning in going to three or four other journals in order to achieve that result. One of the aspects of electronic publication is we no longer have any excuse for rationing input. It matters lit- tle if the journal is five, ten or twenty thousand pages and parucularly if, as I hope will be understood, we use page charges as the primary medium of financing that kind of a system. One of the other benefits of the page charge is that, ves, the potential polluter of excessive input will at least have to pay for the cost of what’s com- ing M1. Well, there are other formats for deposit but I think they would follow fairly naturally from the expectation that there will be a continuum, so my final remark really is that this system is evolving, whatever we say or do or resolve at this Conference. It is going to march ahead anyhow. None of us can be a King Canute saying this tide can't come in and the real issue is: can we channel this technologically driven but, I think at this point, quite inexorable process in ways that will be of the utmost benefit to all the members of our community?