Open Access and the Progress of Science

There’s an old joke about asking the way to somewhere and being told it would be best not to start from where you are. It’s a good way to frame some thoughts about whether our present system of scholarly communication aids the progress of science or gets in the way. If we could start now, equipped with the World Wide Web, computers in every laboratory or institution and a global view of the scientific research effort, would we come up with the system for communicating knowledge that we have today? The system we have, which originated as an exchange of letters and lectures among scattered peers, does some things well. But in its current form—a leviathan feeding on an interaction of market forces within and outside science—one can hardly argue that the system satisfies the needs of a modern scientific community. And new developments in the way science is done will make it even less fit for its original purpose in the years ahead. No, we would think of a new way, one that would provide for rapid dissemination of results that any scientist could access, easily and without barriers of cost. We might debate how to implement quality control, how to ensure that originators of ideas or findings are given their proper due, how our new and better system should be In 1996, after more than two decades in medical cell biology research and scholarly publishing, Alma Swan cofounded Key Perspectives Ltd., a consultancy in the area of scholarly communication. She holds graduate degrees in cell biology