Democratizing Information
Since Euclid, Ptolemy and other scholars gathered at the great library of Alexandria, Egypt, beginning in the 3rd century BC, it has been clear that science marches forward only when scientists have ready and unimpeded access to central repositories of knowledge. Many scholars had hoped the Internet would become a modern Alexandria, but in recent years scientists in poor nations and even at financially strapped U.S. universities have been increasingly unable to afford the soaring subscription charges being levied by the most prestigious online databases.
At a Paris summit on scientific publishing earlier this year librarians agreed that while “the cost per bit of information is getting cheaper, the cost per useful bit is getting more expensive.” The problems facing Helga Patrikios, the medical librarian at the University of Zimbabwe, are typical. Though her library, a cornerstone of health research in sub-Saharan Africa, once subscribed to 600 medical journals, today it can afford only 170.
Patrikios’ colleague, University of Zimbabwe pharmacology professor Klara Tisocki, rightly suggests that “important information on human health” should be seen not as a commodity but as “a right, a human right.”
Librarians are hoping that their problems will be solved by the growth of public online journals like PubMed Central, a Web-based, full-text repository of peer-reviewed biomedical reports that the National Institutes of Health launched last year. PubMed Central is opposed by medical journals that fear it will threaten “our livelihood,” as Margaret A. Winker, the deputy editor of the Journal of the American Medical Assn., candidly admitted. They have declared the venture dead in the digital water numerous times since Nobel Prize-winning scientist Harold Varmus first proposed it in 1999 when he was director of the National Institutes of Health.
In recent months, however, momentum has turned in favor of “digital democracy” efforts like PubMed Central. The British Medical Journal announced in January that it would place all its content on the growing archive. In April the Massachusetts Institute of Technology committed itself to spending $100 million over the next decade to make nearly all of its Web-based course material available free on the Internet. And last month, 20,000 scientists announced they will boycott all online journals that charge a fee for accessing published research more than 6 months old.
Digital data do not need the ludicrously gargantuan level of taxpayer support called for in the “Digital Opportunity Investment Trust,” which former PBS executives Lawrence K. Grossman and Newton N. Minow put before Congress in early April. Their plan would budget $18 billion for vaguely defined efforts to “create a digital space” for the public just as the nation set aside physical spaces for primary schools and universities in the 18th and 19th centuries. However, PubMed Central surely deserves the $2.5 million the National Library of Medicine proposes to spend operating it next year.
With Congress’ direction and support, perhaps one day the Internet will prove to be a modern Alexandria after all.
