Is this the end of the scholarly journal?

Publishing research to blogs and e-books is so easy, some are wondering if peer-reviewed journals are on their way to obsolescence.

from the January 24, 2007 edition

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PLoS ONE takes a different tack. While articles receive a basic screening, they don't have to attain the standard of representing groundbreaking work in order to be published. An article only has to be based on solid science. The idea is that the more valid research is published, the better, as it contributes to an online database.

"If it is science, [if] it is well done, [and if] it provides a valuable contribution to scientific literature, we can publish it," Surridge says. He expects about two-thirds of those papers submitted to PLoS ONE to be accepted.

Since its launch Dec. 20, PLoS ONE has published well over 100 papers and expects to publish 15 to 20 more per week. Readers access the articles for free. PLoS ONE pays its way by charging authors $1,250 to publish an article. While that might seem a barrier to publication, Surridge says most research is financed by grants or large institutions, meaning individual scientists rarely have to pay themselves. But just in case, PLoS ONE is waiving the fee for any authors who request it.

Moshe Prisker and Nikita Bernstein are taking another approach, using the Web's ability to deliver video easily with JoVE. While scientific concepts can be very simple, "the actual doing of the [laboratory] experiments is very difficult," says Dr. Prisker, a neural-stem-cell researcher at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston.

Traditionally, he says, scientists have resorted to wandering from lab to lab asking, "Do you know how to do this or do that? They're basically asking someone with previous experience to show them."

In its first three months, JoVE has posted 18 videos ranging from five to 15 minutes showing techniques such as "Nuclear transfer in mouse oocytes." They get a modest vetting from scientists in the field to make sure they are sound. The site is free to view and charges nothing to post videos. Prisker says that he and Mr. Bernstein, both volunteers, hope that the journal will someday pay for itself through ads from manufacturers of lab equipment (the "Google model," he says).

Other journals are beginning to employ video in some articles, but JoVE is the first to make video images the primary means of conveying information. Brief articles, voice-overs, or captions accompany the moving images.

"Video gives you this ability for unambiguous representation of experiments," Prisker says. "I'm sure that video publication will become a significant force [in online journals]." Nearly all of the early reaction to the fledgling journal has been positive. Visitors to the JoVE website say, "This should have been done long ago," Prisker says.

Since the early days of the Web, observers have speculated that scientists might simply post new research on their own or in communal websites and let search engines find it, thereby bypassing the peer-reviewed journals altogether. If the research proves valuable, other sites will link to it, and the results would be "published" far faster than waiting for a journal to accept them.

Already, an online database called arXiv ( www.arXiv.org), hosted by Cornell University in Ithaca, N.Y., contains more than 400,000 scientific papers posted by their authors without peer review. (The papers often appear later in peer-reviewed journals). Its comprehensiveness makes arXiv (pronounced "archive") a valuable tool, Gerstein, the Yale researcher, says. If someone claims to make a new discovery, anyone can search this database and say, "No, you didn't. It's in the arXiv."

Nonetheless, Gerstein says he thinks scientific journals, and some kind of peer review, will be around for a long time. Publishing in prestigious journals is "deeply intertwined with [scientists'] reputations and their promotions," he says. "You still want to get the stamp of approval of a journal."

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