Inside FRPAA: If Only Someone Else Had Heard
After his experiences on the battlefields of World War I, Alexander Fleming made a shocking discovery--bacteria could be an even deadlier force than enemy artillery. In the startling conditions of trench warfare, infection caused 15 percent of war-related fatalities, or roughly 5.5 million out of 37 million total deaths. Fleming returned to his London laboratory driven to find some way to prevent these deaths. His pursuit eventually led to the discovery that mold, specifically penicillin, could kill bacteria. Today, penicillin has become one of our most successful defenses against infectious disease; however, when Fleming published his findings in the British Journal of Experimental Pathology in 1928, his work raised little interest and was nearly lost to scientific obscurity.
It was not until 1938, ten years later, that British scientist Ernst Chain and Australian scientist Howard Florey rediscovered Fleming’s article. On the eve of World War II, they began to test the effectiveness of Fleming's "miracle" mold on human subjects. Chain, Florey, and an expanded team of scientists, later known as the Oxford Group, took their discoveries to America where USDA scientists perfected the production process, manufactured the drug in mass quantities, and distributed it to Allied forces. The new “wonder drug” saved countless lives that would have otherwise been lost to infection on the battlefields of Europe and Asia. In fact, after the introduction of penicillin, deaths from infection virtually disappeared. Since then, penicillin has saved millions more lives worldwide and is one of the most widely prescribed antibiotics.
Many of our most profound scientific discoveries share similarly humble beginnings. Anyone working in laboratories knows that it takes more than just one scientist, working in the predawn hours to unlock the secrets of the world. It takes another scientist, and then another, and then another to move from a first significant discovery to the practical application of research. Communication between researchers has long been the key to advancing research and accelerating the real world impact of those discoveries. Fortunately, the research community--with the assistance of scholarly associations, publishers, and libraries--has moved worlds beyond shouting "Eureka!" and running through the streets. Yet in today’s world, with information increasingly at one’s fingertips, it is amazing to note that some of the very same barriers that resulted in the ten-year delay of penicillin research and countless other discoveries still exist.
Scholars in all fields communicate their discoveries, ideas, and innovations largely through publication in peer-reviewed journals. Many of those scholars, working in universities around the country, depend on their university libraries to provide access to those journals through subscriptions. However, with journal prices escalating at rates that are two to three times greater than general inflation, this mode of communication is becoming increasingly impractical. Colorado State University Libraries provides the campus with over 31,000 current serials, including more than 23,000 full-text online journals, at a cost of approximately $3.6 million per year. That’s roughly 65 percent of the Libraries’ materials budget solely dedicated to supplying the campus with scholarship published in journals, leaving only 35 percent to spend on books and other important resources.
Unfortunately, in the past five years CSU Libraries has gone through two major journal cancellation projects due to exploding journal costs. Although the Libraries continues in its efforts to provide access to significant research findings via consortial partnerships, which permit the bulk purchase of journal titles in association with other universities, and an ever-expanding interlibrary loan effort, which vastly improves access to articles not in CSU’s own collection, access is shrinking--not growing--in a way that contradicts modern advances in technology.
The Internet should enable instantaneous, immediate communication between researchers and scholars. Just imagine if Fleming could have sat down at a computer and told colleagues in England and beyond about the miracle mold that could knock out staph bacteria. In fact, the number of visitors to digital content on Web sites so far outnumbers traditional journal circulations that the potential to broadly, widely, and immediately impact the scientific community via publishing online is nearly limitless. Take, for example, the journal Science. Science is one of the most commonly cited journals and boasts 130,000 print subscriptions. Yet its Web site, which contains a mix of free and subscription-required portions, receives 1.8 million weekly visits.2 While many publishers are choosing to offer their materials electronically, the need for costly subscriptions, even for materials available online, continues to limit access. Such barriers to the exchange of information between scholars and researchers ultimately threaten to stifle research worldwide.
Comments
Stories of important findings in early publications that took years to be appreciated tend to reflect the absence of adequate distribution systems at the time because of technical and economic barriers in the late 1800's (Mendel's work on peas) and early 1900's (Flemings work mentioned here), or the absence of the intellectual understanding to place those discoveries in context. The attempt to tie those issues to the cost and accessibility of journals today is unjustified.
The increasing costs of scholarly journals that has forced the CSU library to cut subscriptions is regrettable. However, because of inter-library loans, no scholar on campus has lost access to articles in the journals that have been cut. It may take a couple of days, but virtually any article can be acquired. Indeed, the idea that any researcher in America today does not have access to the most recently published research is without merit. Every research institution either has subscriptions to the most heavily used journals or has easy access via inter-library loans. No active researcher today can legitimately claim poor accessibility to excuse not knowing the most relevant results in their field.
Posted by: Daniel Bush | November 15, 2006 09:35 PM