Reinventing  the Basics of Scholarly Communication? (February 8, 2011)

These days Colin Macilwain writes a monthly 'World View' column for the journal  Nature, but the January 30, 2011 issue of The Chronicle of Higher Education features a critical analysis by him of scholarly publication based on the latest effort spear-headed by the publications entrepreneur Vitek Tracz.

In 2000 Mr Tracz founded BioMed Central a UK-based, for-profit scientific publisher specialising in open access journal publication. At the time he says: "Everybody promised me that open access would not succeed, they said I would go bankrupt. I thought there was a very high chance of that, myself. But it now turns out to be significantly profitable." In fact Mr Macilwain reports that "he sold his BioMed Central publications—there are now about 200 of them—to Berlin-based Springer for an undisclosed sum, thought to be in the region of $50-million".

What next to engage the man known as a serial entrepreneur who told Richard Poynder in a 2005 interview:

 I was born in 1940 on the border between Poland and Russia. That was when the Russians occupied the area. So you could say I was conceived in Poland and born in Russia without my parents moving; it was the borders that moved. My family then lived in Siberia for several years, returning to Poland in 1945. I grew up in Warsaw, where I studied mathematics. [My family] went to Israel when I was 21. I continued studying mathematics for a year there, but I wanted to make movies, so I decided to go to Europe to attend a film school. I came to England on my way to France and fell in love with London. I went to film school at the London Polytechnic and the Slade School of Art, and then got a fellowship at the Department of Art History in the University of Essex...  I decided to stop making films and become a publisher, and I started Gower Medical Publishing.

According to Colin Macilwain: "Mr. Tracz plans to turn his latest Internet experiment, a large network of leading scientists called the Faculty of 1000, into what some call 'the Facebook of science', a force that will change the nature of peer review," and transform a scholarly paper into an evolving discussion among the authors, knowledgeable researchers, and other interested readers. And along the way Mr Tracz wishes to bring an end to the high-price of journal subscriptions.

Bruce Alberts, professor of biochemistry at the University of California at San Francisco and currently the editor in chief of the AAAS's weekly Science reckons "[Tracz] is very creative, he hires good people and pushes them hard, and he enjoys doing new things."

And Mark Patterson, director of publishing at open-access Public Library of Science, adds "They've got some great people involved,"

Returning to the Faculty of 1000 -- it in fact includes thousands of  members -- who rate and comment on papers in their individual fields. Mr Tracz says: "When I was explaining it at the start, I said, Take biology or medicine, and divide them into 10; divide each into 10 sub-specialities; in each of these, ask 10 experts; so I used to call it Faculty of 1000 internally, and then I thought, well, it's a name, so let's call it that. Right from the beginning, it turned out to be more than a thousand. Biology was more than 2,000, then medicine, when it was launched, was more than 2,000." The membership is now about 10,000 and their current voluntary function is to comment on and rate new papers that they find of interest [six (recommended), eight (must read), or 10 (exceptional)].

However, as an approach to refereeing research publications both David Lipman, Director of the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) at the National Institutes of Health, and Bruce Alberts have reservations:

Dr. Lipman: F1000 is useful for finding interesting papers that you wouldn't otherwise find, but as a way of rating papers, there isn't enough activity on it right now.

Professor Alberts who believes that it is prone to dominance by particular individuals within subfields, limiting its usefulness as an arbiter of quality:  I'm on the advisory board—which has never met; F1000 could be really good if it was fixed. I've proposed they make a code of ethics for it that would say, for example, if you're asked by someone to review their paper, then you cannot review it. You've got to prevent corruption in the system.

But Mr Macilwain writes: "Those who know Mr. Tracz expect that his focus on transparency will help deal with such problems, particularly now that the man is completely involved."

And the aim of employing the F1000 as a starting point to overhaul peer review? Mr Tracz explains: "Except for a tiny little part at the top, where it is done seriously, peer review has become a joke. It is not done properly, it delays publication unnecessarily, it is open to abuse, and is being abused. It is seriously sick, and it has been for a while." So while "You can't have a refereeing machine where everybody is entitled to referee," F1000 could provide the basis for this group, but furthermore, Colin Macilwain  writes: "Mr. Tracz is also thinking about other elements of the scheme, like transparency. 'Papers should be visible from the beginning, so someone puts a stamp on it, and then it can start accumulating as many things as it wants.' Such papers might also become evolving entities, with authors updating their contents as more reviewers' perspectives come to light."

Professor Alberts, however, strikes a practical note of caution -- the challenge is to get the best researchers to actively participate in post-publication peer review: "I hope people will experiment with it, but whenever you put stuff up for comment, very few people comment who really know anything. It's a tough problem. I've talked to Vitek about this—I suggested that he pay people to do it!" And the journal Nature similarly has found thst making space available for its readers to provide comments, is only rarely use while open peer review was a failed experiment.

Nevertheless in David Lipman's view: "[Vitek's] got artistic sensibilities—he wanted to be a writer, and he was a filmmaker. When you put together that sense of aesthetics with resourcefulness and business management skills, it's a pretty powerful combination."