No Free Lunches: We Should Resist the Push to Rush Research Online

By JOHN H. EWING

In a commentary earlier this year in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Richard J. Roberts, who shared the 1993 Nobel Prize in medicine, called on journals in the life sciences to post their contents online at no charge after a suitable delay -- one month, or perhaps six months, after publication. Specifically, he urged them to deposit the articles they publish in PubMed Central, an online service run by the National Institutes of Health. Parallel to PubMed Central, online