Tuesday, November 13, 2001

New Online Service Lets Biologists Vote on Most Important Articles By JEFFREY R. YOUNG More than 1,400 biologists have volunteered for a new online service that rates the quality of scientific papers in the life sciences by essentially allowing a broad group of researchers to vote on which papers they think are most interesting. The service's organizers say it challenges the traditional system of judging the significance of scientific work. The new service, called Faculty of 1000, is meant to help scientists weed through the growing body of research in biology. Each month, the service's volunteers will be asked to recommend the two or three most interesting papers they have read that month. For each paper they recommend, the reviewers will assign a rating -- "recommended," "must read," or "exceptional" -- and also write a brief comment about why they think the paper is important. So far, the service has recruited 1,450 volunteers who have evaluated about 350 papers, according to Gordon Fletcher, a spokesman for BioMed Central Limited, which is operating Faculty of 1000. A trial version of the service is available free until January 1. After that, scientists who want to see which papers their peers recommend will have to pay an annual subscription fee ($50 for individual users and about $1,500 for institutions) to gain access to the service -- which provides only recommendations, not the texts of the recommended articles. When possible, entries on the Faculty 1000 site will contain an abstract or a link to the full text of the recommended article. The site is divided into 16 sections, and each section is broken up into several subsections. Users can customize the site to highlight the top-rated articles in their areas of interest, or search the titles of recommended articles. "There are so many papers in the peer-review journals that it's almost impossible for anyone on their own to find all the relevant papers or all of the significant papers," says Elliot M. Meyerowitz, a professor of biology at the California Institute of Technology who is co-editor of the plant-biology section of the online service. "The scientific literature is expanding," he adds. "I think we need new models for how to keep up with the scientific output, and to publicize it, and this is an interesting one." "Clearly, the 17th-century model we're using now is growing obsolete." Mr. Fletcher, of BioMed Central, says that the new service shifts emphasis away from journals to focus attention on the merit of each paper. "People assume that if you publish in Science that it's a great article," says Mr. Fletcher. "There's plenty of other good research published in other journals." Faculty of 1000 is one of several new online services that are challenging the role of traditional academic journals, says Jean-Claude Guédon, a professor of comparative literature at the University of Montreal. In a recent policy paper published by the Association of Research Libraries, Mr. Guédon argues that academics should work to break up what he sees as a monopoly of scientific publishers. "Several Faculties of 1,000 in various disciplines should be established," Mr. Guédon says. "Those kinds of competition should help bring down the costs of the core scientific journals and thereby reduce the serial pricing crisis." Easy-to-print version E-mail this article

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