The creation of free chemical databases continues unabated. Today's entry is Pherobase, a service dedicated to documenting the relationship between chemical structures and the insect world.

Users can search Pherobase by text, or browse a large number of precompiled categories: alphabetical by genus; alphabetical by species; and compounds by genus or species. Each compound data sheet contains a wealth of data, all linked to the primary literature: mass spectrum; nmr; synthesis; and behavioral function. There's even an interactive Jmol model for each entry.

Pherobase is clearly designed to be useful to farmers and others involved in agriculture who are interested in using pheromones in pest control. Are insects eating your olive tree? Let pherobase help. Need help with fire ants? Pherobase can help there, too. Wonder what else besides Gypsy Moths might be affected by disparlure? Pherobase has the answer. And nearly all of this information is backed by references to the primary literature.

Pherobase clearly demonstrates the value of building comprehensive, focused chemical databases around a limited subject of high practical utility. After all, chemistry's most enduring contribution is in the production of useful properties, not the production of compounds.

Pherobase is also noteworthy for the way it's being used by its creator, Ashraf El-Sayed. Rather than standing on its own, Pherobase is designed to direct users to suppliers of pheromones and related pest control products by educating them about what might be possible. In this sense, Pherobase's approach offers another intriguing example of an Open Access business model that can actually work.

Yale University has ended it's financial support of BioMed Central's Open Access Membership program effective July 27, 2007. Under the program, Yale libraries paid an annual fee to cover the costs of submissions by Yale authors to BioMed Central (BMC) open access journals. Yale authors can continue to submit manuscripts to BMC, but must pay for all charges themselves.

According to the August 3, 2007 statement by Yale,

... Starting with 2005, BioMed Central page charges cost the libraries $4,658, comparable to single biomedicine journal subscription. The cost of page charges for 2006 then jumped to $31,625. The page charges have continued to soar in 2007 with the libraries charged $29,635 through June 2007, with $34,965 in potential additional page charges in submission.

As we deal with unprecedented increases in electronic resources, we have had to make hard choices about which resources to keep. At this point we can no longer afford to support the BioMedCentral model.

Apparently, Yale is not alone in its decision. In a refreshing act of openness, BMC lists both current members and former members. A surprisingly large number of universities have canceled their memberships, including over 80 in the United States alone. In effect, these cancellations represent a version of the journal deadpool, but in reverse.

Cost increases pose a real threat to the viability of scientific publication. Journals rely heavily on network effects to attract readers, authors, citations, and ultimately, subscribers. A journal can remain viable for some time in the face of canceled subscriptions. But each cancellation brings a journal that much closer to destroying its network, its only real value.

Open access by itself doesn't solve scientific publishing's most serious problem - it simply changes the paths through which ever-increasing sums of money flow.

Thanks to Wendy Warr for her alert on this story posted to the CHMINF-L mailing list.

Several articles in the past few years have alluded to the ongoing cost squeeze faced by librarians maintaining scientific journal collections. Consistently we're told by those doing the buying that subscription costs have gotten way out of control. Sadly, there's only one correct response: kill subscriptions to those journals that price themselves out of the marketplace.

For the most part, canceling journal subscriptions has been a private activity - news doesn't consistently travel beyond the confines of the institution doing it. But what if it did?

Try this thought experiment: you're a journal publisher who has had a number of canceled subscriptions in the last two years. You continue to receive a healthy number of manuscript submissions, yet your revenues have been falling to the point that you may not be able to cover your costs. Do you (a) lower subscription rates to more competitively price your product; (b) keep rates the same, hoping things will turn around; or (c) raise rates to maintain profitability?

There's an interesting hypothesis, variously alluded to, that says that journals increase their subscription rates to remain profitable in the face of declining demand. Classical economics says that declining demand should result in declining prices, but that assumes a healthy, efficiently-functioning marketplace. Scientific publishing today may not be among them.

Could declining subscription rates actually be a major cause of the "increasing costs" faced by scientific publishers and passed on to subscribers? It's a testable hypothesis if the right data have been collected.

To conduct such a study, one piece of information that may be helpful is a market-wide summary of journal subscription cancellations. Let's call it the "Journal Deadpool." Unfortunately, to my knowledge, no such data exist.

By way of the Chemical Information Sources Discussion List, Thurston Donart Miller pointed out that the Physics-Astronomy-Mathematics (PAM) Division of the Special Libraries Association has maintained a list of canceled subscriptions for the last ten years.

The PAM effort is a step in the right direction, but what if they took it further? By including data such as the date of cancellation, the last annual subscription fee, and whether an online subscription to the journal is available at the institution, a much clearer picture of the state of the scientific publishing market would emerge.

A highly-publicized, multi-institution "Journal Deadpool" would certainly give food for thought to scientists considering where to send their next manuscript. And it would strengthen the case of librarians who are caught in the middle.

One of the prerequisites for a healthy marketplace is free flow of information among both buyers and sellers. A Journal Deadpool may be just what the doctor ordered.

Image Credit: geographie

Making a name for yourself in science is no easy job. Aside from the technical challenge of doing noteworthy science while working under constraints, there's the compounding challenge of making your work known to influential colleagues. Excellent work done in a vacuum is lost to science, only to be "rediscovered" by those more willing or capable of self-promotion. Look around at the most successful scientists in your field, and you'll find that they are both extraordinarily adept at doing noteworthy science and in promoting their work.

Scientists have been using the scientific publication system for hundreds of years as a channel for promoting their work. For a variety of reasons, this system is now breaking down before our eyes. There are many reasons - consider these:

• The printed page doesn't matter anymore. Old-guard scientific publishers have been able to prosper by acting as gatekeepers of a precious resource: the printed page. The arrival of immediate, ultra-cheap, ubiquitous, interactive, and persistent communication through the Internet means that printed journals are increasingly viewed as wasteful and irrelevant.

• Printed journals have priced themselves out of the marketplace. How many printed journals has your library dropped over the last year? Does your "library" even carry current printed journals anymore?

• Electronic Information wants to be free. Few things are more frustrating than knowing the answer to your question exists on a server somewhere, but you are forbidden from accessing it. Yes, you can pay $15-$30 for each article you need or get multiple subscriptions costing thousands per year, but is that any way to spend your budget?

• The minimum publishable unit is shrinking. Scientists have legitimate interests in maximizing the number of papers they publish, in minimizing their size, and in decreasing their interval. Submissions to top-tier journals continue to increase. New journals are started to catch the overflow, placing additional strain on the system's ability to find readers and "qualified" reviewers, and driving up production costs in the process.

• Too much information. How many scientific papers have you actually read, from start to finish, in the last month? How many important, relevant papers in your field could you have completely read in the last month? How many of them did you find through an automatic notification system? How many papers have you used solely for one specific piece of information they contain? How many of these papers did you find through a database of some kind?

Open Access has become a hot topic, mainly in response to the points above. Although well-intended, the debate assumes that scientific publication in the Internet age will continue to work essentially the same way it always has - with scientists submitting manuscripts to publishers who act as editors, distributors, and in many cases quality-assurance agencies.

But what if it doesn't end up working out that way?

The reason that the existing scientific publication system has flourished for hundreds of years is that it solved the fundamental problems of two key groups: (1) scientists who wanted to be informed of new developments; and (2) scientists who wanted to promote their work and careers.

If you accept this premise, then nothing prevents entirely new publication models from replacing the existing ones - provided that they solve the basic problem scientists face. If anything, the Internet is replete with examples of powerful old-guard gatekeepers of all stripes being first undermined as they denied that their business models were failing, then lashing out at everything but the root cause of their problems, and finally being driven into oblivion.

Why should old-guard scientific publishers be immune to this process?

Some scientists are discovering value in bypassing scientific publishers altogether. In chemistry, the best-known example is Jean-Claude Bradley and his group at Drexel. As Bradley's group is joined by others willing to experiment in this area, they will uncover a variety of problems that need to be addressed. Some of the most significant (at this point) include:

• tools to create content

• services that host and archive that content indefinitely

• peer-review mechanisms that fully leverage the power of collaboration over the Internet

• utilities for finding and promoting the work

These are the new high-payoff areas in scientific publication. Like all high-payoff areas, this one starts out looking dangerous or insignificant to most people.

This is not to say that that the Internet eliminates the need for gatekeepers. Instead, it creates tremendous opportunities for new gatekeepers. Google, eBay, and Wikipedia are gatekeepers. Facebook and YouTube are also gatekeepers. By all accounts, these services have done phenomenally well and will continue to flourish for some time. Significantly, each service addresses the basic need of information consumers to be informed and information producers to have their message heard. These systems have found powerful mechanisms for quality control that in many cases put the current practice of scientific peer-review to shame. And in no case will you find a business model requiring pay-per-view.

Google, eBay, Wikipedia, Facebook, YouTube, and hundreds of other gatekeepers thrive because each has found a new precious resource to allocate, not by trying to extract every last drop of value from the old ones. Both scientific publishers and Open Access proponents would be wise to consider their example.

Image Credit: Seamus Murray