Vitek Tracz is a risk-taker. He put his money into open-access publishing when free Internet journals seemed like a long shot.
“Everybody promised me that open access would not succeed,” recalls the scientific publisher. “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.” Two years ago 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.
Now, the man described by his colleagues as one of the most innovative and mercurial forces in publishing wants to reinvent the basics of scholarly communication. 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” and a force that will change the nature of peer review. His vision is to transform papers from one-shot events owned by publishers into evolving discussions among those researchers, authors, and readers.
Also in that vision: an end to the high-priced subscriptions that give faculty members and university librarians heartburn.
At other journals, top officials say Mr. Tracz might be able to pull this off. “He’s very creative, he hires good people and pushes them hard, and he enjoys doing new things,” says Bruce Alberts, editor in chief of Science and a professor of biochemistry at the University of California at San Francisco. “They’ve got some great people involved,” agrees Mark Patterson, director of publishing at the Public Library of Science, a major open-access publisher that would like to include F1000 assessments in postpublication discussions it already hosts about its own papers.
But critics—and even some supporters like Mr. Alberts—say that F1000 too often features scientists endorsing their friends’ papers to offer truly independent evaluations, and that the group is still struggling to create large enough discussions to be useful.
Publishing Pioneer
Mr. Tracz plans to start his revolution from London, where his company, the Science Navigation Group, is headquartered. He is known in the business simply as “Vitek,” dresses tieless but dapper, and owns an intricately designed family home on the banks of the Thames. He invariably weekends in Paris and travels frequently to Israel, where one of his businesses builds map applications for mobile phones.
His parents met on a kibbutz in Palestine in the 1920s, and both became Communists before being deported back to Poland. From there they fled to Siberia during World War II. After Mr. Tracz’s father quit the Communist Party in 1956, to protest the suppression of the Hungarian revolt, the family obtained permission to leave for Israel. Mr. Tracz went from there to London in the swinging 60s to study film. He started making promotional films for doctors and then turned to books, founding Gower Medical Publishing
In 1984, Mr. Tracz sold Gower to Harper & Row, now part of HarperCollins, and then pioneered the concept of “review journals” under the Current Opinion banner, in which leading scientists in biology and medicine wrote annual overviews of the recent literature in their areas.
“We wanted to create a scheme that would be comprehensive and systematic,” Mr. Tracz recalls. “People liked the idea so much. They wanted to write for it because then it was a literature service, and people thought, right, once a year I’ll be forced to look at everything. So people just did it.” He sold the Current Opinion journals in 1996.
Two years later, he lent critical support to the nascent open-access movement. Sensing that the Internet would revolutionize publishing, and feeling hostile toward larger publishing rivals such as Elsevier, Mr. Tracz was the only commercial publisher to support the idea. He offered all of the content of his own online journal, BioMed Central, for inclusion in PubMed Central, the digital archive set up by the National Institutes of Health in 2000.
In doing this, Mr. Tracz was backing a development that most other publishers regarded as about as welcome as the arrival of the bubonic plague. “He was incredible,” recalls David Lipman, director of the National Center for Biotechnology Information at the National Institutes of Health, who set up PubMed Central. “He put his own skin in—he just thought it was a good thing, and he risked a lot.”
Paul Ginsparg, a physicist at Cornell University and the founder of the ArXiv physics archive of digital articles, says: “Getting a commitment from Vitek early on was extremely useful. PubMed Central was quite controversial, and it was not at all certain that it would get buy-in” from publishers.
Mr. Tracz wanted PubMed Central to go further and publish nonreviewed papers, or “preprints,” as ArXiv does. He says he was outvoted by his advisory board, largely because the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the most prestigious journal to join PubMed Central, threatened to withdraw “if one preprint appeared” on it.
Many biomedical researchers say they fear preprints because the absence of peer review might allow cranks to publish papers contending, say, that eating bananas protects you from AIDS. Mr. Tracz says those researchers put too much faith in a peer-review system that is already broken. “You know what? That paper has already been published!” he says. “It has been published in a peer-reviewed journal a long time ago. Peer review doesn’t stop it. Any paper can be published.”
Despite being stalled with preprints, Mr. Tracz says he feels that the open-access battle has been won, with open journals now ensconced at Springer and the PLOS firmly established. “It is solved,” he declares emphatically. “It took a lot of investment and a lot of risk, but people have been able to make it work.”
He also takes issue with a suggestion that, with most of the up-to-date literature still lurking behind subscription walls for at least six months, the war is not over. “It is solved in the sense that in a few years, all new papers are going to be open access and available for free,” he says. “Today it is six months—yesterday it was a year. I promise you, within a year or two, it will be zero, because it is not worth it. It is better for the publishers to make it immediate. They keep on trying to defend the subscription model, but it is collapsing around their ears.”
Faculty of 1,000-Plus
The sale to Springer has allowed Mr. Tracz to focus on the Faculty of 1000. The name is something of an understatement because the network has many thousands of members who rate and comment on papers in their individual fields.
“When I was explaining it at the start, I said, Take biology or medicine, and divide them into 10; divide each into 10 subspecialities; in each of these, ask 10 experts,” explains Mr. Tracz. “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.”
But critics say that despite the numbers, F1000 has never quite galvanized the community. “F1000 is useful for finding interesting papers that you wouldn’t otherwise find,” Mr. Lipman says. “But as a way of rating papers, there isn’t enough activity on it right now.” Mr. Alberts, of Science, argues 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,” says Mr. Alberts. “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.”
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. Mr. Tracz has taken full control of a newspaper for researchers, The Scientist—he previously had a smaller stake in it—and last year rebranded it as the “magazine of F1000.” The paper’s former editor, Richard Gallagher, now a publisher in San Francisco, says F1000 “becomes interesting now, because Vitek is turning his full attention to it.”
The core function of F1000 is to allow members to highlight any newly published paper that they consider interesting and give it a points rating of six (recommended), eight (must read), or 10 (exceptional). Many members give network access to a junior colleague who helps them rate publications.
Members say in a sentence or two why they find the paper interesting. Readers then are able to attach their own comments to the F1000 site. (Authors can appeal comments they consider unreasonable.)
Other publishers, including PLOS, are considering similar ventures. But “we have something that no one else has,” Mr. Tracz says. “We already have a community of 10,000 researchers. If there is a reason that scientists want to talk to each other, it is because they want to talk about science. And talking about science means talking about papers. We want to make this the place that scientists come when they want to talk about papers and do things with papers.”
Championing Change
For Mr. Tracz, this objective leads inevitably back to the more grandiose goal of upending the existing publishing system. “There are two big issues, for science and for publishing,” he says. “One is peer review, and one is the publishing of data.” While many researchers and publishers consider prepublication peer review to be, at worst, a necessary evil, Mr. Tracz is scathing about its weaknesses. “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.”
Mr. Tracz takes a pencil from his pocket and sketches out a black box, which he calls a “refereeing machine.”
“What does the ‘refereeing machine’ need? It needs a selected group that has been given permission to referee,” he says. “You can’t have a refereeing machine where everybody is entitled to referee.” F1000 could clearly provide the basis for this group, but 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.
This type of system would be clique-proof, Mr. Tracz contends, because of its innate openness, with all reviews, comments, and reviewers’ biographies clearly visible: “Secrecy is the essence of a clique. That’s why I hate not being open. That’s why I completely disagree with the idea of confidential peer review.”
Then there is the second issue: data."Publishing data is a new problem, growing in importance,” Mr. Tracz says. “There are mountains of data, much of it never published. A lot of it disappears.” Researchers and grant-giving agencies are deeply concerned about screeds of data in incompatible formats that never come together into a single body of knowledge.
Mr. Tracz says the way forward here is for “data” and “discussion” to be published separately, so that the former get due credit.
“At the moment, people dump data,” he says. So reams of DNA sequences end up in databases such as GenBank, where some are used heavily but many more are forgotten. “We want to change that and say, publish the data, put it in front of others, put it in some format that is visible, and people can use it.” When the author of an article refers to that data, he says, the data-producer would get credit “as a special type of co-author, a data co-author.”
Few dispute that changes are on their way in scientific publishing. “The whole business is heading for utter reinvention,” Mr. Patterson says. “There’s common ground in terms of how we’re thinking and how Vitek is thinking; a paper isn’t a full stop. There’s a lot of valuable information that can be added to a paper after publication. And I certainly agree that we need a way for people to gain credit from publishing their data.”
Mr. Alberts says the challenge is to get the best researchers to actively participate in postpublication peer review. “I hope people will experiment with it,” he says. “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!”
Mr. Tracz clearly intends to be part of whatever change is coming. And others say his blend of tenacity and creativity make it a mistake to underestimate what he can do. “He’s got artistic sensibilities—he wanted to be a writer, and he was a filmmaker,” says Mr. Lipman. “When you put together that sense of aesthetics with resourcefulness and business management skills, it’s a pretty powerful combination.”
