In a recent conversation with News Editor Paul Smaglik, Varmus hinted that he seeks to cooperate with society journals and perhaps compete with commercial ones. We have to distinguish among the various kinds of publishers. Things are changing very rapidly, and it's important that we have a system in which peer review and copyright holding and different means of raising money can evolve along with the mechanics of the system. We're obviously concerned about how much this methodology will cost and how it will be paid for. We've been working largely with some of the societies to discuss some of these issues, and we are certainly aware of and concerned about the possibility that revenues could decline for scientific societies.
Societies lobby effectively for the concerns of scientists and many political and cultural venues.
They run important meetings, they worry about the future of minority, female, or young scientists, and they advocate usefully on behalf of all those folks. They develop a sense of community within a scientific discipline. If any individual society's journals were no longer purchasable, but instead just available on E-biomed or some similar site, it would not be an issue of deprivation. Indeed, the societies should be showing their members that they are participating in a new wave of more useful dissemination and presentation of information. No one is being deprived of anything by the absence of a cut rate on a weighty journal that can now be accessed much more easily through the Web.