Over 15,000 scientists are up in arms because of an Internet revolution that never happened. They call themselves the Public Library of Science (PLS) and in a massive statement, many of the world's top scientists have vowed not to publish or review articles in any scientific journal that denies free electronic access to all users.

The Public Library of Science has two aims. It wants free access to back issues of scientific journals and an Internet search engine uniting information from all journals.

The push for the free distribution of scientific findings is the brainchild of acclaimed researcher at the Sloane-Kettering Institute Harold E. Varmus, who was also a candidate for the Harvard presidency. Helping to organize Varmus' effort are head of Harvard's Department of Cell Biology Marc W. Kirschner and Stanford Professor Patrick Brown.

"The Public Library of Science is a political movement determined to make scientific literature readily available and take advantage of a powerful weapon," Varmus said.

The weapon Varmus speaks of is the Internet, which scientists once lauded for its promise of inexpensive and instantaneous information transfer, creating a digital scientific community. Now, they say access to information is rigidly controlled and constrained by the publishers of scientific journals.

The majority of important scientific findings are currently published by a few major companies that hold a monopoly in the industry. With little market pressure, libraries pay high prices for subscriptions in print and online. And scientists do not have quick and easy access to the information that might spur their research.

"Scientific publishing is radically different from other fields," Varmes said.

Scientists must pay to have their articles printed in the most prestigious journals where their work will be peer-reviewed by experts in the field.

"These publishing firms are jerking us around, we do all the reviewing for them and we pay money to have them published. Then we pay high subscription rates to read the articles," Varmus said.

The Public Library of Science is asking scientific journals to make their material free and fully searchable within six months. The group plans to use Pub-Med Central, a website run by the National Library of Medicine as the home for the search engine.

"There is a philosophical problem when scientific publishers own as private property what amounts to hundreds of billions of dollars of publicly funded research," Kirschner said. "They restrict access and the result is a loss in the potential for scientific research."

In The Libraries

Even at Harvard, where a $19 billion dollar endowment might be thought to shield the University from financial strain, the libraries have been hurt by mounting costs of science journals. In late February, Harvard canceled its licensing agreements with the electronic publisher of Nature Online, citing cost concerns and

"lack of perpetual access" online to magazine content.

The web page notes that Nature Online costs nearly twice the price of its counterpart, Science Online.