“Most publishers wish open access would go away,” says Brown. It won't. Major research-funding organizations, including NIH, HHMI, and the Wellcome Trust, now require their grantees to post their findings on openaccess Websites such as PLoS or PubMed Central within 12 months of publication in traditional journals. Publishers are pushing back, however, and in September, the House Judiciary Committee began holding hearings on whether the federal government should be allowed to require grantees to submit accepted papers to a free archive.

Even with the recent advances in collaboration and sharing made possible with open-access publications, there is a feeling among Web-savvy scientists that more could be done. Both Eisen and Brown are working on a more interactive concept, essentially a major upgrade to PLoS, that would allow readers to respond to papers and share their insights. The goal is to tap the often-evanescent thought processes of scientists as they consider the experiments of others.

“In a way, this would be a natural offshoot of what we do in our labs and offices,” says Eisen, with online papers becoming nuclei for discussion— including annotations in the margins from qualified readers. Adds Brown: “Sites like this, if they're good, will take over one of the most important roles that journals play—selecting and stratifying articles relevant to a particular area—while separating that role from the process of publication itself.”

Another online publishing option takes selection and stratification a bit further. Launched in 2002, “Faculty of 1000 Biology” (F1000) is designed to let leading biochemists, cancer biologists, neuroscientists, and endocrinologists, among others, help colleagues identify the most important new papers among the thousands released each year in biology and medicine. These top scientists— some 2,300 according to their Website—evaluate new papers on a numerical scale, allowing F1000 to publish an online rating, abstract, and category (one of seven) ranging from “new finding” to “technical advance” to “refutation.” In recognition that F1000 can be a great time-saver for their busy scientists, many of the world's major research institutions subscribe to it. It has another benefit as well, says HHMI investigator Paul Sternberg at the California Institute of Technology, who serves as a section editor for the publication. “It's especially good at highlighting papers that are obscure and bringing them to light.”

Given the obvious benefits of F1000, which also happens not to challenge the existing order, it has been the proverbial overnight success. But most manifestations of Science 2.0 largely remain obscure. The greatest roadblock to these innovations is not the established print journals themselves but an academic culture that is still inclined to value traditional publishing and that doesn't credit scientists who share their expertise on blogs and open-access sites.

“There is still an incredible premium put on how many articles you have in Cell, Science, or Nature,” says Alex Palazzo, a postdoc in the Harvard Medical School lab of HHMI investigator Tom Rapoport. Palazzo runs The Daily Transcript, a blog dealing with technical issues in cell biology.

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