Douglas C. Eaton
78th President of APS
I would like to thank all the members of APS for the honor and privilege of serving as the 78th President of the APS. This is a particularly singular honor for me since I view myself as a physiologist by choice rather than by training. Despite starting my scientific life as a marine biologist and neuroscientist, I have now carried the banner of physiology for almost 33 years, most of that time as an APS member. As Mark Twain suggested, “I never let my schooling interfere with my education.” After I “had seen the physiological light,” APS was important in developing my career, as well as the careers of many others, through its meetings, publications, and education programs. Serving as APS President is a great challenge because of the complexity of the Society and its many programs but also because of the rapid changes and challenges facing the discipline of physiology in this era of increasing national fiscal deficits and reduced federal support for science, in general, and physiology, in particular.
It is a both an opportunity and a responsibility of each incoming APS President to write a “President’s Message” to the membership. As I ponder the content of this message, I am reminded of the variously attributed old folk curse, “May you live in interesting times.” As an incoming President, I must say that the crystal ball that I keep handy is particularly cloudy and unclear about the future, but there are some “interesting” things floating around in there. It would be a lot easier, hindsight being what it is, to write a farewell message after my year as President. Nonetheless, looking forward, the APS is faced with a number of challenges in the near future: our approach to publishing the APS journals is being called into question by the “Open Access” movement; the possibility of actual reductions in the NIH budget (despite the recent period of budget doubling) has the potential to put a new generation of young physiologists at risk; animal rights advocates are pressing strongly to make research on animals impossible; and politically-based restrictions on some forms of scientific research and foreign researchers threatens to push bright minds and bright ideas off-shore.
Despite these dark clouds in the crystal ball, there appear to be some fair weather clouds as well. Never before have we had the methods to understand the physiological basis for disease: to investigate so thoroughly the complexities of living organisms. We can relate specific processes to molecular structures using recombinant DNA technology and by expression of proteins in cells and whole animals. Physiology is the discipline that allows an understanding of the transition from the function of genes and gene products to the responses of these whole animals. Besides the positive scientific challenges, the APS is faced in the upcoming year with its ongoing redefinition of itself: it is time to develop a new APS Strategic Plan for the next five years. This offers us a real opportunity to examine and capitalize on our strengths and recognize and correct our weaknesses in a way that allows our organization to respond to the opportunities and threats in the larger community of science and the world.
The challenge of support for science.
There can be little question that physiologists, along with other biomedical scientists, benefited enormously from the recently completed five-year doubling of the NIH budget. In a more global context, the American people also benefited from the substantial advances in health care and drug discovery made possible by biomedical research. Unfortunately, these past opportunities are set against a current shortage of resources. The NIH budget increased by only two percent in fiscal year 2005, which is substantially less than the Biomedical Inflation Index. On top of the modest increase, additional funds were diverted from the NIH to other Public Health Service programs, leaving even less to be spent on programs at the NIH and leading to significant reductions in pay lines for new grants. The President’s FY 2006 budget request to Congress for the NIH is for $28.7 billion and contains a spendable increase of $146 million (as reported in (1)). The good news is that spending for R01 grants received a $52 million increase, more than a third of the $146 million increase NIH has to spend in FY 2006. That achievement likely can be credited to NIH Director Elias Zerhouni, who considers the R01 a critical component of science that has to be kept going. The increase in funds could lead to a slight increase in new and competing grants compared to FY 2005. The bad news is that the budget does not cover the three percent inflation traditionally built into grants and that budget levels in the second and subsequent years of ongoing grants will remain flat. Of course, we can hope that Congress will provide additional funds to pay for new grants and the cost of inflation for existing grants. While we need to advocate for a more consistent increase in the NIH budget and hope that Congress will be as responsive as they have been in the recent past, the current political climate and the state of the economy may make it difficult. I hope that, because of my familiarity and experience with funding agencies and review groups, I will be able to guide the APS at this time of serious questions about the funding base for research in the “post-doubling era” of NIH.
The APS journals and “Open access.”
Central to the mission of the APS is the promotion and dissemination of scientific knowledge. Our 14 journals are a critical component of this mission. The journals have had a long history of excellence and innovation and by any of the measures of journal success (subscriptions, impact factor, time to print, submissions, or hits on the website) remain among the best of the biological journals. The transition to electronic editing and publishing is essentially complete and has been very successful (the publications component of the APS website received over 35 million hits last year). Anecdotally, I can say from a personal standpoint, having been an Associate Editor for AJP-Cell Physiology in the pre-electronic days and acting now as an Associate Editor for AJP-Renal Physiology with electronic submission and review, I would never even think about going back.
The journal formerly known as NIPS (News in the Physiological Sciences) has undergone a remarkable sea change transforming itself into Physiology under the direction of the Editor-in-Chief, Walter Boron and his editorial board. The new title reflects the emphasis of the journal on the discipline of physiology. Physiology contains short review-type articles but also include several new features such as culled abstracts from other important papers, short articles on emerging topics and technologies, reviews of websites and occasional historical perspectives. The new look and content of the journal have been very positively received.
Launching what amounts to a new journal underscores the importance of the journal program to the overall health of the APS. The journals are critical for the dissemination of the latest, peer-reviewed, copy-edited, new, physiological science. The movement to promote open or free access (“free” used here in the sense of free-range chicken) for online professional publishing is a fundamental threat to Society-sponsored publication programs. The concept of “open access” was originally ascribed to the rapidly escalating costs of subscriptions to many leading journals produced by for-profit publishers and the poor access to the science in these journals even long after the original journal publication date. More recent reasons given for “open access” have been a desire to provide the general public with free access to scientific reports that were funded by the tax paying public and a suggestion that it represents a mechanism for NIH to “monitor” grant recipient productivity. In fact, the APS journals meet the objectives of the open access model (i.e., available free online to any individual) within one year of publication. APS has played a major role in establishing the “DC Principles,” a statement of commitment to providing free, online access to our journal content an appropriate period after publication of the original article. More than 60 other not-for-profit publishers representing over 125 journals have signed the “Principles.” In collaboration with Stanford University’s HighWire Press, the DC Principles signatories have transformed their print journals to online journals that allow the scientific community and the public access to nearly 850,000 free full-text articles and the abstracts of over 15 million articles in more than 4,500 Medline journals.
Nonetheless, as I write this article, I am examining a statement I received recently as a Principal Investigator on an NIH grant that provides guidelines for depositing all articles that are a product of grant related research in the PubMed Central (PMC), a Public Access initiative of the NIH which will potentially divert a minimum of $4 million from research at a time of diminishing resources. The crystal ball I referred to earlier is particularly unclear on the implications of the new policy both for me as an individual investigator and for the APS journal program as a whole. There are several problems with the proposed plan. First, it is unclear who will control the copyright to the published material and, therefore, how it may be copied and distributed. Second, it is unclear whom the gatekeeper and quality assurance monitor for the articles will be: if I, as a P.I., am responsible for depositing the material, who will check that I have deposited only the peer-reviewed material? And third, and possibly most important, is the proposed transfer of costs for publications from subscribers to authors? The advocates for open access maintain that this would enable researchers living and working in developing countries to have access to the information generated by scientists in wealthy nations, access that is already being provided by publishers through Hinari. However, little attention has been given to the question of how scientists in the US (let alone those in developing nations) will obtain funds to publish their work. Open access is not free as pointed out in a commentary by APS’ Executive Director, Martin Frank (2); and these new costs are particularly unappealing at this time of reduced NIH budgets and restrictions on grant funds. The present business model used by the APS shares the costs of publication between the authors (page charges, submission fee) and the subscribers. The open access model assigns the cost of publishing entirely to authors or through a fee paid by the authors’ institution. Over and above the implications for individual members of the APS, the journals represent the major source of revenue used to support a variety of programs and activities of the Society. In this regard, APS is unlike many other scholarly societies, since other organizations rely nearly equally on revenue generated from their annual meetings and their publications program. For example, the ASCB generates about 35% of its total revenue each year from publications and meetings, while in the Society for Neuroscience, journal revenue accounts for 25% and its meetings for 45% of total revenue (3). For the APS, meetings represent less than five percent while publications account for about 85% of the total revenue. Thus, the APS is very dependent on the financial success of our publications program and any threat to our publication revenue represents a serious threat to the Society as a whole.
Where are we going, where have we been? APS strategic planning.
The APS has always encouraged its members to participate in evaluating the past programs of the Society and in developing a vision for the future of the organization. Usually, members have done this by working through their Sections or through Society committees on which they serve. Occasionally, however, we as a Society engage in a more structured and deliberative approach to examining direction, the development of a multi-year strategic plan. The first such plan was developed in 1992, and it became a benchmark for the Society’s ability to set both short- and long-term goals, to implement new programs (or modify existing ones), and most importantly, to monitor progress towards achieving those goals. A similar strategic planning effort was developed in 2000 and it represents a set of goals that guide the current efforts of the APS (4). However, a strategic plan is only as good as the commitment to implement it; a strategic plan developed for an organization that lacks the will to implement the plan is little more than empty rhetoric and worth about as much as the paper it is printed on. In contrast, our strategic plans have had an enormous impact on the way APS conducts itself on a day-to-day basis because there is a commitment to review, revise, and implement components of the plan on a regular basis. On the other hand, the process of responding positively to the plan must finally render the plan dated or obsolete. Therefore, recent APS presidents have emphasized the need to continue strategic planning on an ongoing basis (5, 6, 7). The Society’s leadership will be developing a new Strategic Plan in 2005 that will be used to guide the Society over the next five years. To the end of providing input from as many APS members as possible in the strategic planning process, the Council and staff of the Society have distributed a member needs survey. The member input provided by past surveys has proven invaluable in previous strategic planning efforts, providing information about member satisfaction and problems with APS programs including scientific meetings, publications, public affairs and education. The character of the survey allows for an assessment of need for different groups within the Society and will help ensure that in a rapidly changing scientific environment, the APS stays at the forefront of the physiological sciences and scientists in the 21st Century. Your responses and opinions will be critical to the development of this Strategic Plan. As a member, you have received an email with your personal link to the survey. Please help the growth of the Society by participating in the survey, if you have not already done so.
Broadening our reach.
The imminent development of a new strategic plan has caused me to examine issues of contemporary physiology as I see it. I feel that physiology is at a crossroads. A decade ago, it was common to hear that “Physiology is dead.” The implication was that physiology as a discipline had little relevance to the genomic initiatives that were underway at the time. It is now clear that this viewpoint is demonstrably wrong. If anything, physiology has become more important than it has ever been and is the critical discipline in interpreting the information about the genome and more contemporary information about the proteome. One fundamental challenge to APS is to promote this idea from elementary school classrooms to clinical research laboratories. I feel well-positioned to help pursue this challenge because of insights from my own career transition from organismic physiology to the physiology of cell signaling and because of my experience with many aspects of APS ranging from Section and committee work to meeting organization.
On the other hand, I would also like the APS to adopt an aggressive approach to broadening our reach. The NIH Roadmap Initiative (8) provides us with both a unique challenge and a unique opportunity. The purpose of the Roadmap is to identify major opportunities and gaps in biomedical research that no single institute at NIH could tackle alone but that the agency as a whole can address, to make the biggest impact on the progress of medical research. The Roadmap consists of several components. Several of these components fit very well with expertise of APS members and Sections. The first is “Building Blocks, Biological Pathways, and Networks.” The overview of this area paints broad strokes, but the underlying message is that the area of cellular signaling and signal transduction will be reinforced at NIH. Physiology in Focus at the EB meeting in 2006 will focus on this area and I would like to see the APS journal Physiological Genomics issue a call for papers in this area. Not all areas of the Roadmap fit well with the APS and its members, but another area where we, as scientists and as a Society, should invest effort is in the Nanomedicine Initiative. Nanomedicine, an offshoot of nanotechnology, refers to highly specific medical intervention at the molecular scale for curing disease or repairing damaged tissues. It also provides an unparalleled opportunity to examine at close range how biological molecules and structures inside living cells operate. Nanomedicine is often considered high-risk research, but the Roadmap also contains a mechanism, the NIH Director’s Pioneer Award, for funding such research. Nanomedicine is also interesting because research in this area will almost surely require interaction between physical scientists and physiologists (9) and interdisciplinary research is another component of the Roadmap and a stated goal of the APS. APS has also been at the forefront of scientific societies in promoting interaction between academic scientists and those in industry with a specific liaison committee and designated members of Section Executive Committees. We need to capitalize on this Roadmap component to foster Public-Private Partnerships and promote the APS commitment to industry-academic liaison. And finally, former APS President, John Hall, promoted the idea that physiology today should capture the concept of “translational” research (5). We need to re-invigorate this effort to take advantage of the Roadmap initiative that proposes to “Re-engineer the Clinical Research Enterprise.”
The trick, of course, is to foster these programs in a time of budget austerity without jeopardizing our other research endeavors. Earmarking of funds should be strongly avoided, but since there is already a commitment on the part of NIH to find ways to support areas that many APS members and the Society as a whole already have an affinity for, we should actively pursue methods to promote “Roadmap” science at our meetings. I know of only one way to guarantee that we will not participate in Roadmap funding initiatives, and that is for us not to apply.
Credit where credit is due.
One thing that has become very obvious to me over the years I have been associated with the APS is that the membership plays an enormously important role in providing the soul and direction for the Society. However, a large part of the credit for the Society’s success also goes to the 72 full-time staff that work each day to execute the day-to-day functions of the Society. Martin Frank should be commended for his management style and for his active role in providing information and vision for Council. Marty clearly has a knack for identifying talent, as evidenced by his outstanding team of department managers, including Linda Allen (Meetings & Membership), Marsha Matyas (Education), Robert Price (Business), Alice Ra’anan (Public Affairs), Margaret Reich (Publications), and Sue Sabur (Marketing). The talent of this team and their dedication to the Society’s goals are a positive force for the Society.
Finally, let me again paraphrase Mark Twain about my own commitment to the APS. I will always try to do right by the APS. This will gratify some people and astonish the rest.
References
1. WASHINGTON FAX, [http://www.washingtonfax.com] February 28, 2005
2. Frank, M. Open does not mean free! The Physiologist 47: 151, 2004.
3. Miller, LP. Open Access: The future of scientific publishing: Negative implications of the movement on scientific society business models. Talk from Society of National Association of
Publishers, Nov. 2003.
4. Boron, W.F. The APS Strategic Plan – A vision for the New Millenium. The
Physiologist 43:71-74, 2000.
5. Hall, J.E. 74th President of the APS. The Physiologist 44:65, 74-79, 2002.
6. Horwitz, B.A. 75th President of the APS. The Physiologist 45:87; 96-99,2002.
7. Williams, J.A. 76th President of the APS. The Physiologist 46:2, 2003.
8. The NIH Roadmap: Accelerating Medical Discovery to Improve Health. http://nihroadmap.nih.gov/
9. Dill, K.A. Strengthening biomedicine’s roots. Nature 400: 309-310, 1999.