Stretching proteins and myself into open access (OA)

I'm not sure where to side on the Open Access (OA) publishing business. On the one hand, paying for an article to be published is a regression to the days of page charges albeit without the double-bind that readers are also required to pay. On the other hand, it does flatten access to the article, and often panders to enlightened self-interest by way of increased exposure and citations. Indeed, a strong argument in favor of OA for articles, data and code was just published in the Journal of Chemical Physics by my friend, Dan Gezelter. (Fortunately his Viewpoint is OA and readily available.) Regardless, publishers need to cover their costs, and here lies the challenge to the scientific community. The various agencies supporting science do not appear to be increasing funding to subsidize the fees even while they are making policy decisions to require OA. Libraries love OA because it might potentially lower their skyrocketing journal costs, though no substantial lowering appears to have yet occurred. Long story short, my group is now doing the experiment: We recently submitted and just published our work in PLoS (Public Library of Science.) Props to them for being consistent as they also required us to deposit our data in a public site. I was also impressed by the reviewing process which did not appear to be lowered in any way by the presumed conflict-of-interest that a publisher might have to accept papers (and associated cash) from all submissions. The experiment continues as I'll watch to see how our OA article fares compared to our earlier articles on ASMD in more traditional journals.

Meanwhile, we are excited about the work itself. My students, led by outstanding graduate student, Hailey Bureau, validated our staged approach (called adaptive steered molecular dynamics, ASMD) to characterize the energies for pulling a protein apart. The extra wrinkle lies in the fact that the protein is sitting in a pool of water. That increases the size of the calculation significantly as you have to include the thousands (or more) of extra atoms in the pool. The first piece of good news—that we had also seen earlier—is that ASMD can be run for this system using a reasonable amount of computer time. Even better, we found that we could use a simple (mean-field) model for the water molecules to obtain nearly the same energies and pathways. This was a happy surprise because, for the most part, the atoms (particularly the hydrogens) on the protein appear to orient towards the effective solvent as if the water molecules were actually there.

Fortunately, because of OA, you can easily read the details online. The full reference to the article is: H. R. Bureau, D. Merz Jr., E. Hershkovits, S. Quirk and Rigoberto Hernandez, "Constrained unfolding of a helical peptide: Implicit versus Explicit Solvents," PLoS ONE 10, e0127034 (2015). (doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0127034) I'm also happy to say that It was supported by the National Science Foundation.