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Public Library of Science Launches

Posted by Hemos on Mon Oct 13, 2003 07:44 AM
from the taking-flight dept.
The Almighty Buck Science
limbicsystem writes "The first issue of the free journal Public Library of Science Biology hits the presses tonight. With Lawrence Lessig on the Board, the PLOS team are taking the Creative Commons to the world of science publishing and hope to compete with the big-name journals Science and Nature. The move towards freely-available scientific journals is supported by major funding bodies who are tired of seeing their grant money spent on subscriptions to commercial journals that can cost thousands of dollars a year. PLOS-Biology is available online at plos.org. The inagural issue has an essay by the executive director of the creative commons, Glen Otis Brown. Oh, and it's all running on Linux ;)"
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  • Cool now I can find out more tropical diseases that I might be suffering wrong and spend more time with my cute local doctor :)

    Rus

  • Peer review and perception (Score:4, Insightful)

    by rhetland (259464) on Monday October 13 2003, @08:08AM (#7198565)
    Journals have become *very* expensive. Even for those of us at universities, who have unlimited online access, we are paying gigantic prices for these journals indirectly through library fees. Many journals are over $1000 a pop, and more for online access. PLOS is one of many answers to this problem.

    Because most people can already get to publication quality work even using such outmoded technology as MS word, it seems that these journals do not necessarily have to exist to typeset papers, as in the old days.

    As far as I see it, the biggest impediment to a successfully open source journal is peer review. The quality of the journal has to be insured. This does not mean that people get paid to review papers (I wish...), but rather that there has to be a knowledgeable editor who knows who knows what in the field, and can put together different reviews to actually decide if the paper is publishable or not. Again, often this person can be underpaid, but there does need to be some sort of staff. It will be interesting to see how PLOS deals with this.

    Once these problems have been overcome, the journal needs to be seen as a good place to publish. Reputation is critical to the success of a journal, and it depends mostly on the quality of papers that it publishes. There are many ways to rank journal influence, but most have to do with how often papers from that journal are cited in other scientific papers. Hopefully, with more access, PLOS will have an edge here, since you could send an electronic copy to all your colleagues completely legally.

    Finally, it will be interesting to see how many other fields are added. Will they stick to the biggies, like genetics and medicine, or will they head off into the smaller disciplines.

    I for one, am hoping for the this project to succeed.

    • PLoS publication costs for authors are high (Score:5, Interesting)

      by scientistguy (627346) on Monday October 13 2003, @08:55AM (#7198650) Journal
      While I also want to see PLoS succeed (and indeed have recently submitted work there), please note the PLoS publication charges per article at $1500 a pop. One also obviously has to pay to receive the printed form of the journal - although I doubt many will do this. So while the costs have been shifted and the science has been made more generally available to the public at large, grants are in fact going to be charged. Many journals charge publication costs for submitted and accepted work, but PLoS is definitely on the high end. This enterprise is going have to recoup for operating costs, and the largess of private donors won't completely cover it. Aside from this point, I do agree with many of your sentiments. I would not worry much about the editorial board. The professional editors they have signed up are first rate and quite idealistic. The academic editorial board is also quite strong. Judging from the quality of some of the initial submissions, they seem to be off to a strong start.
      • While I also want to see PLoS succeed (and indeed have recently submitted work there), please note the PLoS publication charges per article at $1500 a pop.
        Does that mean researchers from third-world countries are indirectly excluded from publishing there? How many of them might decide that instead of trying to publish the results in PLoS their $1500 would be better spent on hiring a research assistant for a year (and publishing in some lesser journal)?
      • Yes, the costs are high ... but as has been pointed out here, they have to be, at least in the beginning.

        Because PLoS is an effort to bring research to the general public or at least to more people than has generally been the case, it can't get its operating fees from charging people to view the articles online, the way Nature and Science do. Because those journals lock down their content so tightly, I can't share a paper with friends.

        For example, I'm a member of an online community that likes to talk abo

      • $1500 only if you can afford it (Score:4, Interesting)

        by Per Abrahamsen (1397) on Monday October 13 2003, @12:17PM (#7200091) Homepage
        If you can't afford the fee, they will lower it or even remove it. They promise paying the fee has no influence on whether the article is accepted.

        One could view the fee as a "suggested voluntary donation", however scientist are generally not allowed to spend research grants on charity. I know I'm not, I tried to make my university donate money to the FSF as a thank for the software we use. We ended up buying overpriced stuff from them instead.

        By phrasing it this way it will be a lot easier to get the payment accepted. It probably also put a higher moral pressure on the submitters to pay if they can.
        • One could view the fee as a "suggested voluntary donation", however scientist are generally not allowed to spend research grants on charity.

          Page charges are typically requested by even for-profit journals. This appears to be an online analogue to that. Many grants have a line item for this very thing. In every journal I've published, they've been optional, but I'm not sure what percentage of researchers actually pay them.

      • Re:PLoS publication costs for authors are high (Score:4, Interesting)

        by Bowling Moses (591924) on Monday October 13 2003, @02:04PM (#7201111) Journal
        Actually, $1500 per article isn't all that bad. Not too long ago I got a paper published. It cost $350 per figure, plus a charge for the first 10 pages (that I now forget) and then an additional charge for pages past the first ten. The total cost of publication for the lab for my paper was well over $2000.
    • Will they stick to the biggies, like genetics and medicine, or will they head off into the smaller disciplines.

      Actually, it's the smaller disciplines (in science anyway) that have some of the highest costs. Brain Research, for example, runs $10,000 per year, last time I checked. Part of the reason for the high cost is the limited audience to spread the cost of publication around (it costs less per copy for 100,000 subscriptions than for 5,000). Related to that is the skyrocketing costs of science jou

      • Actually, it's the smaller disciplines (in science anyway) that have some of the highest costs. Brain Research, for example, runs $10,000 per year, last time I checked.

        I'd like to point out that the field of Neuroscience now qualifies as Pretty Darn Big, and, moreover, it is moving Pretty Darn Fast. This is why Elsevier and others can charge hugely for their journals: the demand *is* there, and the cost of *not* having Brain Research or (to pick a non-random example) the Journal of Comparative Neuro

        • You're absolutely right about Brain Research. It does happen to be one of those journals where you can't substitute another to get the same type and quality of articles.

          This is exactly where PLOS comes in. How about they expand into Brain Research's territory? Of course, first you have to convince the authors it's a better idea to publish in PLOS than in Brain Research.

          Nothing like a little competition to bring reality to a market, eh?

    • Journals are very expensive. No doubt.

      Likewise, journals save lives... at least in the medical profession. Working in a university hospital we get the worse cases, and the rarest cases--and we reference the literature frequently. Just last week I was getting one of my buddies to translate an article from German...

      The medical journals, at least, are making this work by giving discount rates on subscriptions... or charging huge fees if you need access to an article on a one time basis. Thus, the hospita
    • You bring up a great point. I'm working on a project at the University of Virginia to develop an online journal with emphasis on Nineteenth Century Literature. The peer review aspect is regarded as one of the most important deliverables. It is the only way to consistently deliver good content.
    • One place to start reading about the discussion of peer review w.r.t. online journals (and a lot of other stuff about the relationship between scholarly writing and publishers) would be Stevan Harnad's e-prints archive:

      http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/intpub.html
    • As far as I see it, the biggest impediment to a successfully open source journal is peer review. The quality of the journal has to be insured.

      I wouldn't worry about it. For example, as your peer, I would like to point out that the verb you are looking for is "ensured", not "insured". Some other peer will no doubt come along and note that "insured" is a permissible, though not preferred, term for the usage you have in mind, and so on.

      The system breaks down, however, for truly awful misspellings like "red
      • Concerning the price of academic journals and who pays, there's this little ritual that libraries go through every year, where a committee notes that, once again, journal prices have risen an order of magnitude faster than library funding, so which journals will we cut from our subscription list this year? The rising cost of journals is not just reflected in tuition or taxes, but also in the *loss of access* to other journals and in *decisions not to buy books* because there's no room left in the materials
  • This is good news and I welcome the opportunity to publish in a peer reviewed journal free and open to the public. I should also mention however that the other big advantage of printing in online journals is that you have no publication costs related to color print charges and such. Right now I am preparing a manuscript that would end up costing many thousands of dollars to publish in traditional journals because of all the color charges related to publishing an atlas type of paper.

    Also, check out one of
      • see the above comments where a person who submitted to this journal said it cost the submitter $1500 to process his submission. while this is alot of money, i think it's worth the price to maintain ownership of your work.

        I too believe that $1500 is a relatively small amount of money to maintain not only ownership of your work, but also ensuring that your work will continue to be available. My comment related to costs however was directed more towards actual printing costs associated with making color pla
  • These 2 pages have conflicting information:
    http://creativecommons.org/learn/licenses/ [creativecommons.org] http://www.plosbiology.org/plosonline/?request=sli deshow&type=figure&sici=journal-pbio-0000009-g 001 [plosbiology.org]
    Look at "ShareAlike" and Non-commericial. The symbols are wrong.
    Also why did they make the "ShareAlike" symbol very similar to CopyLeft? It confused when I first saw it.....

  • This is really really important. (Score:5, Informative)

    by Tom7 (102298) on Monday October 13 2003, @09:29AM (#7198843) Homepage Journal
    The PLoS is really important. More important than "open source", and it should be on the front page of slashdot.

    Listen: Right now, basically everything published in a journal in the last 50 years is *owned* not by scientists but by publishers. You might not realize this if you never published, but journals and conferences make you *assign the copyright* for your paper to the publishing company. Not license it to them for publication (this would be reasonable), but *give* them the copyright and lose your own rights to publish and distribute the work. Here's a sample agreement from the IEEE [ieee.org] .

    This is seriously fucked up. It means that, if the publishers wanted, they could close up shop and never let anybody see the archive of scientific papers again. It means they can sue you if you publish your own paper on your web page, or make copies of it for a class you teach!

    Computer scientists, being handy with the web, typically publish their papers and then put them up on their websites, playing "civil disobedience." (Some journals have even caved to this, and part of the copyright assignment you actually get licensed to put the paper on your web page.) That means there's already a sort of PLOS for computer science: an index of Computer Scientists' web pages and publications at citeseer [nec.com] .

    The culture in other sciences, like biology, is really different. These guys write, sign the form, and then pay for a few paper copies of the article that they can give out if requested.

    The way it's happening in CS is one way to free science. It seems to be working. But for those who don't actively maintain web pages and don't have a culture where the web is the place to go to look for papers, the PLoS seems like a good way to make this happen. I really, really hope it succeeds.
    • I have a saying about things like this copyright assignment jazz: "standard forms are for other people." If you've got a good paper, you have negotiating power. Tell the journal they can't have your paper unless you retain the copyright, or at least rights to delayed republication or self-archival.

      If you're not a Web whiz, you probably know (or share an elevator daily with) one who could help. Your institution could get a bit of PR mileage out of setting up a repository of archived papers by its member
      • I have a saying about things like this copyright assignment jazz: "standard forms are for other people." If you've got a good paper, you have negotiating power. Tell the journal they can't have your paper unless you retain the copyright ...

        Have you tried this? There are two different parts of the machine here: the program committee, who decides what papers are accepted, and the publishing company, who handles the forms. I've never tried it, but the publishers don't really care much about the papers, so it
    • Computer scientists, being handy with the web, typically publish their papers and then put them up on their websites, playing "civil disobedience."

      Hmmm, I've seen plenty of biologists who do this, including my former boss, and none of them have been busted for this (so far). However, these usually tend to be fairly computer-savvy people already.

      Anyway, PubMed is already a much better way to find publications of interest in biomedical research than any other mechanism, since it's very well curated and co
    • Computer scientists, being handy with the web, typically publish their papers and then put them up on their websites, playing "civil disobedience."
      The physicists were actually way ahead [arxiv.org] of the computer scientists here. BTW, the world-wide web was invented at a physics lab :-)

      BTW, I have never, ever, ever heard of a scientist hearing even a peep of complaint from a journal about distributing reprints and preprints electronically. It's just what everyone does.

  • Does anyone know if the PLOS journals are indexed in major scientific databases (CAS, ISI WebOfScience,...) ? Couldn't find anything on the web site.

  • A modest proposal... (Score:3, Interesting)

    by orthogonal (588627) on Monday October 13 2003, @09:36AM (#7198877) Journal
    Freely-available scientific journals are definitely the wave of the future, but I think PLOS is missing a greater opportunity to foster scientific thought

    Not only should these articles be made availble on the web to anyone who wants to read them, but to encourage the sharing of scientific ideas, persons ought to be able to post commentary on each article in real time, avoiding the typical several week tuern-around times required to mail letters to journals.

    Of course, all commentray letters are not created equal, which could make for a plethora of uninspired or even falacious commentary. To counteract this tendency, I think that those persons who, over time, demonstrate that they have "Insightful" or "Interesting" (or even "Funny") comments to make, be allowed to make other persons' comments more or less visible by awarding them positive or negative points.

    In turn, those awarded the most moderators' points ("mod points") would get a limited number of "mod points" (say, 5) to apply to future comments, perpetuating the cycle and allowing the best commentary on each article to rise to the top -- sort of a redistribution of "good" and "bad" karma.

    While I'm not aware that such a system has ever been tried before, I cannot imagine how it might be abused, and I'm sure it would act only to stimulate a flowering of scientific discourse.

    Comments, anyone?

  • Other online journals (Score:3, Informative)

    by 11223 (201561) on Monday October 13 2003, @09:45AM (#7198935)
    There are other free journals out there as well - the one I'm most familiar with is the Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research [jair.org], which is probably one of the most respected AI research volumes and has been published online since 1993.
      • Yes, BioMedCentral is awesome. I've been printing out all sorts of PDFs from their abundant journals and look forward to doing the same with PLOS.
        It might seem to be a bit of a tangent, but I want to mention something that I think is fairly important, if minor, detail about these on-line journals which is the format they are consumed in.
        While it's fine to get the gist of what's going on on-line, I perfonally prefer to print them out. With a refillable ink-jet model that prints front and back simulta

  • irony of scientific publication on internet (Score:3, Informative)

    by peter303 (12292) on Monday October 13 2003, @09:49AM (#7198967)
    One of the most basic tenants of the scientific method is the verification of scientific knowledge by by reproducable publication of data and methods. However the scientific journal - university library cabal is thwarting this goal by making scientific publications LESS AND LESS available by expensive prices, subscriptions, and lack of access to university libraries by outsiders. For example, the most widely read genral science publications Sience and Nature are online. However most content is by paid subscription only (universities often have blanket subscriptions). Even so, this is pretty open compared to journals in the medical sciences where online access is rare and prices astronomical.
  • Physisits have been doing something similar for ages. Have a look at http://arxiv.org/ [arxiv.org]. Most phyisics papers appear here first, only later going on to paper publishers. The big bifference between the two is arXiv has no reviewing process (its for pre-prints). This does make things quicker which seems to be what physist want, but might have impact on quility of papers.
  • Another journal such as this that doesn't just fill the coffers of Wiley or Elsevier is a good thing. As other posters have pointed out, though, there are similar free electronic journals out there. One that I haven't seen mentioned is the Electronic Transactions on Numerical Analysis (http://etna.mcs.kent.edu), which has actually been around since 1993!

    A big problem with PLoS is that an author is charged $1500 (!!!) to publish in the journal. This is going to bar a lot of people who lack significant fu

    • A big problem with PLoS is that an author is charged $1500 (!!!) to publish in the journal. This is going to bar a lot of people who lack significant funding from publishing in the journal. I don't see how passing the ridiculous costs of journals from subscribers to authors is a very good fix!

      You just aren't thinking very hard about this then. Teh first journal in the PLoS line-up is PLoS:Biology; the vast majority of articles published here, if they really do make it the equivalent of Science/Natu

    • It's been mentioned above, but do note that publication fees [plos.org] will be waived [plos.org] where appropriate.

      /joeyo

      • Some funding groups, like HHMI, will also defray costs. Regardless, as has been mentioned above, paying to have your article published (especially if you want color figures) is not all that uncommon with conventional journals too.

  • A Keystroke Koan for our Open Access Times (Score:3, Informative)

    by harnad (715639) on Monday October 13 2003, @11:50AM (#7199871)
    The launching of PLoS Biology -- http://www Stevan Harnad Normal Stevan Harnad 2 0 2003-10-13T15:09:00Z 2003-10-13T15:09:00Z 6 866 4939 Universite du Quebec a Montreal 41 9 6065 10.2006 200

    The launching of PLoS Biology -- http://www.plosbiology.org/ [plosbiology.org]-- an outcome of Harold Varmus's highly influential 1999 Ebiomed Proposal -- http://www.nih.gov/about/director/ebiomed/ebiomed. htm [nih.gov] -- is a very important event for research and researchers, for two reasons:

    (1) It is another step forward in providing open access to peer-reviewed research, a major step.

    (2) It both demonstrates and will further stimulate the research community's growing consciousness of both the need for open access and the possibility of attaining it.

    It is all the more important, therefore, that on this auspicious occasion for the open-access publication strategy (BOAI-2) we not forget or neglect the other, complementary open-access strategy, open-access self-archiving (BOAI-1) --http://www.soros.org/openaccess/read.shtml [soros.org] -- particularly because systematically supplementing BOAI-2 with BOAI-1 has the power to bring us so much more open-access, so much more quickly.

    A KEY-STROKE KOAN FOR OUR OPEN-ACCESS TIMES

    Here is an extremely conservative calculation that will give you an (I hope unforgettable) intuition for the importance of not neglecting the other road to open access:

    If, in addition to signing the PLoS open letter (pledging to boycott toll-access publishers unless they become open-access publishers http://www.plos.org/support/openletter.shtml [plos.org]), not even all the 30,000 PLoS signatories had self-archived not even all their own toll-access articles, nor even the 55% corresponding to the proportion of blue/green (self-archiving-friendly) toll-access journals -- http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Temp/rcoptable. gif [soton.ac.uk]-- but only the 18% of signatories corresponding to the proportion of postprint-green journals had self-archived just one of the articles they had published in just one of those toll-access journals, the resulting 5400 articles that had been made openly accessible by this act would still have been 5 times as many as PLoS Biology will publish in 5 years (1200 articles, assuming 20 articles per PLoS issue at $1500 a pop). And at the cost of only a few keystrokes more than what it cost to sign the petition.

    Yet all researchers did was sign the PLoS open letter, and then wait, passively, for toll-access journals to turn into open-access journals in response to the petition. And now researchers seem ready to wait yet again, passively, with the popular press now cheering from the sidelines, for more open-access journals like PLoS Biology to be created or converted, one by one.

    As we make our estimate less conservative and arbitrary, and scale it up first to 55% of all annual biology articles, and then beyond that, to the many journals that will support self-archiving if asked, I hope the scales will at last begin to drop from the eyes of those who have not yet noticed the tunnel vision and paralysis involved in focusing only on open-access publishing, when it is *open access* that is our target.

    And perhaps then we will be less surprised that the 23,500 toll-access publishers did not take our boycott threat seriously -- and, by the same token, that they still have no reason to take the handful of open-access journals created since the beginning of the '90s (of which PLoS Biology is about the 543rd) seriously -- if that's all we're prepared to do to demonstrate our need for and commitment to open access for our research, as we just keep sitting on our hands instead o

  • >"Oh, and it's all running on Linux ;)"

    Running on Linux, are you sure? Last night I did a 404 test on it, and it came back with an IIS error message. Maybe that's why it seems to have come to its knees so easily today?
    • Try this link:

      http://biology.plosjms.org/nosuchfile

      And you get this error which leads me to think this the site is not "all" running on Linux:

      The page cannot be found
      The page you are looking for might have been removed, had its name changed, or is temporarily unavailable.

      Please try the following:

      * If you typed the page address in the Address bar, make sure that it is spelled correctly.
      * Open the biology.plosjms.org home page, and then look for links to the information you want.
      * Click th

  • Here's the text of the page I got when
    I tried to download the PDF's for the
    article on monkeys that can operate a
    game without moving their hands:

    "The page cannot be found

    The page you are looking for might have been
    removed, had its name changed, or is
    temporarily unavailable.

    Please try the following:

    Make sure that the Web site address displayed
    in the address bar of your browser is spelled
    and formatted correctly.

    If you reached this page by clicking a link,
    contact the Web site admi
    • There's another interesting resource I found, Origins, that has a great deal of scientific articles

      I was wondering why the parent article was modded "Troll", so I followed the link. It's a web site advocating the pseudo-scientific, crypto-creationist "Intelligent Design" nonsense.

      If you haven't stepped in this dogpile before, "Intelligent Design" basically claims not to necessarily advocate a God, but does advocate the need for a fore-thinking "designer" to account for the complexity of life. It ignores
      • Thanks for the rant, It was nice and intellegent. I'd agree with you too. I think hiding things that we don't agree with won't make them go away. Open, calm and balanced debate's the best way to go. You won't always turn out to be right, but if you can't deal with that, why are you bothering thinking about science anyway?

        Thanks again, it's always good to read something that makes ya think.

      • Creationists would point to the eyes, and ask how such a marvelous and complex device could be the product of "random" evolution; but now scientists have simulated the development of the eye and shown it actually doesn't take that any forethought or much time (in evolutionary terms).

        Who has simulated the development of the eye and found the results you describe? What were the conditions of the simulation?

        • Who has simulated the development of the eye and found the results you describe? What were the conditions of the simulation?

          See "A Pessimistic Estimate Of The Time Required For An Eye To Evolve", D.-E. Nilsson and S. Pelger, Proceedings of the Royal Society London B, 1994, 256

          Or a summary here [don-lindsay-archive.org].
    • Never say never my friend.

      The mainstream journals are useful only in-so-far as they are widely available and widely read. The really big ones have had 100 years or more to gain momentum and get to where they are today! Journals like PLoS Biology have the potential to be FAR more widespread.

      Much like Open Source software, it is only a matter of time.

    • Journals are not cheap, and paying through the nose just for the priviledge of reading what should be public information is rather galling.

      The counter argument is: collecting information, writing and publishing high quality work is extremely hard and expensive. The should be in the quote is an opinion. The counter argument is that research is expensive; so we need a market approach to help determine how the money goes to research to help determine which research projects gets funded. Expensive journals

    • Yes, and lets continue subsidizing agriculture in our western countries, such that we can sell food below the price of which they can be produced in third world countries, with the result that farmers in those countries will remain poor for every, and milions of children will die because of poverty till the end of time.

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