Public Library of Science Launches

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 ;)"

Tropical Illness

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

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

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.

$1500 only if you can afford it

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.

Re:PLoS publication costs for authors are high

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.

Others

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 the original online peer reviewed journals, Molvis [molvis.org].

conflicting information

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.

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.

Indexing

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

Not quite a Microsoft-free zone

The PLoS information site indeed runs on Linux, but it's perhaps worth mentioning that the PLoS Biology journal itself runs on a rather less open platform [netcraft.com]. Kudos to PLoS for their launch though.

For more on the ever-expanding open access movement in science, see Peter Suber's excellent blog: Open Access News [earlham.edu].

Also, check out the other major open access publisher, BioMed Central [biomedcentral.com]. BioMed Central launched in 2000 and has already published more than 3000 peer reviewed biomedical research articles. [biomedcentral.com]

A modest proposal...

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

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.

Thanks Slashdot...

I am glad to see these types of postings on slashdot as I am a biology nut who normally would not discover things of this nature until much later. I know it is not a typical slashdot posting but I am very glad to see it (as I am the many other articles related to science and biology in particular).

irony of scientific publication on internet

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.

arXiv.org e-Print archive

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.

One of hundreds

It is always good to see competition to the publishing establishment with the launch of another free access journal. PLoS Biology now joins 541 other [doaj.org] open access scholarly journals in the SPARC [arl.org] project.

Everyone here is aware, I'm sure, that there is really no such thing as "free" in publishing. Many people and hundreds of institutions are contributing their time, resources and money trying to break the stranglehold of the entrenched publishing industry.

The only way open access can ever really succeed is if authors choose to publish in these journals instead of the established journals. When careers and prestige are on the line, how many faculty and researchers will choose to publish their latest medical discovery in one of these free journals instead of established journals like "New England Journal of Medicine" and "Science"?

As all of the SPARC institutions know, creating the journals is just the first step in a very long and difficult struggle. Read them, publish in them, promote them to others. And thank your librarians for providing the seedbed for all these open access journals to flourish.

A good thing, but not a first.

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 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! There are other free, electronic journals out there that don't cost anything to publish in (such as ETNA). I honestly don't know why PLoS charges so much money. The cost of running an e-journal can't be that high: authors don't get paid anything, reviewers don't get paid anything, and many editors don't get paid anything. Money for running a web/ftp server should just about cover it!

Still need other journals

As a researcher PLOS might make for a good suppliment to other journals, but you still are going to need ot other journals to get by in your research.

You'll never see anyone who's doing research at a university or in the private sector cancel their subscription to any of the major journals, even when there's alternatives out there. They're too essential.

It might give a regular person a chance to read up on some ongoing research, but they can already do that at the library.

Wonderful...

...another journal. The only excitement here is that it is free to read, though not free to publish in.

Before people go wild about this, remember that $1500 is actually quite a lot of money, and more than many, if not most, other journals. Physical Review D, one of the most (if not the most) respected journal in its field, for example, has no page charges. It charges $2,700 for a one year online subscription, but guess what -- if your department publishes more than one paper a year (I would say a good department publishes at least two, if not more, papers per researcher), you are far out-running Plos.

(Indeed, if a department decided to go solely to Plos, they'd be paying $3,000 per researcher -- which is well more than most grants today allocate to page charges.)

Physical Review Letters has a $500 page charge, one third of Plos, and PRL is the most respected "fast track" place to publish. Plos is a (as of yet) no-name journal with no track record (a Nobel prize-winner on the board is meaningless.) Why would anybody publish there?

The only journals that people have complained about are the Elsiver series, which have been jacked up extraordinarily high -- but there are still other options, and people who publish in the Elsiver journals need to realize that poorer universities can't afford them. There is already this kind of pressure (Elsiver is also screwing up its online access and archives), and either Elsiver will change or its readership will.

Finally, Science and Nature are rapidly becoming obsolete. They've published so many silly papers that have been "sexed up" by editors and authors alike, and they've had so many problems with meddlesome editors (in real journals, the editor doesn't get to change the wording in your paper) that it's become a laughing stock in more than one field. To compare Plos to those two is to miss the point.

A Keystroke Koan for our Open Access Times

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

Bad for your health?

Great! Let's rush right out to the doctors getting their medical informaiton from free journals. Those guys charging thousands for real information are full of themselves. We don't need no stinking accuracy or credibility. If I can figure out how to put in my own clutch, they should be able to put in a heart or kidney with the same free information. I'm sure a doctor that's done it will post an article somewhere for free.

Linux?

>"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?

Is this site running Microsoft's IIS, or what ?!?

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 administrator to alert
them that the link is incorrectly formatted.

Click the Back button to try another link.

HTTP Error 404 - File or directory not found.
Internet Information Services (IIS)

Technical Information (for support personnel)

Go to Microsoft Product Support Services and
perform a title search for the words HTTP and
404.

Open IIS Help, which is accessible in IIS
Manager (inetmgr), and search for topics
titled Web Site Setup, Common Administrative
Tasks, and About Custom Error Messages."

I thought it was to be running on Linux.

Maybe this explains part of the reason for
the $1500-to-publish-here fee... ;-)

The real issues of PLoS

Unfortunately, being that money does not yet grow on trees, the money to publish in an open access journal such as PLoS Biology has to come from somewhere. If you look at the fine print of the great majority of journals, there will be a little statement about the publication qualifying as advertisement, because the author had to pay page charges. These charges come out of grant money, and major funding agencies such as the NIH, NSF, and Wellcome Trust have already approved publication charges for open access journals (which, by the way, your taxes paid for these agencies to fund the research to begin with). To then read the journal, you have to pay again. In fact, most of the comments out of the publishing community towards the PLoS journals insist that the $1500 charge is not nearly enough to cover the costs of publishing. Economics and career risk has been the largest concern with the survival of PLoS, not the peer review process.

With people such as Harold Varmus (Nobel Prize in Medicine 1989 "discovery of the cellular origin of retroviral oncogenes") and James Watson, and recruiting former editors of the high profile journal Cell the quality is not likely to be the greatest concern. Besides the economics of running an open access journal, many young scientists, whose careers are still in the making, would be hard pressed to give up the opportunity to publish in Nature or Science, to hold their "moral" ground and publish in PLoS. But it only takes a few to get the ball rolling... Pat Brown (one of the founders of PLoS) and several other authors names were removed from an article in the New England Journal of Medicine, because the journal edited out a sentence pertaining to access and retention of copyright. There were two good commentaries/news in the last two issues of Nature on the NEJM article and PLoS economics, however being that they were published in Nature (whose articles from fifty years ago are still kept closed access), you will have to pay to see them.( I think this will run you approximately $10-30 per article)

Here are the links for those of you who have access:

Nature:Open Access [nature.com]
NEJM fall out [nature.com]

Suckers.

money spent on subscriptions to commercial journals that can cost thousands of dollars a year

Deep Disanalogy Between Open-Access & Open-Sou

Source:
http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hyperm ail/Amsci /2967.html

On the Deep Disanalogy
Between Text and Software and
Between Text and Data
Insofar as Free/Open Access is Concerned

Stevan Harnad

It would be a *great* conceptual and strategic mistake for the movement
dedicated to open access to peer-reviewed research (BOAI)
http://www.soros.org/openaccess/ to conflate its sense of "free"
vs. open" with the sense of "free vs. open" as it is used in the
free/open-source software movements. The two senses are not at all the
same, and importing the software-movements' distinction just adds to
the still widespread confusion and misunderstanding that there is in
the research community about toll-free access.

I will try to state it in the simplest and most direct terms possible:
Software is code that you use to *do* things. It may not be enough to
let you use the code for free to do things, because one of the things you
may want to do is to modify the code so it will do *other* things. Hence
you may need not only free use of the code, but the code itself has to
be open, so you can see and modify it.

There is simply *no counterpart* to this in peer-reviewed research
article use. None. Researchers, in using one another's articles, are
using and re-using the *content* (what the articles are reporting), and
not the *code* (i.e., the actually words in the text). Yes, they read the
text. Yes (within limits) they may quote it. Yes, it is helpful to be able
to navigate the code by character-string and boolean searching. But what
researchers are fundamentally *not* doing in writing their own articles
(which build on the articles they have read) is anything faintly analogous
to modifying the code for the original article!

I hope that that is now transparent, having been pointed out and written
in longhand like this. So if it is obvious that what researchers do with
the articles they read is not to modify the text in order to generate a
new text, as programmers may modify a program to generate a new program,
then where on earth did this open/free source/access conflation come from?

And there is a second conflation inherent in it, namely, a conflation
between research publishing (i.e., peer-reviewed journal articles) and
public data-archiving (scientific and scholarly databases consisting of
the raw and processed data on which the research reports are based).

Digital data archiving (e.g., the various genome databases, astrophysical
databases, etc.) is relatively new, and it is a powerful *supplement*
to peer-reviewed article publishing. In general, the data are not *in*
the published article, they are *associated with* it. In paper days, there
was not the page-quota or the money to publish all the data. And even
in digital days, there is no standardized practice yet of making the raw
data as public as the research findings themselves; but there is definite
movement in that direction, because of its obvious power and utility.

The point, however, is this: As of today, articles and data are not
the same thing. The 2,000,000 new articles appearing every year in the
planet's 20,000 peer-reviewed journals (the full-text literature that
-- as we cannot keep reminding ourselves often enough, apparently --
the open/free access movement is dedicated to freeing from access-tolls)
consists of articles only, *not* the research data on which the articles
are based.

Hence, today, the access problem concerns toll-access to the full-texts
of 2,000,000 articles published yearly, not access to the data on which
they are based (most of which are not yet archived online, let alone
published; and, when they *are* archived online, they are often already
publicly accessible toll-free!).

No doubt research practices will evolve toward making all data
accessible to would-be users, along with the

Re:I like the sound of it.

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 the implicit bottomless recursion: if all life on Earth is the product of an intelligent designer, and indeed required, because of its complexity, and intelligent designer, wasn't that designer itself so complex as to require an intelligent designer, and so on ad infinitum? Yes, it's turtles all the way down, unless of course you propose a timeless and omnipotent god. And thus, "Itelligent Design" is just Creationism given a shave and haircut and dressed up in a stolen lab coat to hid the priestly vestments.

In times past, 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). So to, the "Intelligent Design" advocates hang much of their "theory" on aspects of biology (like rotating flagella in bacteria) that to them is surprising or "unlikely". It should not need to be said -- but unfortunately does need to be said -- that the argument from personal surprise is not science.

We can find many things that are true but counter-intuitive -- including much of physics, not to mention the apparently built-in inability of humans to intuitively grasp certain ideas about statistical likelihood (witness the popularity of lotteries), or concepts, such as "infinity", that our evolution did not prepare us to easily come to terms with. But only the "Intelligent Design" "theorists" see "I wouldn't have expected that" not as a statement about the limits of human minds, but about the limits of the universe. Being dumbfounded by the grandeur of the universe may make good poetry and pleasing holy books, but it's emphatically not science, and neither is "Intelligent Design"; it's religious opinion masquerading as science.

All that said, while I strongly support keeping so-called "Intelligent Design" out of the public schools and out of any serious scientific discussion, I'm uncomfortable calling the parent post a "Troll". Just because I/you/we don't agree with an opinion does not make it a troll, and I prefer open discussion and refutation of bad ideas to their suppression with mod points. Bad ideas, especially, need the disinfectant of open discussion. That's my opinion, anyway.

Re:Not really informative, but...

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 is a way of raising needed funds.

Re:Public Libraries are important

It is with great sadness I note that my quote from CNN has rececived 50% Offtopic and 50% Overrated moderations, resulting in a "Score:-1, Offtopic". No, I'm not a "karma whore", but, and that is a bloody BIG BUT - giving in to superstition, metaphysics, and supernatural beliefs in general is in no way not part of me.

How the [please insert any popular vulgarism] do people believe information is to spread rapidly through an impoverished polulation and, as from what the CNN article insinuates, an active mob infuriated from superstitious beliefs and with blatant disregard for human rights? No, they probably don't have internet access. Yet, this may be a first step towards a better, more educated world. Nothing more nothing less. There are, as far as I can see it, no fancy strings attached to it. Just a plain, public library.

Please, read the entire article. It IS horrifying. This is from 9th October 2003, not 2003B.C. Please read the entire article in full, again. Please. Besides, how the whats can this be Offtopic?! Here again:

BANJUL, Gambia (Reuters) -- A 28-year-old man accused of stealing a man's penis through sorcery was beaten to death in the West African country of Gambia on Thursday, police said.

A police spokesman told Reuters that Baba Jallow was lynched by about 10 people in the town of Serekunda, some 15 km (nine miles) from the capital Banjul.

Reports of penis snatching are not uncommon in West Africa, with purported victims claiming that alleged sorcerers simply touched them to make their genitals shrink or disappear in order to extort cash in the promise of a cure.

The police spokesman said many men in Serekunda were now afraid to shake hands, and he urged people not to believe reports of "vanishing" genitals. Belief in sorcery is widespread in West Africa.

Seven alleged penis snatchers were beaten to death by angry mobs in Ghana in 1997.

Re:Great idea for destroying our economy.

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.