Public Library of Science Launches 101
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 ;)"
This is really really important. (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Other online journals (Score:3, Informative)
irony of scientific publication on internet (Score:3, Informative)
arXiv.org e-Print archive (Score:2, Informative)
One of hundreds (Score:1, Informative)
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 Keystroke Koan for our Open Access Times (Score:3, Informative)
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
Re:A good thing, but not a first. (Score:3, Informative)
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/Nature/whatever *will* be published by people and labs receiving some amount of external funding. Barring that, they could probably apply for intramural funding to defray publication cost in a prestigious journal. After they get off the ground, I have no doubt that one or more philanthropists or corporate sponsors will not start shelling out for this cost. But the point is: there is a real cost to publishing science, and somebody will have to pay it.
As far as the "who pays?" question goes, I think it should be crushingly obvious that this is a big win, especially for people who are underfunded or who come from institutions that do not have large journal budgets. So on-line institutional pricing for Nature is pretty high; I think I remember a figure like $8000 per year being bandied about. There are probably about 5000 institutions paying this fee right now, or about $40 million coming into Nature. There are tens of thousands of others who pay somethingly like $200 per year to get the same access (it can go higher, but you can always get some discount or other). Probably another $40 million or so comes in that way. That's $80 milllion spent for what I believer will work out to be 1000 or so articles. So the total subscription cost is on the order of $80,000 per article published in Nature If these had all been published in PLOS journals, the total subscriber cost would be $1500 per article. Even if I have my Nature numbers high by a factor of 10, there is still a sizable community savings by going the PLOS route. As far as how much PLOS will cost, if they get to the point where they publish as many articles as Nature (say 1000 per year), then I figure they will need an editorial staff of about 10, an office or offices for the same, and whatever their web access costs them (right now they're slashdotted; that shouldn't happen). I don't find it hard to believe that this would cost $1.5 million per year, and so I have to conclude the cost is reasonable. Funds can always be raised to cover reasonable costs.
Re:Linux? (Score:2, Informative)
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 the Back button to try another link.
HTTP 404 - File not found
Internet Information Services
Technical Information (for support personnel)
* More information:
Microsoft Support
==============
BTW I'm using Mozilla Firebird, so I know this error message is coming from the server, and not being rewritten by my browser as IE tends to do.