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 ;)"

Peer review and perception

[rhetland]

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.

There's no question it will succeed.

[Anonymous Coward]

The fact that it exists is success already.

What we need is a bit more activism on campus. I don't see why kids are so conservative these days. You'd think we'd be seeing people scan journals and share them on-line, but sadly that's not the case.
Academic journals are one of the saddest scams in history. The authors aren't paid to write, they've got to write to get tenure or even a position for that matter. The journals themselves claim they're just covering costs, but the libraries are expected to check up millions of dollars in extortion each year. Well, guess who pays? Duh --the students.
You'd think there would be a desire to take matters into their own hands among the youth on today's campuses, but they're oddly complacent.
Luckily, they have their seniors like Lessig to wipe their asses for them.

Re:I like the sound of it.

[orthogonal]

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.

Still need other journals

[Anonymous Coward]

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.