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 ;)"

PLoS publication costs for authors are high

[scientistguy]

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.

Re:Peer review and perception

[pphrdza]

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 journals which has made libraries, the main market for these high cost journals, drop a lot of them, thereby lowering the number of subscriptions (and usually causing a higher cost for the remaining subscribers).

O.K., checked the Elsevier site [elsevier.com], and found a Brain Research subscription has to be purchased as part of a package which costs "USD 21,269 for all countries except Europe and Japan."

ouch.

A modest proposal...

[orthogonal]

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?

Wonderful...

[Anonymous Coward]

...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.

$1500 only if you can afford it

[Per Abrahamsen]

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

[Bowling Moses]

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.