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Biotech Science

PLoS Launches Open Access Biology Journal 17

Posted by michael from the if-it-squirms-it's-biology dept.
Vojtek writes "An international grass-roots organization of scientists is lauching an open access journal, PLoS Biology, that will compete with existing publications. See PLoS.org for details. Read their FAQ, download and post their Poster, support their cause!" We've done several previous stories about these guys - this one is pretty thorough.
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PLoS Launches Open Access Biology Journal More

PLoS Launches Open Access Biology Journal

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  • PLoSdot (Score:1, Offtopic)

    by Bob Vila's Hammer ( 614758 )
    Sounds like slashdot. :-)

    PLoSdot.org?

    +.

  • Very Interesting... (Score:2, Informative)

    by nycsubway ( 79012 )
    Except, where are the journals? I couldn't find either of their journals on their website. I am very interested in them however. I'm sure peices published in that journal will not be funded by large companies or groups and will probably be more theoretical, and possibly more impracticle.

    • Re:Very Interesting... (Score:4, Informative)

      by VendingMenace ( 613279 ) on Friday May 02, 2003 @03:34PM (#5864897)
      well there ARE no journals right now. Just like their site says, "We are accepting submissions for PLoS Biology as of May 1, 2003. The first issue is planned for October 2003."

      Yeah, there may be a trend toward companies not publishing in it, at least in the begginning. This is more due to the fact that there will not be the name regognition that goes along with more traditioinal journals. However, if the idea takes off, there is no reason why anyone would not publish non-classified material in an open journal.

  • great idea... (Score:2, Insightful)

    by VendingMenace ( 613279 )
    hopefully it will work out. There are so many hurdles to overcome. It has to gain popularity and now deal with all this censorship brewha that has come in teh sciences post 9/11.

    Personally, i think that open journals are the way to go. It just seem rediculous that people can't learn about stuff becuase the cost is porhibitively high, but i guess that really isn't anything new. Nevertheless, it sux, and hopefull this jounal will help end this.

    SWEEET!

    • Re:great idea... (Score:5, Informative)

      by sketerpot ( 454020 ) <sketerpot@gmai l . c om> on Friday May 02, 2003 @06:03PM (#5865920)
      A similar site is ArXiv [arxiv.org], which does mostly physics stuff AFAIK. You can do things like searching more easily on the web, as well as the openness benefits.

      • Re:great idea... (Score:5, Informative)

        by Muhammar ( 659468 ) on Friday May 02, 2003 @08:47PM (#5866683)
        Physics people are far ahead of other fields in this - because there is not money to be made in the field.

        Chemistry journals and searchable databases are in clutches of major publishers - which solicit the free work of their referees but charge top dollars. The trouble is: the major customers are pharma companies and large universities and they can afford to pay large fees They are more interested in reliability of the online service rather than cost savings from an open project.

        "In times of universal broadband deceit, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act."

        • science perverted (Score:2, Informative)

          by Anonymous Coward
          Physics people are far ahead of other fields in this - because there is not money to be made in the field. Chemistry journals and searchable databases are in clutches of major publishers - which solicit the free work of their referees but charge top dollars.

          It wasn't supposed to end up this way. [upenn.edu]

      • Re:great idea... (Score:3, Informative)

        by AYEq ( 48185 )
        ArXiv is only a searchable database of preprints. (mathematics preprints is what I knew ArXiv for)

        Basically it consists of papers before they get published.
      • Yeah, ArXiv is great. My problem is with PROLA (APS = Phys. Rev. A-E, Lett.). I'm in high school, so whenever I need one of their papers, I have to talk my way into a local students-only university library.

    • Re:great idea... (Score:3, Informative)

      by bmnc ( 643126 )
      The flipside of the free accesss for readers is likely to be increased cost to authors, as people still have to be employed to find referees, make websites etc... and the money for that has to come from somewhere. I look forward to an open acess physics journal to come online. At the moment we have arxiv.org but thats not published material, its a preprint archive (and doesn't count in the ratrace).

  • What the fuck? (Score:1, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Are people too cool to tell us what acronyms mean? How fucking hard it is to write Public Library of Science?

    • People should use the ABBR tag like so:

      Example: PLoS
      Code: <ABBR title="Public Library of Science">PLoS</ABBR>

      Hovering over PLoS above should show the acronym's expansion (update: actually slashcode doesn't even allow ABBR tags! so the above doesn't work). However it is obvious why people don't use the ABBR tag; acronyms are there because they save people time so why on earth waste even more time by writing the acronym, it's expanded form and some miscelaneous markup!

      I'd like to see Slash

  • The problem with online journals (Score:5, Informative)

    by axolotl_farmer ( 465996 ) on Saturday May 03, 2003 @10:58AM (#5868985)
    Finding articles has begun to become a real big problem. Cheap universities cut down on subscriptions. My place of work, the University of Stockholm, canceled all science journals at the main library this year Online periodicals are still very expensive.

    The problem with free online journals is getting an ISSN number for your journal. Without this, it is not even counted as a publication, and won't appear in any reference databases. To get an ISSN, the journal has to be printed and submitted to something like 50 libraries.

    So, to publish an online journal you still have to kill trees...

  • PLOS only addresses free access. But it does not address the real hairy problem, the lack of peer-review in science and the abscence of free publication. PLOS still hangs on the obsolete idea that science must be censored to be good. Yes, censored, because there can be no re-view before publication, and because the decision is the editor's, not author's peer (most never find out!). What the scientific stablishment calls ``peer review'' is truly called censorship.

    PLOS is better than the parasitic `sci

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