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PLoS, like all reputable open access publishers, waives publication fees for authors who cannot afford to pay. I've seen the specious "open access publishing locks out researchers who can't pay" repeated so often, in such obvious defiance of the facts, that I'm starting to wonder if it's astroturfing on the part of the PRISM crowd.

For example, authors are charged almost $3,000 to publish a single article in PLoS Biology.

PLoS, like all reputable open-access publishers, waives publication fees for authors who can't pay. Basically, the fees paid by authors on big grants from NIH, NSF, et al. which specifically cover publication fees (remember, a lot of traditional journals charge publication fees too, for things like color figures, and waivers are considerably harder to get in that case!) are in part subsidizing articles from authors who aren't on those grants and don't have the resources to pay the publication fees. It's not a perfect system by any means, but it seems to be working so far.

Some are. PLoS One for instance has a pretty high impact factor. It's not up there with Nature, but it's higher than the vast majority of journals.

In case people are wondering... PLoS is the Public Library of Science.

Sure, this is a liberal problem isn't it?

http://blogs.plos.org/thepanicvirus/2011/05/10/and-the-winner-is-fox-news/
http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,1206813,00.html

Or perhaps you missed many conservatives like Michele Bachmann rail on and on against HPV and other vaccines.

No, this a religious problem. Every motivation for the vac-fraks stems from it, and it's desire to abolish science.

I think that's part of why the Public Library of Science went with their model -- authors pay to submit their article (which *does* get peer reviewed, but on technical merits, not if it's "interesting" to the edior). And then it's free to read forever.

ArXiv has shown their value to the community, but they currently rely on support from organizations. Many people who use the site don't even know the issues -- it's not like they're running banner ads asking for donations like Wikipedia.

Now, with the pay-up-front model, some people might balk at the PLoS $1500 submission fee, but that's actually cheaper than some of the existing publishers charge for 'making an article open access' (ie, if you're published with them, you can pay a fee so that no one else has to pay a per-article charge ... but that doesn't help the libraries who have subscriptions). And it's not unheard of for peer-reviewed journals to have submission or publishing fees. Some are per page, some add extra charges for color images, etc.

The problem with a free forum is signal to noise. It would have to have some kind of reputation system, such as scientists rating/flagging each other's contributions. That way, you could add some respected scientists to your 'trusted' list, and things that they trust would be highlighted/promoted to you. Essentially a web of trust model. This has obvious downsides, such as scalability and the inherent formation of cliques and the like.

The thing is that journals are actually a decent solution to these issues. They curate content on your behalf, and you decide which journals are more reputable than others. By doing some of the leg-work for you, they handle scalability and make the format relatively open to all comers. They also have the advantage of already existing: scientists already know which journals are better than others, understand the process of submitting to journals, and so on...

My point is that while you could entirely ditch the journals, and build a whole new system... this would be inefficient. It would seem simpler to take the current journal system, and just fix the things that are wrong with it (in particular, the exorbitant costs and the lack of open access). On the one hand, you may say it's hopelessly idealistic of me to expect for-profit journals to willingly move towards a more open format. On the other hand, there are already highly successful open-access journal ventures (e.g. PLoS), which are indeed pushing the journal system towards open access. So there is hope that we can reform the journal system.

The last part was a joke, the thudguard thing. Sadly what wasn't a joke is that these toys really ARE the most dangerous things kids face today. What with the chemical sets being chemical free these days.

http://dx.plos.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0026374

Available for peer review. Go for it, pal.

There were several back in 2010... I'm sure there are more now.

There is an open free market for Scientific publishing called PLoS http://www.plos.org./ PDF's suck on eReaders mainly due to the fact the text does not reflow for different size readers. The reason eReaders don't support ePub as well as they should is because most eReaders are not sold for profit but to hook you into the distributor's DRM'd products ala Amazon. It is not their priority. Converts just suck. Enough said.

A stunning result probably too recent to have made it in to the book under review: we now have a closed-form formula for the partition numbers.

Lots of the commercial journals charge page fees. Academic researchers (it doesn't sound like you are one, even though you have a paper in press) get those fees paid by their departments. They don't come out of pocket. For the research institutions, it's just one of the many expenses associated with research, including lab equipment, secretarial support, photocopying, scotch tape, etc, more than retrieved by the subscriptions savings fees at the other end. Also, PLOS One waives the publishing fee for authors with insufficient funds:

We offer a complete or partial fee waiver for authors who do not have funds to cover publication fees. Editors and reviewers have no access to author payment information, and hence inability to pay will not influence the decision to publish a paper.

source.

Now, as Martin Fenner said, "Let's see how authors will respond to this and whether it will be possible 10 years from now to distinguish papers published in Nature, Nature Communications and Scientific Reports."

Oldtimers gonna love PLoS' response: http://blogs.plos.org/plos/2011/01/welcome-nature-seriously-2/

I would mod you up (have mod points) but I see you are already at 5. Unfortunately it seems ISI WoK is not free to access (and papers are mainly non-free.

Instead I would suggest to also look for the Public Library of Science (PLoS one) or Scirus.

If possible, Scopus is a really really *great* resource to find papers. Unfortunately it is also non-free.

You may be able to publish for free (i.e. they offer a complete or partial waiver) to publish in PLoS. http://www.plos.org/

We recently published some work there and it was quite fast (about 4 months after submission).

Of course the literature review and other stuff wil still be resource consuming
 

There's Public Library of Science, which has a handful of journals. At least some of which, like PLoS Biology, are highly ranked. PLoS ONE is the biggest open access journal, with over 4,000 articles published last year. Still has a decent second-tier ranking, which will probably increase. The journals published by the professional societies are pretty good too, with typically lower cost of subscription and decent ranking. As bad as the Nature Publishing Group is made to look here (and I'm fully on the side of the University of California system), they're one of the less evil publishers. Elsevier is rotten to the core. Not content with massively overcharging for journals, even by the standards of academic publishers, they're infamous for creating fake journals for Pharma to advertise in.

These scumbag publishers... act like the researchers should be grateful not to be charged a fee.....PLoS is where I'll be sending my work.

So, you take issue with the fact that mainstream publishers don't pay scientists (we'll ignore how that would work in a market where space in well known journals is the scarce resource), and would like to thumb your nose at them by... going with a publisher that will charge you >$2000 to publish your own material! There are good arguments for open access publishing, but your complaints contradict one another.

There is still a market for print journals, although maybe it's on the wane. Someone has to pay for printing and distribution, and the journal staff require salaries. Even online publishing needs servers and bandwidth. The traditional model is that the publishers charge the readers, and the new model is to charge the authors (i.e. the funding agencies), but either way, it can't be free for everyone.

This idea was already executed a while ago by the Journal of Negative Results in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, the Journal of Negative Results in BioMedicine, the Journal of Negative Results in Speech and Audio Sciences and probably a few others that Google will help you find, just as it helped me find. But, as I recall, even PLoS had publishing negative results in its charter and specifically PLoS ONE encouraged them, being all-inclusive.

The problem? Most of them (except for PLoS and PLoS ONE) have a very low impact factor because although negative results are important, they aren't sexy in the least. If they were sexy, they would have been published in more mainstream journals. Because publishing a paper requires significant effort, a scientist is unlikely to spend his most precious resource -- time -- publishing a negative result if he can publish a positive one. Positive results get referenced, negative ones, by-and-large, do not. References in important journals lead to advancement as a scientist through grants, promotion, etc. So, unless the result is going to have significant impact -- like contradicting a previous result, or disproving dogma -- there's little motivation for a scientist to expend the effort to write up and publish a negative result, rather than do more research.
   

Point of reference, the cost of publishing in a PLOS journal is $1300-$2850

My guess is that Wall Street Journal didn't want to pay the prices the publisher (of the scientific journal article) is asking for permission to reprint the pictures, or something like that.

"PLoS is a nonprofit organization of scientists and physicians committed to making the world's scientific and medical literature a freely available public resource. All our activities are guided by our core principles." Do you know anything about the Public Library of Science??????

My guess is that Wall Street Journal didn't want to pay the prices the publisher (of the scientific journal article) is asking for permission to reprint the pictures, or something like that.

"PLoS is a nonprofit organization of scientists and physicians committed to making the world's scientific and medical literature a freely available public resource. All our activities are guided by our core principles." Do you know anything about the Public Library of Science??????

I think that seems short-sighted - even petty. I prefer to look at it from a different point of view.

I'd rather my papers be read & cited by more people, than that they have some fancy brand-name associated with them.

So, unless you're talking about the top tier journals like Science or Nature, I'd rather publish in PLoS or similar open journals, so that I can distribute my papers as widely as possible.

I'm interested in doing good science - not labels - or packing my resume. Sorry, but your first sentence really comes off as pathetic. I hope I never have someone with that point of view in my laboratory.

rho

We did.

http://www.plos.org/

(not me personally, I had no role in this but as a member of the community I applaud)

There is also a new NIH mandate that any research results that are published as a result of NIH funding must be open access after 6 months of the publication date. There is definitely a shift to the open access paradigm. How this will affect the business model of traditional publishing houses is not known, nor do I particularly care. Support open access journals!

Another junior academic here.

I feel like the original submitter question slightly confuses the issues of "paper vs. online", "pay access vs. open access" and "journal vs. something else." The fact is that the "paper vs. online" question is already nearly completely settled: journals have shifted aggressively over the last decade towards being online. Many of them still release paper versions--but nearly all academics access journals online nowadays. The business model has shifted from selling print subscriptions to libraries, to selling online subscriptions to institutions. Any decent journal nowadays is online, and searcheable both from the journal site and due to integration with other search services (e.g. Web of Science).

Journals are adapting, and online systems have helped them streamline their operations. "Two or more years" is no longer the norm. Good journals (with online submission) turn around papers in a few months. The paper is usually available online as soon as it has been accepted and typeset--so the publication is available to anyone interested long before the delayed dead-tree copy is shipped. Also, preprint servers (arXiv being the most famous) help academics get their results out quickly, while still publishing things in more official/traditional sources.

With respect to the "pay access vs. open access" question--this is a more difficult thing to change. Journals are very accustomed to their ability to charge for the spread of information. Many academics (myself included) consider this unfair (as they seem to do very little, relying on volunteer reviewers, and requiring authors to do quite a lot of editing and formatting themselves), and even detrimental to the free spread of information that is crucial to science. Despite the inertia of the entrenched players, things are changing. For instance, the Public Library of Science journals are all open-access, and are doing quite well at attracting high-profile science. The list of open access journals is growing all the time. The pressure has even induced many traditional journals to sponsor preprint servers (e.g. Nature Precedings), or to give authors the option of making their contribution open-access (usually through a page charge).

With respect to the "journal vs. something else" question... it's unclear why we should switch away from journals if they suit our needs. The current journal process (rigorous publication requirements, peer review, editorial oversight) is very important to modern science. It helps maintain the rigor and transparency, while reducing fraud and sub-standard work.

All of that to say that I'm a little confused by the initial submission. The situation is changing. Nearly everything is online. Open access is gaining traction. Modern journals bear little resemblance to the printed versions of a few decades ago... so the suggestion that they are "obsolete" somewhat misses the mark.

PLoS Core Principles

1. Open access. All material published by the Public Library of Science, whether submitted to or created by PLoS, is published under an open access license that allows unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
2. Excellence. PLoS strives to set the highest standards for excellence in everything we do: in content, style, and aesthetics of presentation; in editorial performance at every level; in transparency and accessibility to the scientific community and public; and in educational value.
3. Scientific integrity. PLoS is committed to a fair, rigorous editorial process. Scientific quality and importance are the sole considerations in publication decisions. The basis for decisions will be communicated to authors.
4. Breadth. Although pragmatic considerations require us to focus initially on publishing high-impact research in the life sciences, we intend to expand our scope as rapidly as practically possible, to provide a vehicle for publication of other valuable scientific or scholarly articles.
5. Cooperation. PLoS welcomes and actively seeks opportunities to work cooperatively with any group (scientific/scholarly societies, physicians, patient advocacy groups, educational organizations) and any publisher who shares our commitment to open access and to making scientific information available for the good of science and the public.
6. Financial fairness. As a nonprofit organization, PLoS charges authors a fair price that reflects the actual cost of publication. However, the ability of authors to pay publication charges will never be a consideration in the decision whether to publish.
7. Community engagement. PLoS was founded as a grassroots organization and we are committed to remaining one, with the active participation of practicing scientists at every level. Every publishing decision has at its heart the needs of the constituencies that we serve (scientists, physicians, educators, and the public).
8. Internationalism. Science is international. PLoS aims to be a truly international organization by providing access to the scientific literature to anyone, anywhere; by publishing works from every nation; and by engaging a geographically diverse group of scientists in the editorial process.
9. Science as a public resource. Our mission of building a public library of science includes not only providing unrestricted access to scientific research ideas and discoveries, but developing tools and materials to engage the interest and imagination of the public and helping non-scientists to understand and enjoy scientific discoveries and the scientific process.

Seriously, have you not heard of the Public Library of Science? It's the attempt to break the stranglehold of the for profit publishers. The content is published under the Creative Commons attribution license, and anyone can download it -- unlike most scientific publications, which require a subscription. It's completely peer reviewed, and been extremely successful. The oldest journal, PLoS biology (from 2003), has a 14.1 impact factor. They are, very definitely, peer-reviewed -- you wrote this without apparently even reading the webpage for PloS Pathogens?

PLoS Pathogens currently has an ISI Impact Factor of 6.1.
This is not comparable to to Nature, Science or PLoS Biology but for a specialized journal it's quite high.

The good thing about the PLoS Journals is that they rank quite high _and_ the articles are open accessible by day one. This means that an ordinary slashdot user (not sitting in a rich lab or library that has spent truckloads of money to access the most important journals in its field) has the chance to _read_ the f#@*ing primary resarch article.

As said, the paper is here although the site is down for maintenance at the moment ;).

All PLoS journals are peer reviewed. Impact factor for 2006 was around 6.0 (based on 6 months of publications, likely to increase). Most PLoS's are second-tier publications behind the usual suspects. Your ignorance of this journal does not constitute invalidity of research that is published in it; it merely points out, well, your ignorance.

All PLoS journals are peer reviewed. Impact factor for 2006 was around 6.0 (based on 6 months of publications, likely to increase). Most PLoS's are second-tier publications behind the usual suspects. Your ignorance of this journal does not constitute invalidity of research that is published in it; it merely points out, well, your ignorance.

I didn't RTFA either because "Science" as a publication is practically useless to me until they publish the papers available for all to read for free. The AAAS is disgustingly hypocritical in supporting the existence of a journal which restricts access to information which ought to be available to all the members of a modern society. In contrast the physics community with arXiv.org and the people behind the Public Library of Science (PLoS) http://www.plos.org/ are to be congratulated for sharing their work with the world.

In short: fuck "Science" and the AAAS, especially because of the dismay (commonly expressed by scientists) that the public is ill-informed and under educated about science.

If your home institution is a PLoS Institutional Member , the publication fees are discounted, and there are fee waivers available as well.

As a search scientist, I am a huge fan of open access and I have published and promoted its use in the past. However, there are more issues than just making it law. For example, PLOS Biology charges $2750 US for a single paper. Right now, a budget of $2-3k per year for publication is a reasonable cost, if that were to rise to $2-3k per paper, it could get very expensive, at tax payer cost and at the expense of research activity. How are we going to bring down the cost of open access, perhpas the feds should get into publishing? I am personally a fan of looking at other, perhaps less expensive options, such as creating open data repositories that are publicly funded or focusing on community driven knowledgebases that are in the public domain. Lots of papers aren't very interesting, requiring those authors to pay open access costs is a recipe for useless expense.

Traditional academic publishing works like this:

- Research money (typically from the government, ie your money) is used to fund research and scientists write articles about it.

- Those articles are sent to periodicals (journals) to be published. The journals are corporate, and carry different amounts of prestige. For a researcher, getting papers in prestigious journals is extremely important, so they send them off willingly, and the journals do not pay a dime (in fact, sometimes the researcher has to pay).

- The article gets to sent to an editor at the journal, who is typically a well established senior researcher working for free because being an editor is prestigious (that is, he is working on time paid for by your money).

- The editor chooses researchers to do "peer review" on the article, that is anonymously write judge its merit. These peer reviewers work for free.

- If the article is accepted, the researcher is very happy, and gleefully signs over the copyright on the article he has written (which you paid for) to the corporate publisher.

- The corporate publisher, which now owns the article, won't let anybody access it unless they pay for a subscription to the journal. Large universities typically pay millions of dollars a year (again, largely your money) for journal subscriptions.

So to recap: researchers write the article for free (or pay), editors work for free, reviewers work for free, the publishers get the copyright and loads of money. In some fields you are even expected to typeset the article yourself, leaving the publisher only with the arduous task of visiting the bank to check on its ever increasing balance, and laughing at the sucker who finances all this (you). Because there is prestige in publishing in the "right" journal, and the money being spent doesn't belong to the people spending it, there is no market pressure to drive the prices down nor to make the system more sane. A number of companies, notably Elsevier, Wiley, and Springer, make incredible amounts of money off this.

Lately, however, something has finally started happening. The open access movement has been started to try to make scientific work freely available on the Internet, through open journals (like PLoS) and through researchers retaining copyright so they can put their articles on their own homepages and on sites like arXiv and aforementioned PubMed Central. This movement has gained a lot of momentum, and what is just starting to happen is that the people holding the pursestrap (like the National Institue of Health) want to start requiring that research they pay for published open access. Obviously, the publishers will do anything not to lose their sweet gig, hence the lobbyists all over capitol hill screaming censorship and government interference (both of which are completely ridiculous - I'm as libertarian as the next guy, but if the government pays for the science, it can say where you publish it).

2) If publishers are really contributing nothing to academic publishing, and just charge high prices and force you to sign away your rights (which I think is a fair characterization), here's a crazy idea: stop publishing through them! Set up your own journals and charge nothing or a token amount for access. If scientists are so bigoted they only deign to acknowledge work published in overpriced, unnecessary, exploitative publishers' journals, the problem is on the scientists' end.

That's why people have created PLOS. As a scientist, I can tell you that building a career only with public access journals is next to impossible, today. However public access journals/approaches are growing fast, so maybe in the future what you are suggesting will be entirely possible.

Scientific publishing has been a big business for some time. If scientists only wanted to publish their work then they would submit their papers to the Public Library of Science (PLOS) or to other free (of charge) publishing services. But they want fame, to advance their careers, and publishing in journals such as Cell, Science, or Nature is expensive; and access to scientific papers in those same journals is also expensive. But since scientists don't pay for those privileges out of their own pockets*, price doesn't seem to matter to them -- at least not as much as "fame".
____
*next time you donate to, say, a cancer research charity, remember that some of the money spent on "research" is actually spent on publishing articles in expensive journals

The type of peer-reviewed, open-access journals that people are suggesting already exist and are, from my understanding, quite good. See Public Library of Science, for example. The problem is that universities still see Science, etc. as the most respected place to publish. Which means that if someone wants to get hired by a university, he or she publishes in Science rather than PLoS. This is true despite the fact that the universities have been bitterly complaining about the ridiculous cost of licensing journals.

The open access model works as follows: "Open Access: Everything we publish is freely available online for you to read, download, copy, distribute, and use (with attribution) any way you wish." Pretty straight forward.

As an author you pay a small amount to support the publication of the journal - often smaller than the cost for color pages at a commercial journal, and then your work is freely available. These are high quality journals and are one important part of the free future of scientific publishing. The more people who make this choice, the more pressure there will be on the traditional journals to open up their content if they want to survive.

Well, academia of all places is expected to create this kind of controversy. Access to research paper is one of the most restricted information sources there is! Mostly because there really isnt a market share for people wanting to read about Health Effects Engineering or some other random technical issue. Meanwhile, the whole world is interested in illegally sharing the new Transformers movie, regardless of its quality.

Also, the fact that it was released under the CC license, does this limit his legal ability to sue? Is there case law to support the CC license as a legally-binding rule internationally?

You always have the option of submitting your paper to the PLoS if it follows the applicable guidelines.

Journals provide peer review. This is not paid for by govt. grant money.

Do you really want to go to a govt. database with tons of unreviewed research and try to figure out what is good and what is bs?

Unfortunately, the academic world I grew up believing in no longer really exists;

Check out http://www.plos.org/ for biology and medicine topics.

I love PLoS Biology, but it also costs $2500 to publish in it. Nature Precedings seems more intended for the sort of rapid-fire result publication which wouldn't be economical or feasible with an actual peer-reviewed journal.

Check out http://www.plos.org/ for biology and medicine topics.

I love PLoS Biology, but it also costs $2500 to publish in it. Nature Precedings seems more intended for the sort of rapid-fire result publication which wouldn't be economical or feasible with an actual peer-reviewed journal.

While it's certainly very nice that the big journals like Nature take steps towards offering Open Access to (some of) their material, it has already been a growing trend in certain research areas for the past, say, five years or so. I do research in the field of Bioinformatics/Molecular Biology and except for high-profile stuff that could go into Science or Nature, I simply will not publish anything in a journal that is not Open Access.

The journal being Open Access is of tremendous importance to the researcher as it makes it _much_ more likely, that your paper will actually be found and read by other scientists. I know this from my own literature searches: hits found the PubMed database links to the journal webpage, and if no Open Access version is available, it really have to look like a promising paper, before I spend my time ordering through the University Library.

Also, it should be noted that an ever increasing number of Open Access journal exists in the areas of Life Science in general - for example all the BMC journals, the PLoS journals and even journals from "old school" publishers such as Oxford University Press (e.g. Nucleic Acids Research) have gone Open Access. Also an increasing number of traditional journal now offer an Open Access option, where your pay to make your specific paper availably under Open Access.