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 ;)"

Comments

This is really really important.

[Tom7]

The PLoS is really important. More important than "open source", and it should be on the front page of slashdot.

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 .

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 .

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.