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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 ;)"
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.
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.
The PLoS is really important. More important than "open source", and it should be on the front page of slashdot.
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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.
The launching of PLoS Biology -- http://www.plosbiology.org/-- an outcome of Harold Varmus's highly influential 1999 Ebiomed Proposal -- http://www.nih.gov/about/director/ebiomed/ebiomed. htm -- is a very important event for research and researchers, for two reasons:
(1) It is another step forward in providing open access to peer-reviewed research, a major step.
(2) It both demonstrates and will further stimulate the research community's growing consciousness of both the need for open access and the possibility of attaining it.
It is all the more important, therefore, that on this auspicious occasion for the open-access publication strategy (BOAI-2) we not forget or neglect the other, complementary open-access strategy, open-access self-archiving (BOAI-1) --http://www.soros.org/openaccess/read.shtml -- particularly because systematically supplementing BOAI-2 with BOAI-1 has the power to bring us so much more open-access, so much more quickly.
A KEY-STROKE KOAN FOR OUR OPEN-ACCESS TIMES
Here is an extremely conservative calculation that will give you an (I hope unforgettable) intuition for the importance of not neglecting the other road to open access:
If, in addition to signing the PLoS open letter (pledging to boycott toll-access publishers unless they become open-access publishers http://www.plos.org/support/openletter.shtml), not even all the 30,000 PLoS signatories had self-archived not even all their own toll-access articles, nor even the 55% corresponding to the proportion of blue/green (self-archiving-friendly) toll-access journals -- http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Temp/rcoptable. gif-- but only the 18% of signatories corresponding to the proportion of postprint-green journals had self-archived just one of the articles they had published in just one of those toll-access journals, the resulting 5400 articles that had been made openly accessible by this act would still have been 5 times as many as PLoS Biology will publish in 5 years (1200 articles, assuming 20 articles per PLoS issue at $1500 a pop). And at the cost of only a few keystrokes more than what it cost to sign the petition.
Yet all researchers did was sign the PLoS open letter, and then wait, passively, for toll-access journals to turn into open-access journals in response to the petition. And now researchers seem ready to wait yet again, passively, with the popular press now cheering from the sidelines, for more open-access journals like PLoS Biology to be created or converted, one by one.
As we make our estimate less conservative and arbitrary, and scale it up first to 55% of all annual biology articles, and then beyond that, to the many journals that will support self-archiving if asked, I hope the scales will at last begin to drop from the eyes of those who have not yet noticed the tunnel vision and paralysis involved in focusing only on open-access publishing, when it is *open access* that is our target.
And perhaps then we will be less surprised that the 23,500 toll-access publishers did not take our boycott threat seriously -- and, by the same token, that they still have no reason to take the handful of open-access journals created since the beginning of the '90s (of which PLoS Biology is about the 543rd) seriously -- if that's all we're prepared to do to demonstrate our need for and commitment to open access for our research, as we just keep sitting on our hands instead o
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.