Two New PLoS Journals Launched

Shipud writes "The Public Library of Science journal series is expanding. After PLoS biology and PLoS Medicine we are now getting a geek's favorite: PLoS Computational Biology. Another addition is PLoS Genetics. Both are published open-access under the creative commons license. A history of open access licence publications in science can be found here."

Comments

Note on price

[Daniel Dvorkin]

As a grad student, for financial reasons I'd given up on the idea of publishing in open-access journals until I get my Ph.D., and hopefully a position at a university that would pay the publication fees. I'm a strong believer in the open-access models, but the fact that traditional subscription journals don't charge authors is a real point in their favor. (NB: I'm also a fiction author, and in the fiction world, you should never ever ever pay a publisher to publish your work. EVER. But academic publishing has always worked by different rules.) However, maybe I wasn't reading the fine print carefully enough; PLoS Comp. Bio. has this to say:

Authors are asked to pay $1500 upon acceptance of their article, to help defray the costs of publication (see the FAQs on publication fees). However, if you have insufficient funds to cover this payment, we allow payment of whatever amount you can afford or waive the charge entirely if necessary. Inability to pay never influences the decision of whether to publish a paper.

That's a good start. Ideally, I'd like to see a formal multi-level pricing structure: some nominal fee for grad students, with progressively higher fees for faculty at various levels, and corporate authors. But it does assuage some of my fears about the open-access publishing model in general.

Re:Note on price

[Idarubicin]

As a grad student, for financial reasons I'd given up on the idea of publishing in open-access journals until I get my Ph.D., and hopefully a position at a university that would pay the publication fees. I'm a strong believer in the open-access models, but the fact that traditional subscription journals don't charge authors is a real point in their favor.

For what it's worth, all of the PLoS journals will waive the $1500 publication fee for authors who cannot afford it. It also sounds like a good chunk of money, but for just about any biological or medical lab, it's pretty small potatoes. Cost may be more of an issue if and when PLoS launches journals in other fields.

Meanwhile, it should be noted that some closed-access journals do charge for publication, in the form of page or colour charges.

Ideally, I'd like to see a formal multi-level pricing structure: some nominal fee for grad students, with progressively higher fees for faculty at various levels, and corporate authors.

Once again, this may be more of a concern later, but it's very rare for someone not affiliated with either a university or a corporation to publish in the existing PLoS journals. Relatively few graduate students will publish works without at least a faculty supervisor's name on the paper, too. Besides, the $1500 probably is reasonable for defraying PLoS' costs; it's not meant to be a progressive taxation system. As long as they are willing to waive or reduce fees according to the author's financial circumstances, then a formal schedule of fees probably isn't necessary.