Public Library of Science

Public Library of Science
URL PLoS.org
Commercial? No
Type of site Science
Available language(s) English
Launched 2001
Alexa rank 56,521 (January 2012)[1]
Current status Online

The Public Library of Science (PLoS) is a nonprofit open-access scientific publishing project aimed at creating a library of open access journals and other scientific literature under an open content license. It launched its first journal, PLoS Biology, in October 2003 and publishes seven journals, all peer reviewed, as of May 2009.

Contents

History

The Public Library of Science began in early 2001 as an online petition initiative by Patrick O. Brown, a biochemist at Stanford University, and Michael Eisen, a computational biologist at the University of California, Berkeley, and the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. The petition called for all scientists to pledge that from September 2001 they would discontinue submission of papers to journals which did not make the full-text of their papers available to all, free and unfettered, either immediately or after a delay of several months. Some now do this immediately, as open access journals, such as the BioMed Central stable of journals, or after a six-month period from publication, as what are now known as delayed open access journals, and some after 6 months or less, such as the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Many others continue to rely on self-archiving.

Joined by Nobel Prize winner and former National Institutes of Health director Harold Varmus, the PLoS organizers next turned their attention to starting their own journal, along the lines of the UK-based BioMed Central, which has been publishing open-access scientific papers in the biological sciences in journals such as Genome Biology and the Journal of Biology since late 1999.

As a publishing company, the Public Library of Science began full operation on October 13, 2003, with the publication of a peer-reviewed print and online scientific journal entitled PLoS Biology, and has since launched seven more peer-reviewed journals. One, PLoS Clinical Trials, has since been merged into PLoS ONE. Following the merger, the company started the PLoS Hub for Clinical Trials to collect journal articles published in any PLoS journal and relating to clinical trials.

The PLoS journals are what it describes as "open access content"; all content is published under the Creative Commons "attribution" license (Lawrence Lessig, of Creative Commons, is also a member of the Advisory Board). The project states (quoting the Budapest Open Access Initiative) that: "The only constraint on reproduction and distribution, and the only role for copyright in this domain, should be to give authors control over the integrity of their work and the right to be properly acknowledged and cited."

Business model

To fund the journal, PLoS charges a publication fee to be paid by the author or the author's employer or funder. In the United States, institutions such as the National Institutes of Health and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute have pledged that recipients of their grants will be allocated funds to cover such author charges. PLoS was launched with grants totalling US$13 million from the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation and the Sandler Family Supporting Foundation.[2] It still relies heavily on donations from foundations to cover the majority of its operating costs.

Impact

The initiatives of the Public Library of Science in the United States have initiated similar proposals in Europe, most notably the "Berlin Declaration" developed by the German Max Planck Society, which has also pledged grant support for author charges (see also the “Budapest Open Access Initiative”).

Publications

(all ISSNs are "eISSNs" for the electronic edition)

See also

Footnotes

  1. ^ "Plos.org Site Info". Alexa Internet. http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/plos.org. Retrieved 2012-01-02. 
  2. ^ Declan Butler (June 2006). "Open-access journal hits rocky times". Nature 441 (7096): 914. doi:10.1038/441914a. PMID 16791161. http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v441/n7096/full/441914a.html. 
  3. ^ Welcome to PLoS Currents: Influenza

References

External links

Public Library of Science
Organizers:
Journals: