Eli Kintish, New publishing method aims at greater access, St. Louis Post-Dispatch, December 20, 2003. Excerpt: "Top science journals cost subscribers thousands of dollars each year. That's a travesty for taxpayers who foot the research bill, say supporters of so-called 'open access' publishing....'The American taxpayer spends $50 billion on medical research and then they cannot read the papers that come out of it,' said biologist Michael Eisen of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. Eisen is cofounder of PLoS, which is shaking up the publishing world with its free-for-all attitude. Like other top-flight journals, it employs expert editors and each paper is reviewed carefully by scientists before publication. Instead of selling subscriptions to readers, PLoS pays its bills by charging authors a $1,500 fee for publishing their papers. Other so-called 'open access' journals use a similar system. University librarians say that they would much rather pay publication fees for papers their researchers write than for journal subscriptions."
Posted by
Peter Suber at 12/20/2003 04:47:00 PM.
The open access movement:
Putting peer-reviewed scientific and scholarly literature
on the internet. Making it available free of charge and
free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.
Removing the barriers to serious research.
