We've known since March 16 that Pat Brown, Mike Eisen, and Harold Varmus --the founders of PLoS-- had won the 2004 Wired Magazine Rave Award in the category of science. But now the April issue of Wired has come out with a write-up of winners in each category. Excerpt from Ted Greenwald's article on PLoS, For cracking the spine of the science cartel: "If science is a search for universal laws of nature, why do scientific journals copyright the papers they publish and charge as much as $20,000 a year for a subscription? 'It's insane that the scientific community has allowed publishers to limit the impact of our research,' says UC Berkeley geneticist Michael Eisen. Starting in the late '90s, Eisen and two of his colleagues, Stanford molecular biologist Patrick Brown and Nobel Prize-winning oncologist Harold Varmus, tried to work with traditional publishers to make research more widely available on the Web, but the publishers wouldn't cooperate. So the three scientists devised an end run: the Public Library of Science. In October 2003, PLoS published [its] first open source, peer-reviewed journal, PLoS Biology."
Posted by
Peter Suber at 3/26/2004 09:05:00 AM.
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.
I recommend the OA tracking project (OATP) as the best way to stay on top of new OA developments. You can read the OATP feed on a blog-like web page or subscribe to it by RSS, email, or Twitter. You can also help build the feed by tagging new developments you encounter.
