Open Access News

"We started [PLoS] because we were outraged at the system," Michael Eisen told me last week. A biologist at UC Berkeley and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Eisen is co-founder, with Patrick O. Brown of Stanford University and former NIH director Harold E. Varmus, of the Public Library of Science, which publishes five journals of peer-reviewed scientific papers and has plans for many more. As its name implies, PLoS runs on the principle that the findings of scientific researchers should be openly accessible to all, not deposited in journals whose subscription fees can run to thousands of dollars a year....The idea is not chiefly to save money for universities at the expense of faculty members - indeed, for universities with large faculties, the new model may be more costly than the old. The real goal is to wrest research copyrights from journal publishers; when researchers are paying for publication, they, not the publishers, retain control of their papers. Eisen argues that PLoS eliminates many absurdities of traditional scientific publishing, in which a foundation or institution that might spend millions of dollars on a research project must turn its results over to a publisher gratis (scientific journals normally don't pay for articles) and then spend more money to read the findings. It also takes better advantage of the Internet, which has rendered obsolescent the paper publishing process that gave rise to the subscription model....The established scientific press, which includes giant profit-making corporations such as Reed Elsevier as well as not-for-profit institutions such as the American Assn. for the Advancement of Science (publisher of the journal Science), was arguing that subscriptions were the only way to pay for the rigorous peer review and production values that gave their publications credibility. "We knew we'd have to launch prestigious journals to prove that open access and high quality could be synonymous," Eisen says. PLoS Biology, their first journal, began publishing in October 2003. Once PLoS emerged as a potential competitor, Eisen says, publishers started to take open access seriously. Some agreed to make more material available publicly, generally after a delay of six months or longer. But they also mounted a sharp attack on the very principle of open access. There have been studies with titles such as "The Erroneous Premise of Open-Access Advocates," publicity campaigns aimed at science reporters, and lobbying about the dark side of government-maintained research repositories.