Open Access News

News from the open access movement


Tuesday, October 28, 2008

Happy birthday, PLoS Biology

Theodora Bloom and eight co-authors, PLoS Biology at 5: The Future Is Open Access, PLoS Biology, October 28, 2008.  Excerpt:

On the 13th of October in 2003, with the first issue of PLoS Biology, the Public Library of Science realized its transformation from a grassroots organization of scientists to a publisher. Our fledgling website received over a million hits within its first hour, and major international newspapers and news outlets ran stories about the journal, about science communication in general, and about our founders —working scientists who had the temerity to take on the traditional publishing world and who pledged to lead a revolution in scholarly communication....Not all of the reactions were positive, of course, especially from those in the scientific publishing sector with a vested interest in maintaining the subscription-based system of journal publishing. But thanks in no small part to the efforts of the founders —Pat Brown, Mike Eisen, and Harold Varmus— and an editorial team that included a former editor of Cell and several from Nature, our call for scientists to join the open-access revolution...did not go unheeded. Five years on, the publishing landscape has changed radically. How much have PLoS Biology and PLoS contributed to that change and what might the future hold for us and for publishing?

PLoS Biology is the flagship journal that gave PLoS its initial credibility as a publisher....

The past five years have seen fundamental changes in the publishing infrastructure....

It is not possible to measure PLoS Biology's or even PLoS's contribution to all this change. We are now a small part of a much larger movement....

The next challenge—for PLoS Biology, for PLoS and for all open-access publishers—is to demonstrate the utility of open access in advancing science beyond what can be gained from just making the information publicly available to read. The biggest misconception about open access is that it's only about putting online what was in print and removing any toll for access. It's not: it's about having the freedom to reuse that material without restriction....Open-access publishing is therefore a crucial catalyst for a genuine shift in the way we use and mine the literature and integrate it with databases and other means of scientific communication....

As for the journal itself, PLoS Biology's key goal remains essentially the same as it was for our first issue; to attract and publish outstanding papers in the broad field of biology. Our founders laid it out in their 2003 editorial. “With all that is at stake in the choice of a journal in which to publish—career advancement, grant support, attracting good students and fellows—scientists who believe in the principle of open access and wish to support it are confronted with a difficult dilemma.” This challenge remains the case today because most open-access journals —even PLoS Biology— are still new and lack the prestige of established toll-access journals...And, as Peter Suber notes, “it will take time for OA journals to earn prestige in proportion to their quality” ....

Those of us who have taken part in the open-access scientific revolution can feel proud: open access has come far. But we must not be complacent. Most scientific publications still remain behind a subscription or other access barrier. For those who have not yet taken part, there is still time to help change the system. Commit to making your research-related publications open access by publishing in open-access journals and archiving your existing papers in publicly available digital repositories. It is not just the future —but your future— that is open access.