...Since 2003, we’ve shown the world what high-quality open access journals can achieve. Now we’re ready to shake things up again and we’re involving the scientific community like never before.
Thanks to widespread media and blogosphere coverage, more scientists than we’d ever imagined are aware that we are about to launch PLoS ONE. That’s fine with us - in the words of Oscar Wilde “the only thing worse than being talked about is not being talked about”.
As we are about to release the beta version of this site, we want to acknowledge the inherent challenges of the project and the philosophy that compels us to confront them.
We want to speed up scientific progress and believe that scientific debate is as important as the experimentation itself. PLoS ONE is a forum where research can be both published and discussed – we are launching it in beta so that the whole scientific community can help us to develop it further.
Everything about PLoS ONE is new: the platform, the software, the user interface, the production workflow, the peer-review strategy, the author experience - the development cycle has been intense in order to launch it as soon as possible.
Why did we put ourselves through this? So that we can launch PLoS ONE with its core web 2.0 features at the earliest opportunity. We invite the research community to give us feedback and help us to develop new features.
What makes the site beta? Not the content, which consists solely of quality, peer-reviewed research from hundreds of authors across a diverse range of scientific disciplines. Rather, it’s the tools and functionality surrounding these papers that will be continually refined and developed in response to user feedback....
Posted by
Peter Suber at 12/20/2006 01:41:00 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.
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.
