1. The Public Library of Science (PLoS) Why it is a Model to be Emulated Philip E. Bourne University of California San Diego [email_address] www.sdsc.edu/pb
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8. The journals crisis Journal prices CPI/inflation Journals purchased Source: Association of Research Libraries
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10. Sources of Funding Publishing is the final step in a research project Researcher Publisher Reader £ Public Digital Library Gov Funders Charity Business Institutions £
24. PLoS Founding Board of Directors Harold Varmus PLoS Co-founder Nobel Laureate, Director NCI Patrick O. Brown PLoS Co-founder Howard Hughes Medical Institute & Stanford University School of Medicine Michael B. Eisen PLoS Co-founder Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory & University of California at Berkeley
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27. PLoS Biology October, 2003 PLoS Medicine October, 2004 PLoS Community Journals June-September, 2005 & October, 2007 (NTDs) PLoS ONE December, 2006 “ a very large compendium of papers that have been vetted for scientific quality, but which will not be confined in terms of their likely importance." Harold Varmus, Oct 2005 on PLoS ONE IF ~12 $$$ IF 5-10 $$ IF ~4 $
28. PLoS ONE is the first so-called “ mega journal ”
45. What Does That Mean? The “Publisher” becomes Part of the Scientific Workflow Scientist Idea Experiment Data Conclusions Publish Laboratory Publisher Maybe The Line is Somewhere Else? UKSG 2011 uzar.wordpress.com
46. Maybe The Line is Somewhere Else? Scientist Idea Experiment Data Conclusions Publish Laboratory Publisher Institution? Lab Notebook UKSG 2011 ?
47. Maybe The Line is Somewhere Else? Scientist Idea Experiment Data Conclusions Publish Laboratory Publisher Institution? Lab Notebook UKSG 2011 ?
Specifically, our aim is to achieve open access to the literature, whereby journal articles are freely available immediately upon publication their use is unrestricted, so that readers can download, print off, reanalyse, extract data and so on authors retain the copyright, and specifically the right to be appropriately cited papers are also deposited separately from the publisher in a public online archive (PMC)
This illustrates one aspect of the frustration with the existing system From 1986- 2002 journals increased in price over 200%, and library purchasing has been struggling just to maintain the status quo. Commercially STM pubishing is a huge success story. But many commentators have now asserted that this commercial success has been achieved at the expense of the scientific community, and only those in rich institutions can afford access. And that this position is unsustainable - we are heading for a meltdown.
In my penulimate slide I ’d just like to emphasize that the RCUK proposal resonates with many other related initiatives that are supporting open access internationally. In Europe there is the Berlin Declaration, which has been signed by major funders such as the DFG in Germany, INSERM, CNRS in France. Amongst other things the signatories support the kind of licensing that I mentioned in the previous slide. Redistribution for any purpose subject only to the condition of proper attribution The NIH has a proposal to increase access to the literature, and has invested a great deal in the establishment of PubMed Central, which provides powerful full text searching across published literature, and is committed to long term archiving, interoperability with other repositories, and public access. We strongly encourage the initiative to develop a similar full text archive in collaboration with the BL. Finally, more broadly still the UN ’s World Summit on the Information Society strongly endorses open access publishing.
As you know, the way in which OA journals are financed is by a publication fee, paid for by the same organizations that currently fund subscription journals. As stated in the RCUK draft policy, the costs of communication and dissemination are an integral part of the costs of research itself the challenge is to reroute the funds that currently support publishing towards researchers, so that they are able to pay publication fees.
Harold Varmus, Pat Brown and Mike Eisen established the Public Library of Science, initially as a sort of pressure group whose aim was to force publishers to change their ways.
Initially, they circulated an open letter urging publishers to deposit research literature in freely accessible databases, 6 months after publication. In many people ’s eyes this was seen as a naïve proposal, but it generated massive support in the community. The upshot was that some publishers did alter their policies - notably the society and non profit publishers - but the vast bulk of the literature remained accessible only to subscribers. The reason was simply that researchers had nowhere else to go with their papers - but the level of support indicated that it was the right time to launch journals based on a new business model - open access. And in December last year, Harold, Pat and Mike secured funding from the Moore foundation to the tune of 9 million dollars.