PLoS One

Well, PLoS (The Public Library of Science) has announced a new publishing venture called PLoS One.

For those who do not know, PLoS was started a few years ago by a group of scientists (incuding my brother) with the goal of opening up access to scientific literature. For non scientists it may be surprising to find out that scientific and medical research is usually published in journals which are very expensive to purchase. Thus though the research is supposed to be for the benefit of humaninty, it turns out that one of the primary benefits goes to a few companies and societies that publish the journals. Amazingly, even though the journals frequently do little other than repackage papers written by scientists, they not only make enormous amounts of money off of this, they somehow get the copyright to the papers. In general, these journals are a massive roadblock to scientific and medical discovery.

PLoS started a few journals a few years ago to try and provide alternatives to the standard model. These journals are "Open Access" and thus much better for the world. What PLoS has done better than others attempting to make scientific literature open acces is to show that one can publish a very high quality journal that is still free to all (e.g., PLoS Biology).

Now PLoS has announced a completely new way to publish scientific literature. Called PLoS One this seems like a strong attemp to bring scientific publishing into the 21st century. Among the "features" they say will be there are much more rapid publication, publication of all science (with the only criteria being that it is validated by peer review - no restrictions will be made to force the publication to be radically novel) and development of an online community around the publications.

Stay tuned --- we will have to see how it works out but the initial impression I have is that it sounds quite nice.