Misconceptions in article (Score 1)

The article itself and the write-up are both wrong to say that "only Genome Biology and PubMed Central" have accepted the terms of the PLOS.

• PubMed Central is a repository of papers that are published in journals. It's an NIH (US government) initiative to ensure that electronic science articles are archived permanently. It's not a journal in its own right so it doesn't really make sense to talk about it accepting their terms.
• Genome Biology is one of many journals published under the BioMed Central banner which makes primary research articles freely available online. Copyright is retained by the author. Articles are indexed in PubMed, archived in PubMed Central and metadata is harvestable through the Open Archives Initiative Protocol. There are over 40 BMC journals.

Of course, the costs of processing text and organising peer review need to be covered somehow. BMC plan to charge for non-primary content (e.g. review articles) and we are considering introducing a fee for publication (which would be waived for scientists with limited funds). The cost to the biomedical community of funding research communication by this type of fee would be an order of magnitude less than the current model of charging for access to published work.

The big advantage of making science articles open-access is that indexing is made a lot easier. A biological version of ResearchIndex (aka citeseer) would become possible. Also, you can find open-access research using Google and you don't need to be in an institution with expensive subscriptions to journals to read it.