Comment The real issues of PLoS (Score 1) 101
Unfortunately, being that money does not yet grow on trees, the money to publish in an open access journal such as PLoS Biology has to come from somewhere. If you look at the fine print of the great majority of journals, there will be a little statement about the publication qualifying as advertisement, because the author had to pay page charges. These charges come out of grant money, and major funding agencies such as the NIH, NSF, and Wellcome Trust have already approved publication charges for open access journals (which, by the way, your taxes paid for these agencies to fund the research to begin with). To then read the journal, you have to pay again. In fact, most of the comments out of the publishing community towards the PLoS journals insist that the $1500 charge is not nearly enough to cover the costs of publishing. Economics and career risk has been the largest concern with the survival of PLoS, not the peer review process.
With people such as Harold Varmus (Nobel Prize in Medicine 1989 "discovery of the cellular origin of retroviral oncogenes") and James Watson, and recruiting former editors of the high profile journal Cell the quality is not likely to be the greatest concern. Besides the economics of running an open access journal, many young scientists, whose careers are still in the making, would be hard pressed to give up the opportunity to publish in Nature or Science, to hold their "moral" ground and publish in PLoS. But it only takes a few to get the ball rolling... Pat Brown (one of the founders of PLoS) and several other authors names were removed from an article in the New England Journal of Medicine, because the journal edited out a sentence pertaining to access and retention of copyright. There were two good commentaries/news in the last two issues of Nature on the NEJM article and PLoS economics, however being that they were published in Nature (whose articles from fifty years ago are still kept closed access), you will have to pay to see them.( I think this will run you approximately $10-30 per article)
Here are the links for those of you who have access:
Nature:Open Access
NEJM fall out
With people such as Harold Varmus (Nobel Prize in Medicine 1989 "discovery of the cellular origin of retroviral oncogenes") and James Watson, and recruiting former editors of the high profile journal Cell the quality is not likely to be the greatest concern. Besides the economics of running an open access journal, many young scientists, whose careers are still in the making, would be hard pressed to give up the opportunity to publish in Nature or Science, to hold their "moral" ground and publish in PLoS. But it only takes a few to get the ball rolling... Pat Brown (one of the founders of PLoS) and several other authors names were removed from an article in the New England Journal of Medicine, because the journal edited out a sentence pertaining to access and retention of copyright. There were two good commentaries/news in the last two issues of Nature on the NEJM article and PLoS economics, however being that they were published in Nature (whose articles from fifty years ago are still kept closed access), you will have to pay to see them.( I think this will run you approximately $10-30 per article)
Here are the links for those of you who have access:
Nature:Open Access
NEJM fall out
