Free Journals Grow Amid Ongoing Debate

PLoS founders Brown, Eisen, and Varmus. CREDIT: MARTY KATZ/WASHINGTONPHOTOGRAPHER.COM

From Jocelyn Kaiser in Science:

A decade ago, three U.S. biomedical scientists vowed to start a revolution in science publishing. They wanted to persuade publishers to share research papers normally available only to paying customers in a free online library. The trio threw their weight behind a radical idea: charge authors a fee, give them copyright, and post their peer-reviewed papers on the Internet immediately for anyone to read.

The scientists called their venture the Public Library of Science (PLoS), echoing a frustration among librarians over the escalating cost of journals. They argued that taxpayers shouldn’t have to buy subscriptions to see the results of research they had already paid for. Making the world’s research papers freely available would “vastly increase the accessibility and utility of the scientific literature, enhance scientific productivity,” and bring together disparate communities in biomedicine, wrote PLoS’s founders, including Harold Varmus, the former director of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) who now heads the National Cancer Institute.

Today, the so-called open-access movement is claiming success. Publishers big and small are producing hundreds of free-to-read, peer-reviewed online journals that charge authors fees ranging from about $500 to $3000 per paper. (By various measures, between 7% and 11% of the world’s peer-reviewed scientific journals are now open access.) The most prominent publisher, the nonprofit organization PLoS, launched its first journal in 2003. This year, PLoS is on track to make a small profit—a “landmark for PLoS, but also for open-access publishing as a whole,” testified Catherine Nancarrow, a managing editor of PLoS, at a U.S. congressional hearing last month.

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