Public Library of Science - Open Access

Max Planck Society covers publication fees for PLoS journals

Mark Patterson — Thu, 21 Aug 2008 07:44:04 -0700

PLoS and the Max Planck Society (MPS) have recently established an agreement whereby open access publication fees in PLoS journals will be paid directly by the MPS for articles from researchers at Max Planck Institutes.

The MPS is one of the world’s leading research organizations whose researchers have an international reputation for scientific excellence. We are delighted to be collaborating with the MPS in this way so that more MPS researchers will be encouraged to publish their work in PLoS journals, and to promote open access to research literature more broadly. For papers accepted in PLoS journals after July 1st, 2008, MPS will pay the publication fee directly to PLoS for all articles where the corresponding author is affiliated with a Max Planck Institute.

In 2003 MPS was the co-initiator of the Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge in the Sciences and Humanities and ever since then, MPS has demonstrated consistent and strong leadership in the promotion of open access to research results.

With the ever-expanding range of open access options available to authors, we encourage other research funders to set up funds to cover publication fees in open access journals or to include such expenses within their grants and research awards.

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Max Planck Society covers publication fees for PLoS journal

from Coffee and Sci(ence) on Fri, 2008-08-22 05:43

That’s a quite clever move. I wonder how other research organizations will do in the near future.One can always dream to get a cherry at the top of his grant to decorate the publish milestone.

Max Planck Society covers publication fees for PLoS...

2007 Impact factors for PLoS Journals

Mark Patterson — Wed, 18 Jun 2008 05:57:13 -0700

The latest impact factors (for 2007) have just been released from Thomson Reuters. They are as follows:
PLoS Biology - 13.5
PLoS Medicine - 12.6
PLoS Computational Biology - 6.2
PLoS Genetics - 8.7
PLoS Pathogens - 9.3

As we and others have frequently pointed out, impact factors should be interpreted with caution and only as one of a number of measures which provide insight into a journal’s, or rather its articles’, impact. Nevertheless, the 2007 figures for PLoS Biology and PLoS Medicine are consistent with the many other indicators (e.g. submission volume, web statistics, reader and community feedback) that these journals are firmly established as top-flight open-access general interest journals in the life and health sciences respectively.

The increases in the impact factors for the discipline-based, community-run PLoS journals also tally with indicators that these journals are going from strength to strength. For example, submissions to PLoS Computational Biology, PLoS Genetics and PLoS Pathogens have almost doubled over the past year - each journal now routinely receives 80-120 submissions per month of which around 20-25 are published. The hard work and commitment of the Editors-in-Chief and the Editorial Boards (here, here and here) are setting the highest possible standards for community-run open-access journals.

Another measure of impact is media coverage, and all of our journals routinely attract substantial media attention, which reflects the importance and public interest of much of the work that is published. Witness for example coverage of the recent research article about anti-depressants in PLoS Medicine. And our two newest journals, PLoS Neglected Tropical Diseases and PLoS ONE, are no strangers to the world’s media (see the recent coverage of a PLoS ONE paper about pterosaurs). We provide regular digests of this media coverage both in traditional media and the blogosphere, via the ‘In the news’ channel of the PLoS blog.

Although Thomson is yet to index our two youngest journals, other indexing databases are. The subscription-only Scopus citation index (owned by Elsevier and, incidentally, including many more journals than Thomson’s offering) is already covering PLoS ONE (though so far, only as far back as June 2007). But authors don’t need to rely on subscription-only indexes such as those owned by Thomson and Elsevier, and can instead use the freely-available Google Scholar. Using Google Scholar, for example, one can find that the article by Neal Fahlgren and coauthors, about the cataloguing of an important class of RNA in plants and one of the most highly cited PLoS ONE articles so far has been cited 42 times - strong evidence that good research, even if published in a new journal, will rapidly find its place in the scientific record when it’s made freely available to all.

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Le marché du mardi, n°15

from Marlene's corner on Thu, 2008-07-03 07:55

TECHNO
- On connaissait les outils pour raccourcir les urls (type TinyURL), voici un outil pour raccourcir les textes : TinyPaste réduit un texte en une url (courte).
- Transformer son blog (ou n'importe quel fil rss) en un joli document pdf pour le...

Is PLoS Coming of Age?

from Greg Laden's Blog on Wed, 2008-07-02 18:12

Heavyweight science journalist Sir Delcan Butler has published an update, of sorts, on the status of the Public Library of Science (PLoS), published today in the journal Nature.* In it, he presents a study carried out by Nature on the financial status ...

Impact Factors 2007

from A Blog Around The Clock on Wed, 2008-06-18 11:24

If anyone is interested, Thompson has just released the new Impact Factors for scientific journals. Mark Patterson takes a look at IFs for PLoS journals and puts them in cool-headed perspective. One day, hopefully very soon, this will not be...

Historical Open Access

Bora Zivkovic — Wed, 11 Jun 2008 13:07:25 -0700

More and more societies are compiling their 'classical' papers. Here is another one. And here I wrote, among else:

"In discussions of Open Access, we always focus on brand new papers and how to make them freely available for readers around the world as well as for people who want to mine and reanalyse the data using robots. But we almost never discuss the need to make the old stuff available. Yet we often lament that nobody reads or cites anything older than five years. Spending several years reading everything published in the field in the 20th century up until about 1995 (as well as some 19th century stuff) helped me greatly in my own research. It would help others, I'm sure, especially those who are now revisiting old questions with new techniques. How are the classical papers going to be made available for today's students?

SRBR is working on it now, and I assume that this will be done piece-meal, with each society doing their own work on making old literature available. What I saw (not yet available for public) is a development of a ChronoHistory website. Yes, people will send in pictures and anecdotes and old posters and stuff (and I hope once that material is online that SRBR will get a professional historian of science to make sense of it all), but the most important part of the site will be a repository of the old papers. Services of a real science librarian have been secured to deal with everything from copyright to technical problems in order to provide copies of many old papers on the site. Probably some of the papers will be available to everyone for free while others, due to copyright, may be available only to SRBR members with a password."

I discussed this with Peter Suber and he says that we tend to focus on new literature because it's the low-hanging fruit. Yet he agrees that 'OA to past literature is highly desirable and that we should start thinking about ways to make it happen'. He wrote an article describing a *partial* solution to this problem: Unbinding Knowledge: A proposal for providing open access to past research articles, starting with the most important.

Peter says: "Ultimately we need all peer-reviewed journals to digitize their backfiles for OA. Some are already doing it. Some are digitizing their backfiles but charging for access. Some can't afford to digitize their backfiles at all."

Google is willing to digitize the backfile of any journal. Peter blogged about it in December 2006, although Google still doesn't have a web page for the program. The Google deal isn't very good. But for journals that can't find any other funds to digitize their backfile, Peter thinks it's better than nothing. Google does not have a website for this, but see this interview (this August 2007 interview - via):

Representing another effort to reach currently inaccessible content, Google Scholar now has its own digitization program. "It's a small program," said Acharya. "We mainly look for journals that would otherwise never get digitized. Under our proposal, we will digitize and host journal articles with the provision that they must be openly reachable in collaboration with publishers, fully downloadable, and fully readable. Once you get out of the U.S. and Western European space into the rest of the world, the opportunities to get and digitize research are very limited. They are often grateful for the help. It gives us the opportunity to get that country's material or make that scholarly society more visible."

Peter also said (personal communication): "As far as I know, the Open Content Alliance doesn't (yet) digitize journals, but I hope it will start. However, when Google digitizes print literature it pays all the costs (and slightly restricts use of the results); but when OCA digitizes print lit, it requires the possessor or a donor to pay the costs (and provides full OA to the results)."

What do you all think? What is your Society doing about this, you favourite Journals?

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Open Students

Bora Zivkovic — Tue, 5 Feb 2008 18:33:28 -0800

Open Students is a new blog for students about open access to research. It is run by Gavin Baker (who also recently joined Peter Suber at Open Access News - Congratulations!) and sponsored by SPARC, the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition, as part of its student outreach activities.

The blog will cover the issues of Open Science as it affects the college students and will have frequent guest-bloggers (students, librarians, researchers, publishers...) - of which you can be one if you contact Gavin.

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Guest Blog: Sign the Cape Town Open Education Declaration and Unlock the Promise of Open Educational Resources

Donna Okubo — Wed, 23 Jan 2008 08:49:41 -0800

PLoS invited David Wiley of the USU Center for Open and Sustainable Learning to report on the Cape Town Open Education Declaration.

The Cape Town Declaration on Open Education, which advocates the adoption of open access and open source principles in education, launched on January 22, 2008. The declaration enlarges the idea of open access to scholarly works familiar to PLoS readers in two important ways. First, it increases the scope of material covered to include educational materials like textbooks, lesson plans, lecture notes, and simulations. Second, "open educational resources," as they are called, are licensed so as to permit adaptation, translation, and other changes necessary to support learning in the local context.

According to the declaration, "This emerging open education movement combines the established tradition of sharing good ideas with fellow educators and the collaborative, interactive culture of the Internet. It is built on the belief that everyone should have the freedom to use, customize, improve and redistribute educational resources without constraint. Educators, learners and others who share this belief are gathering together as part of a worldwide effort to make education both more accessible and more effective."

The declaration includes a number of specific recommendations, including one that states, "taxpayer-funded educational resources should be open." This type of language should be familiar to PLoS readers in the context of recent open access mandates from the NIH and European Research Council. We're working hard to see our recommendations succeed on the same scale and would appreciate your support.

The declaration calls on educators, learners, and policy makers to increase participation in the open sharing of educational materials, and has already been signed by over 500 people, including Sir John Daniel, President of the Commonwealth of Learning; Thomas Alexander, former Director for Education at the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development; Peter Gabriel, musician and founder of Real World Studios; Lawrence Lessig, founder and CEO of Creative Commons; and Jimmy Wales of Wikipedia and Wikia.

Please sign the declaration and support our efforts to extend access to educational opportunity to everyone.

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Open Access Textbooks

from Medical Illustration Studio Blog on Tue, 2008-04-01 12:11

PLoS guest blogger David Wiley from the USU Center for Open And Sustainable Learning, reported on the Cape Town Open Education Declaration. It calls for the increased availability and open access of taxpayer-funded educational material, including ...

Open Education Declaration

from A Blog Around The Clock on Wed, 2008-01-23 13:27

On the heels of David Warlick's session on using online tools in the science classroom, this initiative is really exciting: Teachers, Students, Web Gurus, and Foundations Launch Campaign to Transform Education, Call for Free, Adaptable Learning Materia...

Open access mandates from the National Institutes of Health and the European Research Council

Mark Patterson — Mon, 14 Jan 2008 03:29:56 -0800

On January 11th, the NIH announced their new public access policy, which has now been strengthened to a mandate as required by the appropriations bill signed by President Bush in December.

The new NIH policy requires all NIH-funded research articles to be deposited into PubMed Central (PMC) and to be made publicly available within 12 months of the official date of publication. Articles must be submitted to PMC upon acceptance for publication. The policy comes into effect on April 7th this year.

The NIH has produced an extensive and very informative FAQ page, which indicates amongst other things that an estimated 80,000 articles will be published each year as a result of NIH funding – and public access to these articles is now assured (albeit after a delay). In another FAQ, it is stated that the NIH will reimburse publication fees, which also helps to reduce any financial burden on authors who wish to publish in open access journals such as those of PLoS. And publishing in such journals is of course an easy way to comply with the NIH policy – we automatically deposit all articles accepted in PLoS journals into PMC, where they are also publicly available immediately upon publication.

While all this activity has been taking place in the United States, another significant development has happened in Europe. On January 10th, the European Research Council (ERC) issued a new position statement on open access. The ERC is also now mandating public access, and requires "all peer-reviewed publications from ERC-funded research projects [to] be deposited on publication into an appropriate research repository…, and subsequently made Open Access within 6 months of publication". As pointed out by Peter Suber, the ERC has also indicated that it will cover publication fees in open access journals. The ERC is responsible for around €7.5 billion of the Framework Programme 7 which will be supporting research activity in Europe from 2007-2013.

With these positive developments in the US and Europe, that’s a pretty good start to 2008.

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Public Access to Research Funded by National Institutes of Health – Now Law

Mark Patterson — Fri, 28 Dec 2007 09:58:31 -0800

On Dec 26th, 2007, President Bush signed the Bill that requires all NIH-funded research to be made available to the public.

This is wonderful news. The NIH funds research to the tune of $29billion, and all of the published output of this work will now be freely and publicly available within 12 months of publication. In practical terms, this means that any researcher funded by the NIH has to ensure that their papers are deposited at the NIH-funded digital archive called PubMed Central, and are released to the public within 12 months.

One of the most effective ways to comply with this new requirement is for researchers to publish their work in fully open access journals such as those of PLoS. As part of the service we provide to authors, we deposit every article in PubMed Central so that it can be a part of this evolving and important online archive. And this happens as soon as the article is published – so that anyone with an interest in the work can immediately read it and build on it.

Many individuals and organizations have worked very hard to help make the new law happen – none harder than the great people at SPARC and the Alliance for Taxpayer access. You can read the ATA press release here, look at some of the reaction in the blogosphere here, and read a terrific summary of the background to the whole story in recent issues of Peter Suber’s newsletter (in November and December).

There’s still a way to go before we get close to the goal that inspired visionaries such as Harold Varmus, chairman of the PLoS Board of Directors, who envisions comprehensive, unfettered access to research literature coupled with new tools and mechanisms for knowledge mining and discovery. But the new law in the US is a very significant step in the right direction. Happy New Year!

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Using trade law to break publishing monopolies

Gavin Yamey — Fri, 5 Oct 2007 08:51:25 -0700

Last Tuesday, I gave a talk at Stanford University to students and faculty about neglected tropical diseases, and I discussed the enormous difficulty that researchers in endemic countries face in accessing health research literature.

In the discussion session after the talk, an audience member (who was a former drug company rep) offered a fascinating suggestion. The audience member was Shahram Ahari MPH, co-author of a recent PLoS Medicine paper called "Following the Script: How Drug Reps Make Friends and Influence Doctors" (you can watch a video of Shahram discussing his experiences as an Eli Lilly rep on YouTube).

Shahram asked whether a case could be made to invoke the TRIPs agreement in order to disseminate journal articles in developing countries.

Here's a little background to explain why Shahram's idea is such a brilliant one.

The Agreement on Trade Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS), administered by the World Trade Organization (WTO), is an international agreement that sets down minimum standards for many forms of intellectual property regulation (including patents on essential medicines).

In 2001 the WTO adopted the Doha Declaration on TRIPS and Public Health, which said that the TRIPS agreement “can and should be interpreted and implemented in a manner supportive of WTO Members’ right to protect public health and, in particular, to promote access to medicines for all.”

Under TRIPS, a country facing an emergency (such as HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis, malaria and other epidemics) can go ahead and manufacture or buy generic versions of a patented drug (such as a patented antiretroviral medication), a phenomenon known as compulsory licensing. The international AIDS charity AVERT defines a compulsory license as "a government license that enables someone other than the patent holder to copy patented or copyrighted products and processes."

Which brings me back to Shahram.

Imagine a scenario in which a developing country is facing a national health emergency, and there's a research article that contains information that is highly relevant to addressing that emergency. Let’s say the emergency is an alarmingly high rate of mother-to-child transmission of HIV, and a new study shows a major breakthrough in preventing such transmission. And let’s say that unfortunately the article copyright is owned by the publisher (not the author), and the article is locked away behind a typical subscription barrier (usually around $30 per person to view it).

Could the government, asked Shahram, invoke TRIPs to simply bypass the copyright holder and disseminate the article across the nation?

It would be an interesting proposition to test, and I’d be particularly keen to hear the views of lawyers or IP activists.

Using TRIPs to disseminate copyrighted knowledge could arguably save lives. Indeed the late James Grant, former executive director of Unicef, argued that: “The most urgent task before us is to get medical and health knowledge to those most in need of that knowledge. Of the approximately 50 million people who were dying each year in the late 1980s, fully two thirds could have been saved through the application of that knowledge.”

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PLoS Hub for Clinical Trials now launched - take a spin

Emma Veitch — Fri, 28 Sep 2007 11:44:11 -0700

The PLoS Hub for Clinical Trials is live today - completing the merger of PLoS Clinical Trials with PLoS ONE. Our goal in developing Hubs is to provide a place where you, the researcher or reader, can easily reach relevant PLoS content and build on it. Think of the Hub as a gateway directly connecting you to articles that you are likely to be interested in; you can sign up to get email alerts of the most recent additions directly from the Hub.

Articles included in the Hub are published on the Topaz platform, which means that you can use the tools we've developed for annotating, discussing, and rating articles for every paper included in the Hub. These features are available on content previously published in PLoS Clinical Trials and on PLoS ONE, and papers from the soon-to-be launched PLoS Neglected Tropical Diseases. Ultimately we hope that the Hub will grow into a great resource for clinical triallists.

PLoS is as committed as ever to publishing the results of all clinical trials, regardless of outcome, and to making this information freely and publicly available; find out more about how you can submit your trials research to PLoS journals.

If you are interested in the results, conduct and design of trials, check out the Hub, try out the commenting and rating tools, and send us your feedback: what do you want to see, and be able to do, in the Hub? This is just the beginning, and we plan to add further Hubs for specific subject areas, as well as cool new community features. Visit, come back, and comment!

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Help make NIH-funded research findings freely available to everyone!

Bora Zivkovic — Wed, 12 Sep 2007 07:36:04 -0700

Back in July, the House of Representatives passed a bill that requires all the NIH-funded research to be made freely available to the public within at most 12 months subsequent to publication.

The equivalent bill has passed the Senate Appropriations Committee earlier this summer and will be up for vote in the Senate very soon! In advance of this important vote, The Alliance for Taxpayer Access has issued a Call for action:

"As the Senate considers Appropriations measures for the 2008 fiscal year this fall, please take a moment to remind your Senators of your strong support for public access to publicly funded research and – specifically – ensuring the success of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) Public Access Policy by making deposit mandatory for researchers.

Earlier this summer, the House of Representatives passed legislation with language that directs the NIH to make this change (http://www.taxpayeraccess.org/media/release07-0720.html). The Senate Appropriations Committee approved a similar measure (http://www.taxpayeraccess.org/media/release07-0628.html). Now, as the Appropriations process moves forward, it is critically important that our Senators are reminded of the breadth and depth of support for enhanced public access to the results of NIH-funded research. Please take a moment to weigh in with your Senator now."

Read the rest for talking points and the contact information of your Senators, then do your part and contact them! And spread the word - by e-mail, posting on your blog or website, on forums and mailing lists. Let's get this bill passed this month and thus ensure that taxpayer-funded research is freely available to its funders - the taxpayers. This needs to be done no later than Friday, September 28, 2007, when the bill is slated to appear in the Senate.

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