Originally published June 23 2005
Academic publications should not be closed to public, professor says
by Mike Adams, the Health Ranger, NaturalNews Editor
A recent Wired article calls for an end to keeping valuable medical research private and for opening up more publishing systems like PLoS, which is an online library where researchers can be published and view other research.
He and his postdoctoral adviser, Pat Brown, fully expected cooperation from Stanford Library, which hosts a large number of scientific journals.
"Instead," Eisen recalled, "we were told that the articles we wanted belonged to the publishers and we should basically piss off."
It had never occurred to Eisen that publishers could own scientific literature.
He was offended by the idea that scientists could be wronged by copyright.
In October 2000, Eisen, Brown and Harold Varmus, a former director of the National Institutes of Health, co-founded the Public Library of Science, or PLoS, a nonprofit organization dedicated to making scientific and medical research available online, free from government or corporate control.
Two years later they received $9 million to create a nonprofit scientific publishing venture.
So far, PLoS has launched two online science journals -- PLoS Biology and PLoS Medicine -- with plans for three more in the coming months, covering genetics, pathogens and computational biology.
All of them are run by experts in their fields and require rigorous peer review, just like any other respectable academic journal.
There are a few key differences, though.
PLoS journals are free and allow authors to retain their copyrights, as long as they allow their work to be freely shared and distributed (with full credit given, naturally).
They also require that authors pay $1,500 from their grants, or directly from their sponsors or institutions, to have their work published.
These groups pay the bulk of the $10 billion that goes to scientific and medical publishers each year, and what do they get in return?
Limited access to the research they funded, and no right to reuse the information.
"It's ridiculous to give publishers complete control of an invaluable resource that they had an extremely limited role in creating," Eisen said.
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