Scientific publishing moving toward an open-access system

["Hamaker, Chuck" <cahamake@email.uncc.edu>]

Scientific publishing moving toward an open-access system
http://www.taipeitimes.com/News/edit/archives/2003/11/29/2003077716
Taipei Times
By Patricia Reaney
REUTERS
Saturday, Nov 29, 2003,Page 9 

Scientific publishing may never be the same again if a group of 
crusading researchers have their way.

Just as the Internet transformed the way the public gets information, 
the founders of the nonprofit Public Library of Science (PLoS) want 
scientific research to be freely available to everyone.

Instead of paying for access to scientific research locked in 
subscription-only databases controlled by leading scientific journals, 
they want open access to scientific literature.

We are hoping to drive a change in the business model across all of 
scientific publishing," Vivian Siegel, the executive director of the 
journal PLoS Biology, told Reuters.

...

Until now.

"There is a lesson here that publishers who apply a user-pays model 
have failed to take seriously -- the emergence of author power," Peter 
Horton, the editor of medical journal the Lancet, said in a commentary 
in a recent issue.

"Simply handing over an article's copyright to a publisher is, for many 
academic leaders, no longer acceptable," he added.

..
So far the reaction to PLoS Biology has been extraordinary, according 
to Siegel, with more than a half million hits on the Web site in the 
first two hours after its launch.

She stressed that PLoS is not trying to put big scientific publishers 
out of business, but to compete with them and to get them to open up 
their databases to the public.

***