PLoS Medicine Launch Date Announcement

["John D'Ignazio" <john@arl.org>]

### For immediate release ###

For more information, contact:
Barbara Cohen (US): +1.415.624.1206, bcohen@plos.org
Virginia Barbour (UK):+44.1223.494.482, vbarbour@plos.org

PUBLIC LIBRARY OF SCIENCE TO LAUNCH INTERNATIONAL OPEN-ACCESS MEDICAL
JOURNAL

May 5, 2004, San Francisco -- New discoveries about human health and
disease will be made freely and immediately available to anyone in the
world with an Internet connection -- from physicians and researchers to
patients and policy makers -- in a new open-access medical journal, PLoS
Medicine, to be launched in Autumn, 2004.

"Thanks to the Internet and new strategies for financing publication
costs, it is now possible to share the results of medical research with
anyone, anywhere, who could benefit from it. How could we not do it?"
argued Dr. Harold E. Varmus, Nobel laureate, former National Institutes
of Health Director, and one of the co-founders of the Public Library of
Science [PLoS].

PLoS, a non-profit organization whose mission is to make reliable
scientific and medical literature a public resource, formally announced
today that it will publish PLoS Medicine,an open-access, international,
general medical journal, beginning this fall. A call for papers has been
issued, indicating that the journal is now accepting submissions.

PLoS Medicine will publish important peer-reviewed advances in all areas
of medical research, including epidemiology and public health, together
with summaries of all research articles written for non-specialists and
features about international developments in medicine, controversial
medical topics, neglected diseases, and other health-related subjects. All
content in the journal will be freely available online and allowed to be
reproduced worldwide for teaching, promoting awareness of new discoveries,
and other purposes.

The prospect of an open-access alternative to the existing
subscription-based prestigious medical journals has been welcomed by many
in the health research and advocacy worlds. Already more than 75
physicians and researchers have been recruited to the editorial board of
PLoS Medicine, ranging from an AIDS physician in Rwanda to the leader of a
gene therapy unit in Paris to a cardiologist in Salt Lake City.

PLoS was founded in 2000 by Dr. Varmus and colleagues Patrick O. Brown of
Stanford University and Michael B. Eisen of Lawrence BerkeleyLaboratory
and the University of California, Berkeley. Last October,=20 the
organization launched its first open-access journal of peer-reviewed
scientific research, PLoS Biology, whose content has been favorably
reviewed by the New York Times, Le Monde, and countless other media
outlets around the world.

"The case for open access to medical research is even stronger than it is
for basic research in biology.  The National Institutes of Health in
theUnited States alone spends over $28 billion on biomedical research.
Everyone in the country -- and around the world -- should have access to
the results of those studies," commented Joseph L. Goldstein, a member of
the PLoS Medicine editorial board and Nobel Prize winner in Medicine based
at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas.

PLoS Medicine will be overseen by PLoS Senior Editors Barbara Cohen,
former editor of Nature Genetics and former executive editor of the
Journal of Clinical Investigation, and Virginia Barbour, a physician and
haematologist and former executive editor of the Lancet. Working closely
with members of the editorial board and in consultation with the wider
medical and health research community, they will develop an open-access
forum for important studies and for discussion of medical research and
practice in the broader context of global health and social
responsibility.


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For more information about the Public Library of Science, see
http://www.plos.org.

For more information about PLoS Medicine, see http://www.plosmedicine.org.