Public Library of Science

[Ann Okerson <ann.okerson@yale.edu>]

Indeed of great interest... 

---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Fri, 23 Aug 2002 09:56:39 +0100
From: Jan Velterop <jan@biomedcentral.com>
To: ann.okerson@yale.edu
Subject: Public Library of Science

Ann,  Of interest to the liblicence list?

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22 August 2002 
Nature 418, 805 (2002); doi:10.1038/418805b 

Public-access group plans journals 

KENDALL POWELL 

[WASHINGTON] The Public Library of Science (PLS) - a group of researchers
who last year threatened to boycott scientific publishers unless they put
their journals online for free - will unveil its own publishing venture by
the end of the year, one of its leading members says.

Michael Eisen, a geneticist at the University of California, Berkeley, and
a founding member of the PLS, says that the venture will produce
free-access print and online journals, covering costs by making page
charges to authors.

A year ago, the PLS withdrew its plan to initiate a boycott of established
journals from 1 September 2001 - despite obtaining few concessions from
publishers.

Eisen says that PubMed Central, a free archive established by the National
Institutes of Health in 2000 for access to published biomedical research,
is "woefully inadequate" in meeting researchers' needs.

Ed Sequeira, who manages PubMed Central, says that retrievals from the
archive have doubled in the past year to 300,000 per month. He says that
it will soon add more journals to the 80 currently archived. But the
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences has revised the time lag
from its original publication to free appearance on the archive from one
month to six months.

And in a setback for the concept of publicly funded research archives, the
US Department of Energy says that it is considering closing its PubScience
search service for physical-sciences research.

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