Free science journal hits press

Nature Science Update is reporting Free science journal hits press. Will this be what open source is proving to be for software? By moving the costs from the readers to the authors then the free flow of information that is vital to science may be enhanced. If you have looked at some of the links for my posts, some of you may not be able to read them. That is because I have subscriptions to both Nature and Science and they won't let you read the full articles unless you do likewise. Best wishes, PLoS.

Monday sees the first issue of a new magazine for scientists. Its arrival is already causing a stir: unlike other journals that record research about biology and medicine, this one is free.

The scientists behind the journal, called PLoS Biology, are challenging standard publishing practice, in which researchers pay to read others' results in journals. They argue that this is unfair - to scientists who submit their work freely and to the public whose taxes subsidize the research.

The Public Library of Science (PLoS), a non-profit organization based in San Francisco, is not the first to try so-called open-access publishing. Physicists post most papers onto online servers before they go into print. And since 2000, a London-based company called BioMed Central has published more than 100 free-access biomedical journals.

But PLoS Biology is shooting for the big time. Promoted by an American television advertising campaign this summer, it aims to compete head-on with top-tier scientific journals such as Science, Nature and Cell. Unlike these, it does not charge readers for online access - instead, PLoS charges researchers $1,500 to publish a paper.

The move is part of a sea-change underway in science journals. Library-bound tomes have given way to fast-turnaround online papers with numerous links. Even the effectiveness of peer review, in which papers are screened by other researchers before publication, is being called into question. "It's reflective of changing times in publication," says biologist Jim Woodgett of the Ontario Cancer Institute in Canada.

One scientist backing PLoS is Stephen Cohen of the European Molecular Biology Laboratory in Heidelberg, Germany. A paper of his features in the debut issue. Cohen hopes that the journal will prove a hit and force others to drop their prices. "[PLoS] aims to change the landscape," he says.

Two organizations that bankroll biological research have also thrown their weight behind open-access publishing. Britain's Wellcome Trust and the US Howard Hughes Medical Institute both announced this year that that they will fund publishing fees in their grants.

Sceptics question whether PLoS will be able to cover its peer-review, production and distribution costs. Others worry that under-funded disciplines and developing countries might not be able to afford the upfront costs. It is also unclear whether researchers who are keen to further their career will sacrifice a prominent Cell paper, say, for one in a new free-access journal.

Many scientists "are waiting to see what happens", says Natasha Robshaw, head of marketing for BioMed Central.