Science AMA Series: I am Michael Eisen, Professor of Biology at the University of California, Berkeley. I co-founded the Public Library of Science, publisher of open access journals including PLOS ONE. AMA! : science

"Every year, scientists around the world publish around 2,000,000 papers describing new ideas, techniques and discoveries. Unfortunately, the vast majority of these papers - around 85% - are published in subscription journals that place these papers behind paywalls, effectively rendering them inaccessible to anyone not affiliated with a major research university with a large library budget. Thus most of the world's population - including many scientists, and most teachers, students, health care workers, patients, journalists, policy makers and the interested public - do not have access to one of humanity's greatest creations - the published scientific and medical literature. Absurdly, scientists give their papers to publishers for free - and often even pay for the privilege of having their paper appear in a subscription journal - forcing libraries across the world to pay to access them. The money involved is staggering - science publishers take in close to $10 billion a year in revenue - an insane amount of money to waste in an era when science funding has been cut to the bone. I am Michael Eisen, a biologist at the University of California, Berkeley, who has been working for the last 15 years to change this system. In 2000 I and two colleagues founded the Public Library of Science a non-profit publisher of scientific journals dedicated to making the world's scientific and medical literature a freely available public resource. PLOS publishes a series of journals that use a business model - known as open access - in which the costs of publishing are paid upfront by universities, government agencies and other sponsors of science, and every paper we publish is made immediate freely available for anyone to access, download and reuse. Although we were widely dismissed at the beginning, PLOS and the open access movement we helped launch is in the ascendancy. One of our titles - PLOS ONE - is now the biggest journal in the world, and virtually every publisher is jumping onto the open access bandwagon ..."