The OA Interviews: Michael Eisen, co-founder of the Public Library of Science

“Michael Eisen is an evolutionary biologist at University of California Berkeley and an Investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. He is also co-founder of the Open Access (OA) publisher Public Library of Science (PLoS). Founded in 2000, PLoS was conceived as an advocacy group for what only later became known as Open Access. PLoS’ first initiative was to publish an Open Letter and invite scientists around the world to sign on to it... Nearly 34,000 scientists from 180 countries signed the pledge... most of the scientist signatories proved happy to forswear their own pledge, and continue publishing in the very journals that had turned a deaf ear to them. Disappointed but undeterred, Eisen and the other two PLoS co-founders — biochemist Patrick Brown, and Nobel Laureate Harold Varmus — reinvented the organisation as a non-profit publisher, and in 2003 they launched an OA journalcalled PLoS Biology. PLoS Medicine followed a year later. Today PLoS publishes seven OA journals and is also experimenting with new OA services like PLoS Currents, which aims to minimise the delay between the generation and publication of new research... in 2006 the publisher launched PLoS ONE... PLoS ONE is revolutionary in two ways. First, where journals are normally discipline specific PLoS ONE will consider any paper in any discipline within the hard sciences. Second, reviewers are told only to assess the technical validity of papers submitted, not their likely scientific importance or significance. It turned out to be a winning formula, and PLoS ONE grew so rapidly that it is now the largest peer-reviewed journal in the world. It has published over 31,000 papers since 2006... But success has not come without controversy. Critics accuse PLoS of engaging in “bulk, cheap publishing of lower quality papers to subsidize its handful of high-quality flagship journals.” By doing so, they add, it is lowering the quality of published research... Then at the end of last year a reworked Research Works Act (RWA) was introduced... In an editorial published in the New York Times on 10th January, for instance, Eisen called on researchers to ‘cut off commercial journals’ supply of papers by publishing exclusively in one of the many ‘open-access’ journals that are perfectly capable of managing peer review (like those published by the Public Library of Science, which I co-founded)...’ By publicly calling out Elsevier in this way, Eisen has sparked a widespread revolt against the publisher. Amongst other things, this has led to the creation of a boycott site that, as of this writing, has attracted around 6,500 signatures... Eisen has also welcomed the re-introduction of the Federal Research Public Access Act (FRPAA)...” The blogger continues presenting his viewpoints of various topics interspersed with comments from Michael Eisen regarding the implications of the boycott for gold OA and PLoS, sustainability of Gold OA, publishing costs and prices for PLoS, and the alternatives presented by Green OA. The blogger concludes with excerpts from the interview with Michael Eisen and provides a link to the full text of the interview.