Open access to disease and other research – PLoS Pathogens | Official GRAD 5104 Blog

"The appearance of open access journals is something I personally applaud. Having current research available for everyone with internet connection and understanding of English language, seems fair as some of the research is supported by tax money. This was also pointed out in Richard Van Noorden’s article “The true cost of science publishing” in Nature (2013) (1). To my mind it highlights, that my research is accountable to the general public instead of just my peers. Paying for my research to be distributed widely instead of to only the ones with access to high impact scholarly papers seems like a responsible thing to do. PLoS is perhaps the most widely known open-access journal family with a good reputation. It concentrates on biological and life sciences. It has a very appealing web interface and is indexed in all the major archives we use in biological research to find articles like PubMed, MEDLINE, Web of Science, and Scopus.  PLoS stands for US Public Library of Science. The online journals of PLoS family include PLoS ONE, PLoS Biology, PLoS Medicine, PLoS Computational Biology, PLoS Currents, PLoS Genetics, PLoS Pathogens, and PLoS Neglected Tropical Diseases. I will concentrate on the PLoS Pathogens for now to illustrate the PLoS family of journals. PLoS is a non-profit organization. In 2001 it announced to start publishing electronic open-access journals, after an attempt to persuade other publishers to release their journals for the public for free after a delay (2-6 months post first publication of the issue) (2). The goal of PLoS is to provide the public access to research, not depending on financial resources. PLoS Pathogens has been published as a separate journal since 2005, as evident from the journal’s archives ..."