PLoS stays afloat with bulk publishing : Nature News

ab1630's bookmarks 2018-08-05

Summary:

"Public Library of Science (PLoS), the poster child of the open-access publishing movement, is following an haute couture model of science publishing — relying on bulk, cheap publishing of lower quality papers to subsidize its handful of high-quality flagship journals. Since its launch in 2002, PLoS has been kept afloat financially by some US$17.3 million in philanthropic grants. An analysis by Nature of the company's accounts shows that PLoS still relies heavily on charity funding, and falls far short of its stated goal of quickly breaking even through its business model of charging authors a fee to publish in its journals. In the past financial year, ending 30 September 2007, its $6.68-million spending outstripped its revenue of $2.86 million, according to the publicly available accounts. But its financial future is looking brighter thanks to a cash cow in the form of PLoS One, an online database that PLoS launched in December 2006. PLoS One uses a system of 'light' peer-review to publish any article considered methodologically sound. In its first full year of operation in 2007, PLoS One published 1,230 articles, which would have generated an estimated $1.54 million in author fees, around half of PLoS's total income that year. By comparison, the 321 articles published in PLoS Biology in 2007 brought in less than half this amount...."

Link:

https://www.nature.com/news/2008/080702/full/454011a.html

From feeds:

Open Access Tracking Project (OATP) » ab1630's bookmarks

Tags:

oa.new oa.stem oa.open_science oa.plos oa.sustainability oa.business_models oa.quality oa.gold oa.publishing oa.publishers oa.funders.private oa.funding oa.plos_one oa.peer_review oa.scholcomm oa.authors oa.megajournals oa.fees oa.costs oa.funders oa.journals oa.economics_of oa.revenues

Date tagged:

08/05/2018, 10:18

Date published:

08/05/2018, 06:23