Category Archives: PLoS

PLOS, open access and scientific societies

Several people have noted that, in my previous post dealing with PLOS’s business, I didn’t address a point that came up in a number of threads regarding the relative virtues of PLOS and scientific societies – the basic point being that people should publish in society journals because they do good things with the money (run meetings, […]

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On pastrami and the business of PLOS

Last week my friend Andy Kern (a population geneticist at Rutgers) went on a bit of a bender on Twitter prompted by his discovery of PLOS’s IRS Form 990 – the annual required financial filing of non-profit corporations in the United States. You can read his string of tweets and my responses, but the gist […]

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Why I, a founder of PLOS, am forsaking open access

PLEASE NOTE BEFORE YOU READ THIS THAT IT WAS WRITTEN FOR APRIL FOOLS DAY!!! I co-founded the Public Library of Science (PLOS) in 2002 because I believed deeply that the open access publishing model PLOS espoused and has come to dominate was good for science, scientists and the public.  Over the past decade open access […]

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The Past, Present and Future of Scholarly Publishing

I gave a talk last night at the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco about science publishing and PLoS. There will be an audio link soon, but, for the first time in my life, I actually gave the talk (largely) from prepared remarks, so I thought I’d post it here. An audio recording of the talk […]

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How academia betrayed and continues to betray Aaron Swartz

As news spread last week that digital rights activist Aaron Swartz had killed himself ahead of a federal trial on charges that he illegally downloaded a large database of scholarly articles with the intent to freely disseminate its contents, thousands of academics began posting free copies of their work online, coalescing around the Twitter hashtag […]

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What the UC “open access” policy should say

The joint faculty senate of the ten campuses of the University of California has floated a trial balloon “open access” policy. I, of course, laud the effort to move the ball forward on open access, but the proposed policy falls short in two key ways. 1) The rights reserved by the University are too limited. […]

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Xenophobic scientific publishers: open access aids foreign enemies

The American Association of Publishers and the anti-open access DC Principles group have sent letters to both houses of Congress outlining why they oppose the Federal Research Public Access Act, which would make the results of all federally funded research publicly available. They largely trot out the same tired “not all publishers are alike, so don’t impose […]

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We won the Battle of the Research Works Act. Now let’s win the War for Open Access.

Late last year Elsevier and two of its allies in Congress quietly introduced a bill that would have halted the trend towards increased public access to the results of government funded research headlined by the NIH’s Public Access Policy. This brazen act, which its backers hoped would pass unnoticed in the quiet of the holidays, […]

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My brain just exploded: CUP pushes “article rental scheme”

With fake publishers all the rage on Twitter, I was sure that this press release from Cambridge Journals was some kind of joke. Cambridge Journals has announced a brand new Article Rental scheme, which will see single academic research articles being made available over a 24-hour period at a significantly lower cost. More brilliance from […]

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Better version of “Boycott Elsevier” t-shirt

And here’s a hi-res version of the image if you want it. Some other versions I’ve been working on:  

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