PLOS
The Public Library of Science ( PLOS until mid-2012 PLoS ) to German " Public Library of Science ," is a non-commercial open access project for scientific publications in the United States with the aim of a library of scholarly open access journals and other scientific literature to build a freely available texts.
This project PLOS Biology, PLOS Medicine, PLOS Computational Biology, PLOS Genetics, PLOS Pathogens, PLOS Neglected Tropical Diseases and PLOS ONE are currently published in the frame.
The publications are stored in the digital PubMed Central ( PMC) archive of the National Institutes of Health ( NIH) and published under the Creative Commons Attribution License.
History
The Public Library of Science was established in early 2001 after an online call to Patrick O. Brown, a biochemist at Stanford University and Michael Iron, bioinformatics at the University of California, Berkeley and the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. The call addressed to all scientists prompted to agree to cease from September 2001, the provision of technical articles to the journals that are not made freely available the full text of the journal article after the expiration of six months from publication.
After the Nobel laureate and former director of the National Institutes of Health Harold Varmus joined them, the PLOS organizers concentrated on building up their own publishing platform. They were based on the Open Access model of the British BioMed Central Publishing, made in the scientific, freely available publications in journals such as Genome Biology and Journal of Biology since the end of 1999. As a start-up funding they received nine million U.S. dollars from the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, an organization founded by computer pioneer Gordon Moore and his wife Foundation, which promotes, among other things science.
Publications
Some journals such as the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences declared their acceptance of these rules. Other journals, including the highly respected magazines Nature and Science, on the other hand were limited to the permission of their authors to publish their contributions in their own archives.
As a publisher took the Public Library of Science become fully operational on 13 October 2003 with the publication of articles, which were reviewed by other respected scientists in the same disciplines (so-called peer review ), both in printed as well as online journal with the journal PLOS Biology, which was supplemented subsequently by another title. To finance the magazines requires the business model that the authors, as in conventional magazines also common to assume the cost of the publication.
The Public Library of Science initiative has launched similar projects in Europe. The most famous among them is the written at a meeting of the Max Planck Society in connection Berlin Declaration. As a result, besides the Max Planck Society and other institutions for the promotion of science have decided to give authors a cost support publishing in open-access media.
The journal PLOS Biology has now an impact factor of 14.1 and PLOS Medicine 13.8 a.
PLOS Currents
Harold Varmus announced on 20 August 2009 that with PLoS Currents: Influenca a new project will start to combat the H1N1 flu, through rapid publication of scientific articles on the subject to advance.