A group of leading life scientists is calling on publishers, editors, and scientists "to join together to create public, electronic archives of the scientific literature, containing complete copies of all published scientific papers" (Science, March 23, 2001: 2318). This grassroots effort, known as the Public Library of Science (PLOS) has attracted the support so far from over 12,000 scientists from 120 countries who have signed a letter indicating that as of September 2001 they will only publish in, review and edit for, and subscribe to journals that make their content freely available on a publicly accessible archive six months after publication.
Leading proponents of such public archives have outlined their perspective in the March 23 issue of Science [http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/291/5512/2318a]. They urge publishers to "reinforce their partnership with the scientific community by supporting extant archives like PMC [PubMed Central] and by allowing archival material to be freely used and distributed . . ." The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the British Medical Journal, Nucleic Acids Research, Molecular Biology of the Cell, and the BioMed Central journals have already signed on to PMC and are delivering content with only a short delay after print publication.
For more information on the Public Library of Science and to read the Open Letter, please see http://www.publiclibraryofscience.org.
- Excerpted from: SPARC
E-News, February-March 2001.
Also see:
The
Self-Archiving Initiative
A Subversive
Proposal
eprints.org
