From the College Librarian Open Access Publishing

There has been a great deal of talk in the scientific and library communities recently about our increasing inability to afford access to important research. Journal prices continue to rise at unsustainable rates, forcing academic institutions to cancel crucial titles. Libraries and their parent institutions complain that we pay for-profit publishers for journals containing research that we ourselves have subsidized through faculty salaries, grants and release time. In effect, colleges and the federal government reimburse private publishers for the very articles we have funded.

One response to this traditional publishing model has been the "open-access" movement, which argues that all refereed research should be available free of charge to all who have access to the web. Research in the public interest, runs the argument, should not be available only to those who can afford to pay. Open access is an attempt to preserve the rigorous peer-review process, while preventing for-profit publishers from laying claim to and reaping outrageous profits from information that ought to be in the public domain. Open access licenses typically allow the unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction of material published in open access-journals, so long as the original work is properly cited.

A key concern about open access has been that of quality. Can non-profit, open-access publishers convince important scientists to publish in their journals? Can they produce articles that meet the same standards as those in for-profit journals published by venerable companies such as Elsevier, Wiley, and others with deep pockets? Even proponents of open-access publishing must admit that the bulk of open-access journals founded to date do not contain the quality of research, or possess the weight or prestige of their more established competitors.

One foundation, however, is attempting to prove that open-access publishing can be just as rigorous and prestigious as that in well established journals. The Public Library of Science, founded with support from a number of foundations, aspires to publish journals with the same clout and influence as those such as Science , Nature , The Lancet , etc. To date PLoS has founded eight journals . Two — PLoS Biology and PLoS Medicine—have already established themselves as top-tier titles, whose research is regularly cited in the mainstream press. The PLoS web site reports that it "strives to set the highest standards for excellence in everything we do: in content, style, and aesthetics of presentation; in editorial performance at every level; in transparency and accessibility to the scientific community and public; and in educational value."

Best of all, PLoS journals are free and open to all.

Bryn Geffert
College Librarian