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63-454: PLOS (for Public Library of Science ; PLoS until 2012 ) is a nonprofit publisher of open-access journals in science, technology, and medicine and other scientific literature , under an open-content license. It was founded in 2000 and launched its first journal, PLOS Biology , in October 2003. As of 2024, PLOS publishes 14 academic journals, including 7 journals indexed within

126-410: A professional in the field, a researcher in another field, a journalist , a politician or civil servant , or an interested layperson. Indeed, a 2008 study revealed that mental health professionals are roughly twice as likely to read a relevant article if it is freely available. Research funding agencies and universities want to ensure that the research they fund and support in various ways has

189-525: A $ 1 million grant to help PLOS achieve financial sustainability and launch new free-access biomedical journals. The PLOS organizers turned their attention to starting their own journal along the lines of the UK-based BioMed Central , which has been publishing open-access scientific articles in the biological sciences in journals such as Genome Biology since 2000. The PLOS journals are what is described as "open-access content"; all content

252-416: A case of academic misconduct and plagiarism, and could be pursued as such. There is no evidence that "scooping" of research via preprints exists, not even in communities that have broadly adopted the use of the arXiv server for sharing preprints since 1991. If the unlikely case of scooping emerges as the growth of the preprint system continues, it can be dealt with as academic malpractice. ASAPbio includes

315-489: A colour system. The most commonly recognised names are "green", "gold", and "hybrid" open access; however, several other models and alternative terms are also used. In the gold OA model, the publisher makes all articles and related content available for free immediately on the journal's website. In such publications, articles are licensed for sharing and reuse via Creative Commons licenses or similar. Many gold OA publishers charge an article processing charge (APC), which

378-756: A fee reduction. (In all cases, decisions to publish are based solely on editorial criteria.) PLOS was launched with grants totaling US$ 13 million from the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation and the Sandler Family Supporting Foundation . PLOS confirmed in July 2011 that it no longer relies on subsidies from foundations and is covering all of its operational costs. Since then, the PLOS balance sheet has improved from $ 20,511,000 net assets in 2012–2013 to $ 36,591,000 in 2014–2015. In April 2017, PLOS

441-589: A journal's impact factor. Some publishers (e.g. eLife and Ubiquity Press ) have released estimates of their direct and indirect costs that set their APCs. Hybrid OA generally costs more than gold OA and can offer a lower quality of service. A particularly controversial practice in hybrid open access journals is " double dipping ", where both authors and subscribers are charged. By comparison, journal subscriptions equate to $ 3,500–$ 4,000 per article published by an institution, but are highly variable by publisher (and some charge page fees separately). This has led to

504-410: A journal, the archived version is called a " postprint ". This can be the accepted manuscript as returned by the journal to the author after successful peer review. Hybrid open-access journals contain a mixture of open access articles and closed access articles. A publisher following this model is partially funded by subscriptions, and only provide open access for those individual articles for which

567-562: A key principle. Open access (mostly green and gratis) began to be sought and provided worldwide by researchers when the possibility itself was opened by the advent of Internet and the World Wide Web . The momentum was further increased by a growing movement for academic journal publishing reform, and with it gold and libre OA. The premises behind open access publishing are that there are viable funding models to maintain traditional peer review standards of quality while also making

630-527: A multitude of journal and conference styles, and sometimes spend months waiting for peer review results. The drawn-out and often contentious societal and technological transition to Open Access and Open Science/Open Research, particularly across North America and Europe (Latin America has already widely adopted "Acceso Abierto" since before 2000 ) has led to increasingly entrenched positions and much debate. The area of (open) scholarly practices increasingly sees

693-461: A new open access business model, to experiments with providing as much free or open access as possible, to active lobbying against open access proposals. There are many publishers that started up as open access-only publishers, such as PLOS, Hindawi Publishing Corporation , Frontiers in... journals, MDPI and BioMed Central. Some open access journals (under the gold, and hybrid models) generate revenue by charging publication fees in order to make

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756-468: A role for policy-makers and research funders giving focus to issues such as career incentives, research evaluation and business models for publicly funded research. Plan S and AmeliCA (Open Knowledge for Latin America) caused a wave of debate in scholarly communication in 2019 and 2020. Subscription-based publishing typically requires transfer of copyright from authors to the publisher so that

819-583: A series of hypothetical scooping scenarios as part of its preprint FAQ, finding that the overall benefits of using preprints vastly outweigh any potential issues around scooping. Indeed, the benefits of preprints, especially for early-career researchers, seem to outweigh any perceived risk: rapid sharing of academic research, open access without author-facing charges, establishing priority of discoveries, receiving wider feedback in parallel with or before peer review, and facilitating wider collaborations. The "green" route to OA refers to author self-archiving, in which

882-625: A signatory of the SDG Publishers Compact in 2023, and has taken steps to support the achievement of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). These include the introduction of five new open-access journals in 2021 to publish research relevant to the SDGs: PLOS Climate , PLOS Water , PLOS Sustainability and Transformation , PLOS Digital Health , and PLOS Global Public Health . In 2011,

945-499: A time-stamp at the time of publication, which helps to establish the "priority of discovery" for scientific claims (Vale and Hyman 2016). This means that a preprint can act as proof of provenance for research ideas, data, code, models, and results. The fact that the majority of preprints come with a form of permanent identifier, usually a digital object identifier (DOI), also makes them easy to cite and track. Thus, if one were to be "scooped" without adequate acknowledgement, this would be

1008-627: A version of the article (often the peer-reviewed version before editorial typesetting, called "postprint") is posted online to an institutional and/or subject repository. This route is often dependent on journal or publisher policies, which can be more restrictive and complicated than respective "gold" policies regarding deposit location, license, and embargo requirements. Some publishers require an embargo period before deposition in public repositories, arguing that immediate self-archiving risks loss of subscription income. Embargoes are imposed by between 20 and 40% of journals, during which time an article

1071-684: A very important role in responding to open-access mandates from funders. Healthcare Information For All by 2015 HIFA was launched in October 2006 at the 10th Congress of the Association for Health Information and Libraries in Africa in Mombasa, Kenya (it was initially called HIFA 2015). It currently has more than 20,000 professional members from 2500 health and development organisations in 180 countries. The HIFA vision is: "A world where every person and every health worker will have access to

1134-466: A wide variety of academic disciplines, giving most academics options for OA with no APCs. Diamond OA journals are available for most disciplines, and are usually small (<25 articles per year) and more likely to be multilingual (38%); thousands of such journals exist. The growth of unauthorized digital copying by large-scale copyright infringement has enabled free access to paywalled literature. This has been done via existing social media sites (e.g.

1197-410: Is a prohibition on data mining . For this reason, many big data studies of various technologies performed by economists ( as well as machine learning by computer scientists ) are limited to patent analysis , since the patent documents are not subject to copyright at all. FAIR is an acronym for 'findable, accessible, interoperable and reusable', intended to more clearly define what is meant by

1260-405: Is a set of principles and a range of practices through which nominally copyrightable publications are delivered to readers free of access charges or other barriers. With open access strictly defined (according to the 2001 definition), or libre open access, barriers to copying or reuse are also reduced or removed by applying an open license for copyright, which regulates post-publication uses of

1323-752: Is consistent with the Green Open Access model. A persistent concern surrounding preprints is that work may be at risk of being plagiarised or "scooped" – meaning that the same or similar research will be published by others without proper attribution to the original source – if publicly available but not yet associated with a stamp of approval from peer reviewers and traditional journals. These concerns are often amplified as competition increases for academic jobs and funding, and perceived to be particularly problematic for early-career researchers and other higher-risk demographics within academia. However, preprints, in fact, protect against scooping. Considering

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1386-547: Is more than 20,000 for all forums): HIFA's impact is limited by its very low human resource capacity (one professional staff plus volunteers). This in turn is related to lack of investment by funding agencies in the availability and use of reliable healthcare information. However, since 2020 the COVID-19 pandemic and its associated " infodemic " have underlined the fundamental importance of access to reliable healthcare information. "Never before has everyone been so aware of

1449-458: Is one of the most permissive, only requiring attribution to be allowed to use the material (and allowing derivations and commercial use). A range of more restrictive Creative Commons licenses are also used. More rarely, some of the smaller academic journals use custom open access licenses. Some publishers (e.g. Elsevier ) use "author nominal copyright" for OA articles, where the author retains copyright in name only and all rights are transferred to

1512-606: Is paywalled before permitting self-archiving (green OA) or releasing a free-to-read version (bronze OA). Embargo periods typically vary from 6–12 months in STEM and >12 months in humanities , arts and social sciences . Embargo-free self-archiving has not been shown to affect subscription revenue , and tends to increase readership and citations. Embargoes have been lifted on particular topics for either limited times or ongoing (e.g. Zika outbreaks or indigenous health ). Plan S includes zero-length embargoes on self-archiving as

1575-695: Is published under the Creative Commons "attribution" license . The project states (quoting the Budapest Open Access Initiative ) that: "The only constraint on reproduction and distribution, and the only role for copyright in this domain, should be to give authors control over the integrity of their work and the right to be properly acknowledged and cited." As a publishing company, the Public Library of Science officially launched its operation on 13 October 2003, with

1638-600: Is the Subscribe to Open publishing model introduced by Annual Reviews ; if the subscription revenue goal is met, the given journal's volume is published open access. Advantages and disadvantages of open access have generated considerable discussion amongst researchers, academics, librarians, university administrators, funding agencies, government officials, commercial publishers , editorial staff and society publishers. Reactions of existing publishers to open access journal publishing have ranged from moving with enthusiasm to

1701-424: Is typically paid through institutional or grant funding. The majority of gold open access journals charging APCs follow an "author-pays" model, although this is not an intrinsic property of gold OA. Self-archiving by authors is permitted under green OA. Independently from publication by a publisher, the author also posts the work to a website controlled by the author, the research institution that funded or hosted

1764-477: Is usually other researchers. Open access helps researchers as readers by opening up access to articles that their libraries do not subscribe to. All researchers benefit from open access as no library can afford to subscribe to every scientific journal and most can only afford a small fraction of them – this is known as the " serials crisis ". Open access extends the reach of research beyond its immediate academic circle. An open access article can be read by anyone –

1827-415: The #ICanHazPDF hashtag) as well as dedicated sites (e.g. Sci-Hub ). In some ways this is a large-scale technical implementation of pre-existing practice, whereby those with access to paywalled literature would share copies with their contacts. However, the increased ease and scale from 2010 onwards have changed how many people treat subscription publications. Similar to the free content definition,

1890-681: The Free Journal Network . APC-free journals tend to be smaller and more local-regional in scope. Some also require submitting authors to have a particular institutional affiliation. A " preprint " is typically a version of a research paper that is shared on an online platform prior to, or during, a formal peer review process. Preprint platforms have become popular due to the increasing drive towards open access publishing and can be publisher- or community-led. A range of discipline-specific or cross-domain platforms now exist. The posting of pre-prints (and/or authors' manuscript versions)

1953-684: The National Institutes of Health and at that time director of Memorial Sloan–Kettering Cancer Center ; Patrick O. Brown , a biochemist at Stanford University ; and Michael Eisen , a computational biologist at the University of California, Berkeley , and the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory . The petition called for all scientists to pledge that, from September 2001, they would discontinue submission of articles to journals that did not make

PLOS - Misplaced Pages Continue

2016-907: The Science Citation Index Expanded , and consequently 7 journals ranked with an impact factor . PLOS journals are included in the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ). PLOS is also a member of the Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association (OASPA), a participating publisher and supporter of the Initiative for Open Citations , and a member of the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE). The Public Library of Science began in 2000 with an online petition initiative by Nobel Prize winner Harold Varmus , formerly director of

2079-666: The Philosopher's Stone with a free-domain alternative, such as A Voyage to Lilliput , an emergency room physician treating a patient for a life-threatening urushiol poisoning cannot substitute the most recent, but paywalled review article on this topic with a 90 year-old copyright-expired article that was published before the invention of prednisone in 1954. 2) the authors of research papers are not paid in any way, so they do not suffer any monetary losses, when they switch from behind paywall to open access publishing, especially, if they use diamond open access media. 3)

2142-502: The Public Library of Science became an official financial supporting organization of Healthcare Information For All by 2015 , a global initiative that advocates unrestricted access to medical knowledge, sponsoring the first HIFA2015 Webinar in 2012. In 2012, the organization quit using the stylization "PLoS" to identify itself and began using only "PLOS". In 2016, PLOS confirmed that its chief executive officer, Elizabeth Marincola , would be leaving for personal and professional reasons at

2205-803: The World Health Organization; promote multilingualism; identify and address priority issues; harness collective intelligence; strengthen advocacy; and protect from misinformation. The network is administered by the Global Healthcare Information Network CIC, a nonprofit organisation based in the United Kingdom and a non-State actor in official relations with the World Health Organization. The HIFA community interacts on six online discussion forums: HIFA, CHIFA, HIFA-Portuguese, HIFA-French, HIFA-Spanish, and HIFA-Zambia (the total number of members

2268-457: The assessment that there is enough money "within the system" to enable full transition to OA. However, there is ongoing discussion about whether the change-over offers an opportunity to become more cost-effective or promotes more equitable participation in publication. Concern has been noted that increasing subscription journal prices will be mirrored by rising APCs, creating a barrier to less financially privileged authors. The inherent bias of

2331-645: The author's employer or funder. In the United States, institutions such as the National Institutes of Health and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute have pledged that recipients of their grants will be allocated funds to cover such author charges. The Global Participation Initiative (GPI) was instituted in 2012, by which authors in "group-one countries" are not charged a fee and those in "group-two countries" are given

2394-662: The authors (or research sponsor) pay a publication fee. Hybrid OA generally costs more than gold OA and can offer a lower quality of service. A particularly controversial practice in hybrid open access journals is " double dipping ", where both authors and subscribers are charged. For these reasons, hybrid open access journals have been called a " Mephistophelian invention", and publishing in hybrid OA journals often do not qualify for funding under open access mandates , as libraries already pay for subscriptions thus have no financial incentive to fund open access articles in such journals. Bronze open access articles are free to read only on

2457-488: The cost of electronic publishing , which has been the main form of distribution of journal articles since ca. 2000, is incommensurably smaller, than the cost of on-paper publishing and distribution, which is still preferred by many fiction literature readers. Whereas non-open access journals cover publishing costs through access tolls such as subscriptions, site licenses or pay-per-view charges, open-access journals are characterised by funding models which do not require

2520-401: The current APC-based OA publishing perpetuates this inequality through the 'Matthew effect' (the rich get richer, and the poor get poorer). The switch from pay-to-read to pay-to-publish has left essentially the same people behind, with some academics not having enough purchasing power (individually or through their institutions) for either option. Some gold OA publishers will waive all or part of

2583-448: The differences between traditional peer-review based publishing models and deposition of an article on a preprint server, "scooping" is less likely for manuscripts first submitted as preprints. In a traditional publishing scenario, the time from manuscript submission to acceptance and to final publication can range from a few weeks to years, and go through several rounds of revision and resubmission before final publication. During this time,

PLOS - Misplaced Pages Continue

2646-403: The end of that year. In May 2017, PLOS announced that their new CEO would be Alison Mudditt with effect from June. In 2021, PLOS announced a policy that required changes in reporting for researchers working in other countries as an attempt to address neo-colonial parachute research practices. To fund the journals, PLOS charges an article processing charge (APC) to be paid by the author or

2709-402: The fee for authors from less developed economies . Steps are normally taken to ensure that peer reviewers do not know whether authors have requested, or been granted, fee waivers, or to ensure that every paper is approved by an independent editor with no financial stake in the journal. The main argument against requiring authors to pay a fee, is the risk to the peer review system, diminishing

2772-412: The following changes: An obvious advantage of open access journals is the free access to scientific papers regardless of affiliation with a subscribing library and improved access for the general public; this is especially true in developing countries. Lower costs for research in academia and industry have been claimed in the Budapest Open Access Initiative , although others have argued that OA may raise

2835-553: The full text of their articles available to all, free and unfettered, either immediately or after a delay of no more than six months. Although tens of thousands signed the petition, most did not act upon its terms; and in August 2001, Brown and Eisen announced that they would start their own nonprofit publishing operation. In December 2002, the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation awarded PLOS a $ 9 million grant, which it followed in May 2006 with

2898-517: The greatest possible research impact. As a means of achieving this, research funders are beginning to expect open access to the research they support. Many of them (including all UK Research Councils) have already adopted open-access mandates , and others are on the way to do so (see ROARMAP ). A growing number of universities are providing institutional repositories in which their researchers can deposit their published articles. Some open access advocates believe that institutional repositories will play

2961-604: The kinds of open access defined in the Budapest Open Access Initiative , the Bethesda Statement on Open Access Publishing and the Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge in the Sciences and Humanities . The re-use rights of libre OA are often specified by various specific Creative Commons licenses ; all of which require as a minimum attribution of authorship to the original authors. In 2012,

3024-516: The latter can monetise the process via dissemination and reproduction of the work. With OA publishing, typically authors retain copyright to their work, and license its reproduction to the publisher. Retention of copyright by authors can support academic freedoms by enabling greater control of the work (e.g. for image re-use) or licensing agreements (e.g. to allow dissemination by others). The most common licenses used in open access publishing are Creative Commons . The widely used CC BY license

3087-507: The number of works under libre open access was considered to have been rapidly increasing for a few years, though most open-access mandates did not enforce any copyright license and it was difficult to publish libre gold OA in legacy journals. However, there are no costs nor restrictions for green libre OA as preprints can be freely self-deposited with a free license, and most open-access repositories use Creative Commons licenses to allow reuse. The biggest drawback of many Open Access licenses

3150-1011: The overall quality of scientific journal publishing. No-fee open access journals, also known as "platinum" or "diamond" do not charge either readers or authors. These journals use a variety of business models including subsidies, advertising, membership dues, endowments, or volunteer labour. Subsidising sources range from universities, libraries and museums to foundations, societies or government agencies. Some publishers may cross-subsidise from other publications or auxiliary services and products. For example, most APC-free journals in Latin America are funded by higher education institutions and are not conditional on institutional affiliation for publication. Conversely, Knowledge Unlatched crowdsources funding in order to make monographs available open access. Estimates of prevalence vary, but approximately 10,000 journals without APC are listed in DOAJ and

3213-472: The publication of a print and online scientific journal entitled PLOS Biology , and has since launched 11 more journals. One, PLOS Clinical Trials , has since been merged into PLOS ONE . Following the merger, the company started the PLOS Hub for Clinical Trials to collect journal articles published in any PLOS journal that related to clinical trials; the hub was discontinued in July 2013. PLOS became

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3276-581: The publisher page, but lack a clearly identifiable license. Such articles are typically not available for reuse. Journals that publish open access without charging authors article processing charges are sometimes referred to as diamond or platinum OA. Since they do not charge either readers or authors directly, such publishers often require funding from external sources such as the sale of advertisements , academic institutions , learned societies , philanthropists or government grants . There are now over 350 platinum OA journals with impact factors over

3339-462: The publisher. Since open access publication does not charge readers, there are many financial models used to cover costs by other means. Open access can be provided by commercial publishers, who may publish open access as well as subscription-based journals, or dedicated open-access publishers such as Public Library of Science (PLOS) and BioMed Central . Another source of funding for open access can be institutional subscribers. One example of this

3402-550: The reader to pay to read the journal's contents, relying instead on author fees or on public funding, subsidies and sponsorships. Open access can be applied to all forms of published research output, including peer-reviewed and non peer-reviewed academic journal articles, conference papers , theses , book chapters, monographs , research reports and images. There are different models of open access publishing and publishers may use one or more of these models. Different open access types are currently commonly described using

3465-635: The reliable healthcare information they need to protect their own health and the health of others, and will be protected from health misinformation". HIFA explores how to meet the information needs of citizens as well as health workers and health policymakers, recognising the importance of citizens, parents and children as providers of care, especially in low-resource settings where health workers may be absent or hard to reach. The HIFA Strategy (2022–24) describes seven strategic shifts to accelerate progress towards universal access to reliable healthcare information: convene stakeholders; strengthen collaboration with

3528-486: The same work will have been extensively discussed with external collaborators, presented at conferences, and been read by editors and reviewers in related areas of research. Yet, there is no official open record of that process (e.g., peer reviewers are normally anonymous, reports remain largely unpublished), and if an identical or very similar paper were to be published while the original was still under review, it would be impossible to establish provenance. Preprints provide

3591-693: The term 'open access' and make the concept easier to discuss. Initially proposed in March 2016, it has subsequently been endorsed by organisations such as the European Commission and the G20 . The emergence of open science or open research has brought to light a number of controversial and hotly-debated topics. Scholarly publishing invokes various positions and passions. For example, authors may spend hours struggling with diverse article submission systems, often converting document formatting between

3654-421: The terms 'gratis' and 'libre' were used in the Budapest Open Access Initiative definition to distinguish between free to read versus free to reuse. Gratis open access ( [REDACTED] ) refers to free online access, to read, free of charge, without re-use rights. Libre open access ( [REDACTED] ) also refers to free online access, to read, free of charge, plus some additional re-use rights, covering

3717-482: The total cost of publication, and further increase economic incentives for exploitation in academic publishing. The open access movement is motivated by the problems of social inequality caused by restricting access to academic research, which favor large and wealthy institutions with the financial means to purchase access to many journals, as well as the economic challenges and perceived unsustainability of academic publishing. The intended audience of research articles

3780-781: The work openly available at the time of publication. The money might come from the author but more often comes from the author's research grant or employer. While the payments are typically incurred per article published (e.g. BMC or PLOS journals), some journals apply them per manuscript submitted (e.g. Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics until recently) or per author (e.g. PeerJ ). Charges typically range from $ 1,000–$ 3,000 ($ 5,380 for Nature Communications ) but can be under $ 10, close to $ 5,000 or well over $ 10,000. APCs vary greatly depending on subject and region and are most common in scientific and medical journals (43% and 47% respectively), and lowest in arts and humanities journals (0% and 4% respectively). APCs can also depend on

3843-446: The work, or to an independent central open repository, where people can download the work without paying. Green OA is free of charge for the author. Some publishers (less than 5% and decreasing as of 2014) may charge a fee for an additional service such as a free license on the publisher-authored copyrightable portions of the printed version of an article. If the author posts the near-final version of their work after peer review by

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3906-439: The work. The main focus of the open access movement has been on " peer reviewed research literature", and more specifically on academic journals . This is because: 1) such publications have been a subject of serials crisis , unlike newspapers , magazines and fiction writing . The main difference between these two groups is in demand elasticity : whereas an English literature curriculum can substitute Harry Potter and

3969-721: Was one of the founding partners in the Initiative for Open Citations . PLOS has its main headquarters in Suite 225 in the Koshland East Building in Levi's Plaza in San Francisco . Previously, the company had been located at 185 Berry Street. In June 2010, PLOS announced that it was moving to a new location in order to accommodate its rapid growth. The move to the Koshland East Building went into effect on 21 June 2010. Open-access journal Open access ( OA )

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