PLoS ONE, Open Access, and the Future of Scholarly Publishing

Open Access (OA) advocates argue that PLoS ONE is now the largest scholarly journal in the world. Its parent organisation — Public Library of Science (PLoS) — was co-founded in 2001 by Nobel Laureate Harold Varmus. What does the history of PLoS tell us about the development of PLoS ONE? What does the success of PLoS ONE tell us about OA? And what does the current rush by other publishers to clone PLoS ONE tell us about the future of scholarly communication?

Our story begins in 1998, in a coffee shop located on the corner of Cole and Parnassus in San Francisco. It was here, Harold Varmus reports, that the seeds of PLoS were sown, during a seminal conversation he had with colleague Patrick Brown. Only at that point did Varmus realise what a mess scholarly communication was in. Until then, he says, he had been “an innocent person who went along with the system as it existed”.

Enlightenment began when Brown pointed out to Varmus that when scientists publish their papers they routinely (and without payment) assign ownership in them to the publisher. Publishers then lock the papers behind a paywall and charge other researchers a toll (subscription) to read them, thereby restricting the number of potential readers.

Since scientists crave readers (and the consequent “impact”) above all else, Brown reminded Varmus, the current system is illogical, counterproductive, and unfair to the research community. While it may have been necessary to enter into this Faustian bargain with publishers in a print environment (since it was the only way to get published, and print inevitably restricts readership), Brown added, it is no longer necessary in an online world — where the only barriers to the free-flow of information are artificial ones.

Physicists, Brown said, have overcome this “access” problem by posting preprints of all their papers on a web-based server called arXiv. Created by Paul Ginsparg in 1991, arXiv allows physical scientists to ensure that their work is freely available to all. “Should not the biomedical sciences be doing something similar?” Brown asked Varmus.

It was doubtless no accident that Brown — who had previously worked with the Nobel Laureate — chose Varmus as his audience for a lecture on scholarly publishing: at the time Varmus was director of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) — the largest source of funding for medical research in the world. He was, therefore, ideally placed to spearhead the revolution that Brown believed was necessary.

Fortunately for the open access movement (as it later became known) Varmus immediately grasped the nature of the problem — aided perhaps by some residual Zen wisdom emanating from the walls of the coffee shop they were sitting in, which had once been the Tassajara Bakery. Varmus emerged from the café persuaded that it would be a good thing if publicly-funded research could be freed from the publishers’ digital padlocks. And he went straight back to the NIH to consult with colleagues to that end.

Again fortuitously, one of the first people Varmus broached the topic with was David Lipman — director of the NIH-based National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI). NCBI was home to the OA sequence database GenBank, and Lipman was an enthusiastic supporter of the notion that research should be freely available on the Web. By now Varmus’ conversion was complete.

This conversion was to see Varmus embark on a journey that would lead to the founding of a new publisher called Public Library of Science, the launch of two prestigious OA journals (PLoS Biology and PLoS Medicine), and subsequently to the creation of what OA advocates maintain is now the largest scholarly journal in the world — PLOS ONE.

As we shall see, Varmus’ journey was to prove no walk in the park, and some believe his project lost its bearings on the way. Rather than providing a solution, they argue, PLoS may have become part of the problem.

Certainly PLoS ONE has proved controversial. This became evident to me last year, when a researcher drew my attention to a row that had erupted over a paper the journal had published on “wind setdown”.

Even some of the journal’s own academic editors appeared to be of the view that the paper should not have been published (in its current form at least). As the row appeared to raise questions about PLoS ONE’s review process — and about PLoS ONE more broadly — I contacted PLoS ONE executive editor Damian Pattinson.

The response I got served only to pique my interest: While Pattinson invited me to send over a list of questions, I subsequently received an email from PLoS ONE publisher Peter Binfield informing me that it had been decided not to answer my questions after all. 

To read on please click here (for a long PDF file). 

The PDF includes a response from PLoS. I will also be publishing the response as a separate post. (Now available here).
 

This article was cited in a 2011 report on peer review in scientific publications by the British House of Commons Science and Technology Committee.


**** UPDATE FEBRUARY 2012: AN INTERVIEW WITH PUBLIC LIBRARY OF SCIENCE CO-FOUNDER MICHAEL EISEN IS NOW AVAILABLE HERE ****