[GOAL] Interview with Michael Eisen, co-founder of the Public Library of Science

[Richard Poynder]

Michael Eisen is an evolutionary biologist at University of California
Berkeley and an Investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. He is
also co-founder of the Open Access (OA) publisher Public Library of Science
(PLoS).

 

Founded in 2000, PLoS was conceived as an advocacy group for what only later
became known as Open Access. PLoS' first initiative was to publish an Open
Letter and invite scientists around the world to sign on to it.

 

Those signing pledged that henceforth they would "publish in, edit or review
for, and personally subscribe to only those scholarly and scientific
journals that have agreed to grant unrestricted free distribution rights to
any and all original research reports that they have published, through
PubMed Central and similar online public resources, within 6 months of their
initial publication date."

 

Nearly 34,000 scientists from 180 countries signed the pledge; but while a
small handful of publishers complied with the demands outlined in the
letter, most blithely ignored it. Worse, most of the scientist signatories
proved happy to forswear their own pledge, and continue publishing in the
very journals that had turned a deaf ear to them.

 

Disappointed but undeterred, Eisen and the other two PLoS co-founders -
biochemist Patrick Brown, and Nobel Laureate Harold Varmus - reinvented the
organisation as a non-profit publisher, and in 2003 they launched an OA
journal called PLoS Biology. PLoS Medicine followed a year later.

 

More here:  http://bit.ly/xTWJNF

 

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