PLoS Medicine
PLoS Medicine is now accepting submissions for the first issue to be launched in the Fall 2004! This new open-access journal will publish significant advances in all medical disciplines, including epidemiology and public health. The studies will be selected by teams of academic and professional editors who are supported by expert peer-reviewers.
PLoS is a non-profit organization of scientists and physicians and everything they publish is available at no cost to users on their web site and in PubMed Central. Readers may read, download, redistribute and use the articles for free, provided they properly attribute the article to its original authors. In order to make the information free to users, PLoS’ business model is based on a publication charge of $1500, paid by the author or research sponsor (currently authors often pay commercial publishers for page or color charges). Importantly, authors retain all copyright to their published work.
Why does the world need another medical journal? The Public Library of Science web site explains: “Because there is no top-tier open-access forum for disseminating the peer-reviewed results of medical research across the full spectrum of disciplines. In addition to the compelling idea that work substantially funded with public money should be available to the public, the movement for open access is predicated on the notion that the practice and progress of medicine is more efficient when the medical literature is freely available online in centralized, searchable archives, immediately upon publication.” You can read more about why PLoS became a publisher in the editorial of volume 1, issue 1 of PLoS Biology , which was successfully launched in October 2003.
Visit the
Public Library of Science web site at http://www.plos.org
and consider contributing to the changing model of scientific publishing by submitting your best work to PLoS Medicine at http://www.plosmedicine.org/
