A Lot Can Happen in a Decade

This issue marks the 10-year anniversary of PLOS Biology, and it’s as good a time as any to pause and take stock of how the last decade, PLOS, and PLOS Biology have seen irreversible changes in academic publishing. And these changes are for the better. Historically, individual decades have seen changes in social norms and attitudes, changes that have, very occasionally, resulted in the unthinkable becoming...well, thinkable. This year, for example, the United States marked the 50 anniversary of Martin Luther King’s ‘I have a dream’ speech – a highlight of the American civil rights movement that achieved many important goals during a single decade and was in turn celebrated in the first decade of the 21 century by the election of the first African American to the office of President of the United States. Political and social change on this kind of scale requires not only attitudinal change—often brought about by campaigning communities—but also legislative support to act as the foundation for sustained change. For the Open Access movement, the last 10 years have been a pivotal time for addressing the financial and commercial considerations of academic publishing, moving from grass roots initiatives to the introduction of government policy changes. Over this same 10-year span of time, the world as we know it witnessed an acceleration of technological transformation, driven in large part by advanced internet and new communication technologies, which have easily kept pace with exponential growth predictions made from Moore’s law [1]. In the developed world, smartphones and tablets abound, and the world is connected for more hours per day than is probably healthy. And in developing countries, some non-profits, like the One Laptop per Child initiative [2], have sought to ensure that the younger generation in these countries won’t be left in the technological dark ages. From year to year, scientific, technical, and medical (STM) research has also advanced in leaps and bounds, with corresponding increases in the number of research publications (PubMed lists 1,059,583 papers published in 2012 compared with 561,605 in 2002). Studies in the humanities and social sciences also forge on with new findings and theories being published all the time. With the benefit of technology, the results of these academic pursuits can be published online and that one online copy is, theoretically, within the reach of everyone, everywhere. But is this really the case? Over the last decade, there has been an immense effort to change how accessible all of this new (and old) information is to the world at large. At PLOS Biology, we all feel immense pride in our 10-year involvement in the Open Access movement, which has seen a wide uptake and acceptance of open access publishing. Further progress toward greater accessibility occurred earlier this year with the introduction of a bill to the United States Senate and House of Representatives—the Fair Access to Science and Technology Research Act [3] (successor to the Federal Research Public Access Act)—which would mandate earlier public release of taxpayer-funded research. In the United Kingdom, the 2012 Finch report recommended that the United Kingdom support ‘gold’ open access publishing for immediate access to papers upon publication [4]. The response by Research Councils UK took the form of a new policy on open access, effective in 2013, to provide grants to UK Higher Education Institutes to support payment of article processing charges associated with open access publishing. The European Commission has a strategy in place that aims to make the results of projects funded by the EU Research Framework open access via either ‘green’ or ‘gold’ publishing. Australian Research Councils (ARC) implemented a policy at the start of 2013 requiring deposition of ARC-funded research publications in an open access institutional repository within 12 months of publication. Discussions about the costs during this transition phase are ongoing, and there remains a question of whether pushing for ‘green’ or ‘gold’ is the better route to take. But, regardless of its ‘colour’, the future for improved access to research is definitely bright. Although PLOS wasn’t the first open access publisher (BioMed Central, the first large-scale publisher devoted to open access, launched in 2000 and the Hindawi Publishing Corporation was also already on the scene), we have, we feel, played a pivotal role alongside these and other kindred publishers in promoting and supporting the progression and uptake of the Open Access movement. In a study published in 2011 in PLOS ONE, Laasko et al. discussed how open access publishing developed between 1993 and 2009, reporting an estimated 191,000 articles published in 2009 in 4,769 open access journals; an average annual growth rate of 18% in the number of open access journals from the year 2000, and an average annual growth rate of 30% in the number of open access articles. At the time of this writing, the Directory of Open Access Journals (also coincidentally celebrating their tenth anniversary this year—Happy Anniversary, DOAJ!) contains 9,901 journals and 1,503,096 articles. What an amazing achievement. After many scientists did not follow through on their initial pledges to support open access publishing, PLOS’ founders saw the need to fill a publishing hole, their intention being to create more open access venues where scientists could publish. The launch of PLOS had the additional desired effect of creating more pressure on traditional publishers to consider their business models. And, too, it met the need to dispel a myth— demonstrating that open access publishing did not equal vanity publishing, even though it is the author who pays the costs associated with publishing in this model. PLOS also