Meeting the Needs of Different Research Communities

P LoS was founded in October 2000 not as a publisher, but as a grassroots movement of researchers who believed that the results of the global research enterprise should be a freely available public resource. So why did PLoS become a publisher, and what are we doing in this role to serve the world's varying biomedical researchers and clinicians? At its inception, the fi rst action by PLoS was to encourage scientifi c and medical journal publishers to make the archival research literature freely available. An open letter, signed by almost 34,000 scientists from 180 countries, urged publishers to deposit copies of their research articles in a full text public repository, such as PubMed Central, within six months of publication. Sadly, the vast majority of publishers declined to deposit their works—a depressing situation that continues to this day. We concluded that the only way forward was to publish our own journals. These would provide an alternative, open-access venue for important discoveries in science and medicine and would serve as a model for showing that open-access publication is viable. The fi rst phase of our life as a publisher involved launching our two fl agship journals—PLoS Biology in October 2003 and PLoS Medicine in October 2004. These two journals provide an open-access alternative to the best subscription journals in the life sciences and medicine, respectively. These fi rst journals have helped to put open access on the map. In the 18 months since we started as a publisher not only have many researchers embraced these fl edgling journals as a top tier " home " for their work, but also there has been growing international support for open-access initiatives. For example, 55 institutions worldwide have so far signed the Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge in the Science and Humanities. Beginning this month, researchers who are funded by the United States National Institutes of Health are being asked by the agency to deposit a copy of their accepted research papers into PubMed Central. And in the United Kingdom, the Wellcome Trust is making it a requirement of its grant conditions that Wellcome Trust–funded researchers deposit an electronic version of their manuscripts in a UK portal of PubMed Central within six months of publication. PLoS is now entering its second phase as a publisher, in which we launch the fi rst three PLoS community journals. The case for launching these journals …