Why PLoS Became a Publisher

Communication among scientists has undergone a revolution in the last decade, with the movement of scientific publication to a digital medium and the emergence of the Internet as the primary means for distributing information. Millions of articles are, in principle, just a mouse click away from our computers. For many of us, PDFs have replaced printed journals as the primary form in which we read about the work of our colleagues. Yet we have barely begun to realize the potential of this technological change. For practicing scientists, it provides myriad opportunities to expand and improve the ways we can use the scientific literature. Equally important, it is now possible to make our treasury of scientific information available to a much wider audience, including millions of students, teachers, physicians, scientists, and other potential readers, who do not have access to a research library that can afford to pay for journal subscriptions. We founded the Public Library of Science three years ago to work toward realizing these opportunities. We began as a grassroots organization of scientists, advocating the establishment and growth of online public libraries of science, such as the National Institutes of Health’s PubMed Central, to provide free and unrestricted access to the scientific literature. Today, with the launch of PLoS Biology, we take on a new role as publishers, to demonstrate that high-quality journals can flourish without charging for access.