PLOS and Open-Access publishing

Hi WK,I saw the first printed issue of PLOS. As you observed, the editorial board contains a group of bigwigs including a former editor for Nature Genetics. So in terms of personell running the show, it is no slouch. The articles were hard to distinguish in quality etc. from many other biology journals though none were as flashy, catchy, newsworthy as Nature or Science (not that this is a bad thing)..at least they had an article on elephants Thus far, it does not seem to be so different from your standard journal other than how it finances itself. I think it is way to early to tell if it will have an impact.

I also hope this particular experiment works. Harold Varmus has been championing such a system for a long time so it is good to see it take flight. But it will be an uphill struggle at first since impact factors and "newsworthiness" have an unhealthy hold on a lot of science at the moment. But at least it is a good step for the taxpayers who subsidize the research in the first place and then cannot read the results without paying a fortune to publishers like Elsevier.