As part of my coverage of the evoultion of the debate over open access (the story should run on Wired News this week), I emailed some questions to Public Library of Science, one of the leading open-access publishers.
Mark Patterson, director of publishing, responded.
First, I asked what PloS thinks about the publicity campaign that's been launched by traditional publishers who want to prevent mandatory open access:
The action by the AAP [Association of American Publishers] is anindication of how strong the open access movement has become. There hasbeen huge progress towards open access over the past year inparticular, and comprehensive open access is now inevitable.
PLoS
will continue to build an outstanding open access publishing operation,
and promote public access to all research publications…
The PLoS journals themselves are open access, peer-reviewed, andpublish great science. The quality of these journals speaks for itself.
What about the financial status of PloS? (Some open-access journals are having trouble making a profit.]
PLoS
is supported by a mixture of philanthropy and revenue from ourpublishing operation, and we are on a path towards financialself-sufficiency.
I also asked about the PloS system, which generally requires authors to pay to be published.
As for author payment, our current prices are listed at http://www.plos.org/journals/pubfees.html.
Weoffer a complete or partial fee waiver for authors who do not havefunds to cover publication fees. Editors and reviewers have no accessto author payment information, and so the inability to pay the fee willnot influence the publishing decision about a paper.
