The Internet-fueled reinvention of the scientific journal took an important step forward with the announcement of PLoS ONE, a pioneering system for the publication and creative use of scientific and medical knowledge. PLoS ONE is the latest innovation from the Public Library of Science, a non-profit organization making the world's research literature a freely available public resource. PLoS ONE will return control over scholarly publishing to the research community by bringing together research from all areas of biology and medicine, offering authors an efficient and highly effective means to communicate their results and ideas, and providing the community with powerful new tools for navigating and adding value to the published research literature.

"Scientists are eager to apply the awesome power of the Internet revolution to scientific communication, but have been stymied by the conservative nature of scientific publishing," said Michael B. Eisen, co-founder of PLoS. "PLoS ONE redefines what a scientific journal should be – eliminating needless barriers between authors and their audience and transforming the published literature from a static series of articles into a dynamic, interconnected, and constantly evolving resource for scientists and the public."

At a time when the boundaries between different scientific disciplines are becoming more and more blurred, the scientific literature has become increasingly fragmented, with journals of narrow scope accessible only to a limited audience of subscribers. Rather than perpetuate these arbitrary and often meaningless divisions, PLoS ONE will be an open public venue for all rigorous scientific research from every discipline. To enable the exploration of diverse content, PLoS ONE will employ powerful search and personalization tools. Users will be able to share their views on papers with the broader community through annotations and discussion threads, adding value to published material and creating powerful new ways for other readers to navigate and understand the literature.

Papers published by PLoS ONE will be held to rigorous standards of scientific quality. However, subjective considerations like "likely impact," "degree of advance," or "interest to a general reader" will not play a role in deciding whether an article should be published or not. Instead, published papers will be exposed to peer review in its fullest sense. All readers will have the tools to add comments, annotations, and ratings to each article, so that post-publication review forms an integral part of the review process. PLoS ONE will empower the scientific community as a whole to engage in an open discussion on every piece of published work, capturing the varied and extremely valuable assessment of published papers that occurs after the work has been published.

With PLoS ONE, papers need no longer be static markers in an ongoing process of scientific discovery, but the beginning of a conversation between authors and readers alike. Authors looking back on papers written 6 months or a year ago may see things that they would have written differently; new data may have arisen to strengthen or alter some of the conclusions. PLoS ONE will provide authors with opportunities to make those changes and so acknowledge the evolution of their ideas. This will not alter the scientific record--the original paper is still the original paper--but authors and readers can build upon it. And anyone with an interest can read and benefit from this.

PLoS ONE is the next step in PLoS's open-access publishing program, to ensure that all articles can be published in an open-access venue, the foundations of which were laid by journals such as PLoS Biology and PLoS Medicine. PLoS ONE will launch later this year and will be accepting submissions from the beginning of August. >from *Public Library of Science announces PLoS ONE: A new approach to open-access publishing* . June 7, 2006

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> experiment in changing scientific culture. april 20, 2006
> ten simple rules for getting published. october 28, 2005
> new study weighs impact of open access on scholarly journals. october 11, 2005
> the role of rss in science publishing. december, 2004
> berlin declaration: science and culture accessible to all internet users. november 5, 2003
> science commons: building a free flow of knowledge. march 15, 2002
> budapest open access initiative: open access to scholarly journal literature. february 18, 2002
> public library of science journals: a new model for scientific publishing. september 10, 2001
> science must push copyright aside by richard stallman. june 20, 2001

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> breaking thes scientiarum acta barrier acces

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