Featured Commoner: PLoS Biology

Staff members of the Creative Commons, an organization seeking alternatives to copyright in the face of increasingly restrictive default rules, recently interviewed Michael Eisen, biologist at Lawrence Berkeley National Lab and UC Berkeley and co-founder of the Public Library of Science, about the launch of PLoS Biology, its publication under a Creative Commons license, and its promise to transform open access models, the scientific community, and the world. This week, PLoS moved closer to realizing this dream with the release of its first open access publication: PLoS Biology, a world-class, peer-reviewed scientific journal.

http://creativecommons.org/getcontent/features/plos
(Creative Commons Featured Commoner, October 2003)

The Public Library of Science is a nonprofit organization dedicated to making the world's scientific and medical literature a freely available public resource. PLoS emerged in October 2000 through the effort of three dynamic and highly respected scientists: Nobel Laureate and former head of the National Institutes of Health Harold Varmus, molecular biologist Pat Brown of Stanford University, and biologist Michael Eisen of Lawrence Berkeley National Lab and UC Berkeley. This trio's dream, as the L.A. Times put it, is to build "a world in which the many thousands of scientific journals . . . are placed in an electronic library open to the public."

Posted by Tom on October 16, 2003