PLOS (for Public Library of Science; PLoS until 2012 ) is a nonprofit publisher of

open-access journal Open access (OA) is a set of principles and a range of practices through which research outputs are distributed online, free of access charges or other barriers. With open access strictly defined (according to the 2001 definition), or libre op ...

s in science, technology, and medicine and other

scientific literature : ''For a broader class of literature, see Academic publishing.'' Scientific literature comprises scholarly publications that report original empirical and theoretical work in the natural and social sciences. Within an academic field, scient ...

, under an open-content license. It was founded in 2000 and launched its first journal, ''

PLOS Biology ''PLOS Biology'' is a monthly peer-reviewed scientific journal covering all aspects of biology. Publication began on October 13, 2003. It is the first journal published by the Public Library of Science. The editor-in-chief is Nonia Pariente. In ad ...

'', in October 2003. As of 2022, PLOS publishes 12 academic journals, including 7 journals indexed within the

Science Citation Index Expanded The Science Citation Index Expanded – previously entitled Science Citation Index – is a citation index originally produced by the Institute for Scientific Information (ISI) and created by Eugene Garfield. It was officially launched in 1964 and ...

, and consequently 7 journals ranked with an

impact factor The impact factor (IF) or journal impact factor (JIF) of an academic journal is a scientometric index calculated by Clarivate that reflects the yearly mean number of citations of articles published in the last two years in a given journal, as i ...

. PLOS journals are included in the

Directory of Open Access Journals The Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) is a website that hosts a community-curated list of open access journals, maintained by Infrastructure Services for Open Access (IS4OA). It was launched in 2003 with 300 open access journals. The proje ...

(DOAJ). PLOS is also a member of the

Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association The Open Access Scholarly Publishing Association (OASPA) is a non-profit trade association of open access journal and book publishers. Having started with an exclusive focus on open access journals, it has since expanded its activities to include ...

(OASPA), a participating publisher and supporter of the

Initiative for Open Citations The Initiative for Open Citations (I4OC) is a project launched publicly in April 2017, that describes itself as: "a collaboration between scholarly publishers, researchers, and other interested parties to promote the unrestricted availability of ...

, and a member of the

Committee on Publication Ethics The Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) is a nonprofit organization whose stated mission is to define best practice in the ethics of scholarly publishing and to assist editors and publishers to achieve this. Mission COPE educates and su ...

(COPE).

History

The Public Library of Science began in 2000 with an online petition initiative by

Nobel Prize The Nobel Prizes ( ; sv, Nobelpriset ; no, Nobelprisen ) are five separate prizes that, according to Alfred Nobel's will of 1895, are awarded to "those who, during the preceding year, have conferred the greatest benefit to humankind." Alfr ...

winner

Harold Varmus Harold Eliot Varmus (born December 18, 1939) is an American Nobel Prize-winning scientist. He is currently the Lewis Thomas University Professor of Medicine at Weill Cornell Medicine and a senior associate at the New York Genome Center. He was a ...

, formerly director of the

National Institutes of Health The National Institutes of Health, commonly referred to as NIH (with each letter pronounced individually), is the primary agency of the United States government responsible for biomedical and public health research. It was founded in the late ...

and at that time director of

Memorial Sloan–Kettering Cancer Center Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center (MSK or MSKCC) is a cancer treatment and research institution in the borough of Manhattan in New York City, founded in 1884 as the New York Cancer Hospital. MSKCC is one of 52 National Cancer Institute– ...

;

Patrick O. Brown Patrick O'Reilly Brown (born 1954) is an American scientist and businessman who is the chief executive and founder of Impossible Foods Inc. and professor emeritus in the department of biochemistry at Stanford University. Brown is co-founder of th ...

, a

biochemist Biochemists are scientists who are trained in biochemistry. They study chemical processes and chemical transformations in living organisms. Biochemists study DNA, proteins and Cell (biology), cell parts. The word "biochemist" is a portmanteau of ...

Stanford University Stanford University, officially Leland Stanford Junior University, is a private research university in Stanford, California. The campus occupies , among the largest in the United States, and enrolls over 17,000 students. Stanford is consider ...

; and

Michael Eisen Michael Bruce Eisen (born April 13, 1967) is an American computational biologist and the editor-in-chief of the journal eLife. He is a professor of genetics, genomics and development at University of California, Berkeley. He is a leading advocate o ...

, a

computational biologist Computational biology refers to the use of data analysis, mathematical modeling and computational simulations to understand biological systems and relationships. An intersection of computer science, biology, and big data, the field also has fo ...

at the

University of California, Berkeley The University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley, Berkeley, Cal, or California) is a public land-grant research university in Berkeley, California. Established in 1868 as the University of California, it is the state's first land-grant u ...

, and the

Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL), commonly referred to as the Berkeley Lab, is a United States Department of Energy National Labs, United States national laboratory that is owned by, and conducts scientific research on behalf of, t ...

. The petition called for all scientists to pledge that from September 2001 they would discontinue submission of articles to journals that did not make the full text of their articles available to all, free and unfettered, either immediately or after a delay of no more than six months. Although tens of thousands signed the petition, most did not act upon its terms; and in August 2001, Brown and Eisen announced that they would start their own nonprofit publishing operation. In December 2002, the

Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation The Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation is an American foundation established by Intel co-founder Gordon E. Moore and his wife Betty I. Moore in September 2000 to support scientific discovery, environmental conservation, patient care improvements a ...

awarded PLOS a $9 million grant, which it followed in May 2006 with a $1 million grant to help PLOS achieve financial sustainability and launch new free-access biomedical journals. The PLOS organizers turned their attention to starting their own journal, along the lines of the UK-based

BioMed Central BioMed Central (BMC) is a United Kingdom-based, for-profit scientific open access publisher that produces over 250 scientific journals. All its journals are published online only. BioMed Central describes itself as the first and largest open a ...

, which has been publishing open-access scientific articles in the biological sciences in journals such as ''Genome Biology'' since 2000. As a publishing company, the Public Library of Science officially launched its operation on 13 October 2003, with the publication of a print and online scientific journal entitled ''

'', and has since launched 11 more journals. One, ''PLOS Clinical Trials'', has since been merged into '' PLOS ONE''. Following the merger, the company started the PLOS Hub for Clinical Trials to collect journal articles published in any PLOS journal and relating to clinical trials; the hub was discontinued in July 2013. The PLOS journals are what is described as "open-access content"; all content is published under the

Creative Commons Creative Commons (CC) is an American non-profit organization and international network devoted to educational access and expanding the range of creative works available for others to build upon legally and to share. The organization has release ...

"attribution" license. The project states (quoting the

Budapest Open Access Initiative The Budapest Open Access Initiative (BOAI) is a public statement of principles relating to open access to the research literature, which was released to the public on February 14, 2002. It arose from a conference convened in Budapest by the Open S ...

) that: "The only constraint on reproduction and distribution, and the only role for copyright in this domain, should be to give authors control over the integrity of their work and the right to be properly acknowledged and cited." In 2011, the Public Library of Science became an official financial supporting organization of

Healthcare Information For All by 2015 Healthcare Information For All (HIFA) is a global campaign and community of practice of health professionals, publishers, librarians, technologists, researchers, policymakers, and patient representatives, working to improve the availability and u ...

, a global initiative that advocates unrestricted access to medical knowledge, sponsoring the first HIFA2015 Webinar in 2012. In 2012 the organization quit using the stylization "PLoS" to identify itself and began using only "PLOS". In 2016, PLOS confirmed that their

chief executive officer A chief executive officer (CEO), also known as a central executive officer (CEO), chief administrator officer (CAO) or just chief executive (CE), is one of a number of corporate executives charged with the management of an organization especially ...

Elizabeth Marincola Elizabeth Marincola is the Senior Advisor for Communications and Advocacy at the African Academy of Sciences and is responsible for AAS Open Research, the Academy’s publishing platform. She has advocated for increased government resources dedicat ...

would be leaving for personal and professional reasons at the end of that year. In May 2017, PLOS announced that their new CEO would be Alison Mudditt with effect from June. In 2021, PLOS announced a policy that required changes in reporting for researchers working in other countries as an attempt to address neo-colonial parachute research practices.

Financial model

To fund the journals, PLOS charges an

article processing charge An article processing charge (APC), also known as a publication fee, is a fee which is sometimes charged to authors. Most commonly, it is involved in making a work available as open access (OA), in either a full OA journal or in a hybrid journal. ...

(APC) to be paid by the author or the author's employer or funder. In the United States, institutions such as the National Institutes of Health and the

Howard Hughes Medical Institute The Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) is an American non-profit medical research organization based in Chevy Chase, Maryland. It was founded in 1953 by Howard Hughes, an American business magnate, investor, record-setting pilot, engineer, fil ...

have pledged that recipients of their grants will be allocated funds to cover such author charges. The Global Participation Initiative (GPI) was instituted in 2012, by which authors in "group-one countries" are not charged a fee, and those in group-two countries are given a fee reduction. (In all cases, decisions to publish are based solely on editorial criteria.) PLOS was launched with grants totaling US$13 million from the

and the Sandler Family Supporting Foundation. PLOS confirmed in July 2011 that it no longer relies on subsidies from foundations and is covering all of its operational costs. Since then the PLOS balance sheet has improved from $20,511,000 net assets in 2012–2013 to $36,591,000 in 2014–2015.

Publications

Other partners

In April 2017, PLOS was one of the founding partners in the

Headquarters

PLOS has its main headquarters in Suite 225 in the Koshland East Building in

Levi's Plaza Levi Strauss Plaza, also known as Levi Plaza or Levi's Plaza, is an office complex located in North Beach/Telegraph Hill along The Embarcadero in San Francisco, California.Ginsberg, Steve. "Levi Strauss inks $300M headquarters deal." ''San Franc ...

San Francisco San Francisco (; Spanish language, Spanish for "Francis of Assisi, Saint Francis"), officially the City and County of San Francisco, is the commercial, financial, and cultural center of Northern California. The city proper is the List of Ca ...

. Previously, the company had been located at 185 Berry Street. In June 2010, PLOS announced that it was moving to a new location in order to accommodate its rapid growth. The move to the Koshland East Building went into effect on 21 June 2010.

Footnotes

References

*Adam, David
"Scientists Take on the Publishers in an Experiment to Make Research Free to All"
''The Guardian,'' 6 October 2003. *Albanese, Andrew. "Open Access Gains with PLoS Launch: Scientists Call for Cell Press Boycott; Harvard Balks on Big Deal." ''Library Journal,'' 15 November 2003, 18–19. * * ** *Butler, Declan

''Nature'', 2 August 2001, 469. * *Case, Mary. "The Public Library of Science." ''ARL: A Bimonthly Report on Research Library Issues and Actions from ARL, CNI, and SPARC,'' no. 215 (2001): 4. https://web.archive.org/web/20151110091642/http://www.arl.org/newsltr/215/plos.html * * * *Doyle, Helen. "Public Library of Science (PLoS): Committed to Making the World's Scientific and Medical Literature A Public Resource." ''ASIDIC Newsletter,'' no. 87 (2004): 9–10. https://nfais.memberclicks.net/assets/ASIDIC/Newsletters/s04_newsletter.pdf * * *Eisen, Michael. "Publish and Be Praised." ''The Guardian,'' 9 October 2003. http://www.guardian.co.uk/life/opinion/story/0,12981,1058578,00.html *Foster, Andrea L. "Scientists Plan 2 Online Journals to Make Articles Available Free." ''The Chronicle of Higher Education,'' 10 January 2003, A29. * *Kleiner, Kurt. "Free Online Journal Gives Sneak Preview." ''New Scientist,'' 19 August 2003, 18. https://www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp?id=ns99994071 * *Malakoff, David. "Opening the Books on Open Access." ''Science Magazine,'' 24 October 2003, 550–554. *Mantell, Katie. "Open-Access Journal Seeks to Cut Costs for Researchers." ''SciDev.Net,'' 15 January 2004. http://www.scidev.net/News/index.cfm?fuseaction=readNews&itemid=1194&language=1 ** * * * *Mellman, Ira. "Setting Logical Priorities: A Boycott Is Not the Best Route to Free Exchange of Scientific Information." ''Nature'', 26 April 2001, 1026. * *Olsen, Florence. "Scholars Urge Boycott of Journals That Won't Join Free Archives." ''The Chronicle of Higher Education,'' 6 April 2001, A43. *Peek, Robin. "Can Science and Nature Be Trumped?" ''Information Today'' 20, no. 2 (2003): 19, 50–51. *———. "The Future of the Public Library of Science." ''Information Today'' 19, no. 2 (2002): 28. *———. "The Scholarly Publisher as Midwife." ''Information Today'' 18, no. 7 (2001): 32. *Pickering, Bobby. "Medical Journals to Get Open Access Rival." ''Information World Review,'' 21 May 2004. http://www.iwr.co.uk/iwreview/1155321 *Public Library of Science. "Open Letter to Scientific Publishers." (2001). http://www.plos.org/about/letter.html *Reich, Margaret. "Peace, Love, and PLoS." ''The Physiologist'' 2003; 46(4): 137, 139–141. https://web.archive.org/web/20041223045509/http://www.the-aps.org/news/PloS.pdf * * * *Suber, Peter. "The Launch of PLoS Biology." ''SPARC Open Access Newsletter'', no. 67 (2003). http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/newsletter/11-02-03.htm#launch * * *Velterop, Jan. "Vendor View." ''Information World Review,'' 1 December 2001. http://www.iwr.co.uk/iwreview/1150688 *Wadman, Meredith. "Publishers Challenged over Access to Papers." ''Nature,'' 29 March 2001, 502. *

External links

* {{authority control Organizations based in San Francisco Science and technology in the San Francisco Bay Area Open access publishers Non-profit academic publishers Articles containing video clips