Hemai Parthasarathy who’s the managing editor of PLoS Biology, is leading a discussion at the Berkman Center. She was an editor at Nature for five years. PLoS was started to put scientific papers into the public domain. It started with genomics three years ago. It’s a peer-reviewed open access journal. They hired editors from established journals.It wants to be “inclusive of top-tier papers”: Instead of trying to determing the top .001% of papers, it aims at publishing maybe the top 1%.

PLoS has an “intrinsic tension” she says because most of the people who started the journal don’t believe in elite publishing. “We think it’s wrong for tenure committees to pass the buck” to the editors of the top-tier journals. That’s why they’ve started PLoS One. It launches in November. “The idea is to take the editorializing out of the peer review process.” It asks whether a paper is sound enough to be published, but not how important the paper is. “Publish everything worth publishing” that’s submitted, and then put a layer of open peer review conversation about it. “When I was at Nature, I’d reject ten papers a week in neuroscience alone because they weren’t important enough.” Then the papers would be passed on to the next five journals, and you’d lose all the information generated in the reviewing of that paper. “It’s incredibly inefficient.” “Peer review is overwhelming scientists. Scientists are getting asked to review twenty papers a week.”

PLoS’ “impact factor” is high — the average number of times papers in that journal are cited. But the measure is flawed, Hemai says. E.g., reviews and notes don’t get counted as articles but do draw citations, so the citations / articles number goes up; that’s why more journals are running more reviews, etc.

PLoS, she says, is “the thinking man’s open access journal.” It takes about 1% because it wants to keep quality high. Also, it raises the impact factor which helps them recruit high quality papers.

PLoS will have some type of quantifiable ranking system based on the open peer review system. “We’ll also do some topdown filtering. Some editorial board members will pick some articles from PLoS One to write about in PLoS Biology.” They haven’t decided whether to allow pseudonyms. Hemai seems to favor requiring real names, but she says the other side is that a post doc may be relucant to criticize a Nobel Laureate.

PLoS One will have a giant editorial board. Currently they have 180+ editors. Editors’ will append their name to the articles they approve.

Charlie Nesson points out this is a fascinating example of Internet governnance. “How can we help?” he asks. Hemai responds: “Make some of the subscription pool available to open access publications. And top down say that if you publish your papers in a way that other people can access them, that will be rewarded.” MIT, she says, has been working with Science Commons to make a copyright agreement and negotiate with the journals to allow articles to be open access. E.g., Harvard could require its scientists to deposit their articles in an open acccess archive, and could negotiate with the non-open journals to permit that.

PLoS raises money through advertising and through publication charges. Generally it’s the funding agencies — research institutions, universities — who pay these charges for the scientists. At PNAS (a journal), they can charge thousands of dollars to publish a color diagram. She says that Elsevier’s distributor, Sell Press (Cell? sp?), charges $5,000 to authors to make their articles available for free. “If you sponsor research, you want to sponsor its dissemination as well.”

There’s discussion about what Harvard can do and how publishing in open access journals can be rewarded. I say that it comes down to generating a reputation system that becomes a reliable guide so that someone going up for tenure can say not only that she was published at PLoS but that it got a something score of whatever (or some other metric).

There’s discussion of what university libraries can do. E.g., they can negotiate copyright permissions so that professors don’t get prevented — as they are now — from using their own materials in a class.

PLoS One is thinking about allowing revisions of papers to be published afterwards and associated with it. “The least publishable unit has been getting smaller and smaller as time goes by.”

PLoS will be built on open source software. “Long term, anyone can start their own journal.” (And maybe someday the journals are assembled on demand based on metadata because…wait for it…everything is miscellaneous.) [Tags: berkman plos science publishing everything_is_miscellaneous open_science]

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