Google-PLoS current produces open access without author fee
I have not really looked closely at PLoS Currents until now, but being aware that breaking into PLoS comes with a hefty author fee price tag of $1350 -$2900, I was pleasantly surprised to discover that PLoS Currents is open access without the inhibition of a high author fee….I mean there is no fee at all. The catch? The author or his human resources does all the labor to create an attractive multimedia online document with a designated Google beta app called Knol™.
Who would be interested in forgoing the prestige of a journal publication?
My experience and observations suggest there are lots of people that understand that in the digital scholarship world, sharing immediate impact research rapidly is both valuable and rewarding. arXiv, the well-regarded open access repositories for physics, mathematics, computer science, and other fields has since 1991 been demonstrating the benefits and rewards of pre-publication sharing. Researchers in these disciplines allow colleagues and the international public to see and test the results, open, available, and shared as rapidly as possible.
The blogosphere is built upon the notion that rapid sharing of knowledge that others want to read or experience fuels interest, motivation, and in a few instances, careers that are about knowing and sharing.
In the biomedical scholarly community, I have witnessed the most audacious and innovative content for medical education from educators who already accomplished their tenure status and fully intend to forgo any realistic expectation of compensation or credit to share their knowledge or expertise in an innovative format. You can see the fruits of the labors and freely access their creations in the AAMC MedEdPORTAL and Heal, the Health Education Assets Library
PLoS Currents intends go beyond their fast-track journal publication system to minimize the delay between the generation and publication of new research. The content is peer-reviewed, citable, publicly archived, and included in PubMed, avoiding the morass of blogs and using their brand to spark an acceleration of the research cycle itself.Authors use Knol™ to write their submission and control of the appearance of their article. Submission to publication can take place in a matter of day with no slow down for an author fee transaction. Besides Influenza, launched in response to the worldwide H1N1 influenza outbreak sections on Huntington Disease , Evidence on Genomic Tests , phylogenetic studies called the Tree of Life, as well as Muscular Dystrophy and Disasters. If you are already thinking about an area of urgent importance not listed here, please contact the editors.
You might consider watching this short video showing how the average computer user can create a Knol™:
PLoS Currents provides an innovative approach to Open Access publishing. I’ve been watching its growth since the first of its journals, PLoS Currents: Influenza, was established in August of 2009. There are now six PLoS Currents journals. So far, 75 articles have been published in PLoS Currents: Influenza. The highest number of views for any of these articles has been 19,000, for an article accepted on August 27, 2009. As might be expected, the other more recently-established PLoS Currents journals have published fewer articles. At this early date, it’s difficult to evaluate the impact of these journals. With what journals should they be compared? What does seem clear is that the experiment with these journal will (and should) continue.