The PLoS combination of quality and quantity

Ginny Barbour Managing Editor PLoS Medicine

BioMed Central Colloquium

Thursday 8th February 2007, The Royal College of Physicians, London, UK

• “publishers should attempt to equate traditional publishing models with peer review”

• Eric Dezenhall, PR Consultant to Jeffrey Skilling, former Enron chief, ExxonMobil and, in 2006, to the Association of American Publishers

• “Media massaging is not the same as intellectual debate.”

“…the rigor of peer review is independent of the price, medium, and funding model of a journal.  Open Access may threaten the profits and market position of some publishers, but it does not threaten the quality of published science.”

Peter Suber, http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/fosblog.html

Actually, OA improves quality

• We don’t have to stick with the old models of publishing peer reviewed papers

• Right now, quality control ends when a paper is published, and interaction between authors and readers is rare

• The internet is a revolutionary technology and Web 2.0 can make the process of scientific publishing better by “harnessing collective intelligence”

• -Tim O'Reilly, 2006,Web 2.0 Compact Definition: Trying Again

Oct 2003Oct 2004

Open access 2.0

The Next

Generation

2005: Community Journals

Open access

•• Inclusive:

all of science and medicine• Objective pre-publication peer-

review: focusing on scientific rigor• Post-publication commentary:

interactive, dynamic, openCollaborative:

In Beta - open source software site being developed with input from users

• New ways of assessing quality:eg, user annotations

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•The literature is vast

•Machines can be used to discover previously unknown information

•Open access facilitates this discovery process

Why quality is so important:text mining and open access

Text mining

www.plos.org

Jensen, Saric and Bork Nature Reviews Genetics

Feb 2006

OA will improve the quality of the scientific record

• Makes papers more available for scrutiny

• Contributes more efficiently to the wider literature

• Web 2.0 has the potential to encourage active criticism and correction