A new approach to open-access publishing

PLoS ONE is the latest innovation from the Public Library of Science, a non-profit organisation making the world's research literature a freely available public resource.

PLoS ONE will return control over scholarly publishing to the research community by bringing together research from all areas of biology and medicine, offering authors an efficient and highly effective means to communicate their results and ideas and providing the community with powerful new tools for navigating and adding value to the published research literature.

"Scientists are eager to apply the awesome power of the Internet revolution to scientific communication, but have been stymied by the conservative nature of scientific publishing," said Michael B. Eisen, co-founder of PLoS and an assistant professor at the University of California, Berkeley.

"PLoS ONE redefines what a scientific journal should be " eliminating needless barriers between authors and their audience and transforming the published literature from a static series of articles into a dynamic, interconnected and constantly evolving resource for scientists and the public."

PLoS ONE will be an open public venue for all rigorous scientific research from every discipline. To enable the exploration of diverse content, PLoS ONE will employ powerful search and personalisation tools.

Users will be able to share their views on papers with the broader community through annotations and discussion threads, adding value to published material and creating powerful new ways for other readers to navigate and understand the literature.

Papers published by PLoS ONE will be held to rigorous standards of scientific quality. However, subjective considerations like "likely impact," "degree of advance," or "interest to a general reader" will not play a role in deciding whether an article should be published or not. Instead, published papers will be exposed to peer review in its fullest sense.

All readers will have the tools to add comments, annotations, and ratings to each article, so that post-publication review forms an integral part of the review process. PLoS ONE will empower the scientific community as a whole to engage in an open discussion on every piece of published work, capturing the varied and extremely valuable assessment of published papers that occurs after the work has been published.

PLoS ONE is the next step in PLoS's open-access publishing program, to ensure that all articles can be published in an open-access venue. PLoS ONE will launch later this year and will be accepting submissions from the beginning of August.