PLOS
The twenty-four case studies in Made with CC were chosen from hundreds of nominations received from Kickstarter backers, Creative Commons staff, and the global Creative Commons community.
We did background research and conducted interviews for each case study, based on the same set of basic questions about the endeavor. The idea for each case study is to tell the story about the endeavor and the role sharing plays within it, largely the way in which it was told to us by those we interviewed.
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PLOS (Public Library of Science) is a nonprofit that publishes a library of academic journals and other scientific literature. Founded in 2000 in the U.S.
plos.org
Revenue model: charging content creators an author processing charge to be featured in the journal
Interview date: March 7, 2016
Interviewee: Louise Page, publisher
Profile written by Paul Stacey
The Public Library of Science (PLOS) began in 2000 when three leading scientists — Harold E. Varmus, Patrick O. Brown, and Michael Eisen — started an online petition. They were calling for scientists to stop submitting papers to journals that didn’t make the full text of their papers freely available immediately or within six months. Although tens of thousands signed the petition, most did not follow through. In August 2001, Patrick and Michael announced that they would start their own nonprofit publishing operation to do just what the petition promised. With start-up grant support from the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, PLOS was launched to provide new open-access journals for biomedicine, with research articles being released under Attribution (CC BY) licenses.
Traditionally, academic publishing begins with an author submitting a manuscript to a publisher. After in-house technical and ethical considerations, the article is then peer-reviewed to determine if the quality of the work is acceptable for publishing. Once accepted, the publisher takes the article through the process of copyediting, typesetting, and eventual publishing in a print or online publication. Traditional journal publishers recover costs and earn profit by charging a subscription fee to libraries or an access fee to users wanting to read the journal or article.
For Louise Page, the current publisher of PLOS, this traditional model results in inequity. Access is restricted to those who can pay. Most research is funded through government-appointed agencies, that is, with public funds. It’s unjust that the public who funded the research would be required to pay again to access the results. Not everyone can afford the ever-escalating subscription fees publishers charge, especially when library budgets are being reduced. Restricting access to the results of scientific research slows the dissemination of this research and advancement of the field. It was time for a new model.
That new model became known as open access. That is, free and open availability on the Internet. Open-access research articles are not behind a paywall and do not require a login. A key benefit of open access is that it allows people to freely use, copy, and distribute the articles, as they are primarily published under an Attribution (CC BY) license (which only requires the user to provide appropriate attribution). And more importantly, policy makers, clinicians, entrepreneurs, educators, and students around the world have free and timely access to the latest research immediately on publication.
However, open access requires rethinking the business model of research publication. Rather than charge a subscription fee to access the journal, PLOS decided to turn the model on its head and charge a publication fee, known as an article-processing charge. This up-front fee, generally paid by the funder of the research or the author’s institution, covers the expenses such as editorial oversight, peer-review management, journal production, online hosting, and support for discovery. Fees are per article and are billed upon acceptance for publishing. There are no additional charges based on word length, figures, or other elements.
Calculating the article-processing charge involves taking all the costs associated with publishing the journal and determining a cost per article that collectively recovers costs. For PLOS’s journals in biology, medicine, genetics, computational biology, neglected tropical diseases, and pathogens, the article-processing charge ranges from $2,250 to $2,900. Article-publication charges for PLOS ONE, a journal started in 2006, are just under $1,500.
PLOS believes that lack of funds should not be a barrier to publication. Since its inception, PLOS has provided fee support for individuals and institutions to help authors who can’t afford the article-processing charges.
Louise identifies marketing as one area of big difference between PLOS and traditional journal publishers. Traditional journals have to invest heavily in staff, buildings, and infrastructure to market their journal and convince customers to subscribe. Restricting access to subscribers means that tools for managing access control are necessary. They spend millions of dollars on access-control systems, staff to manage them, and sales staff. With PLOS’s open-access publishing, there’s no need for these massive expenses; the articles are free, open, and accessible to all upon publication. Additionally, traditional publishers tend to spend more on marketing to libraries, who ultimately pay the subscription fees. PLOS provides a better service for authors by promoting their research directly to the research community and giving the authors exposure. And this encourages other authors to submit their work for publication.
For Louise, PLOS would not exist without the Attribution license (CC BY). This makes it very clear what rights are associated with the content and provides a safe way for researchers to make their work available while ensuring they get recognition (appropriate attribution). For PLOS, all of this aligns with how they think research content should be published and disseminated.
PLOS also has a broad open-data policy. To get their research paper published, PLOS authors must also make their data available in a public repository and provide a data-availability statement.
Business-operation costs associated with the open-access model still largely follow the existing publishing model. PLOS journals are online only, but the editorial, peer-review, production, typesetting, and publishing stages are all the same as for a traditional publisher. The editorial teams must be top notch. PLOS has to function as well as or better than other premier journals, as researchers have a choice about where to publish.
Researchers are influenced by journal rankings, which reflect the place of a journal within its field, the relative difficulty of being published in that journal, and the prestige associated with it. PLOS journals rank high, even though they are relatively new.
The promotion and tenure of researchers are partially based how many times other researchers cite their articles. Louise says when researchers want to discover and read the work of others in their field, they go to an online aggregator or search engine, and not typically to a particular journal. The CC BY licensing of PLOS research articles ensures easy access for readers and generates more discovery and citations for authors.
Louise believes that open access has been a huge success, progressing from a movement led by a small cadre of researchers to something that is now widespread and used in some form by every journal publisher. PLOS has had a big impact. In 2012 to 2014, they published more open-access articles than BioMed Central, the original open-access publisher, or anyone else.
PLOS further disrupted the traditional journal-publishing model by pioneering the concept of a megajournal. The PLOS ONE megajournal, launched in 2006, is an open-access peer-reviewed academic journal that is much larger than a traditional journal, publishing thousands of articles per year and benefiting from economies of scale. PLOS ONE has a broad scope, covering science and medicine as well as social sciences and the humanities. The review and editorial process is less subjective. Articles are accepted for publication based on whether they are technically sound rather than perceived importance or relevance. This is very important in the current debate about the integrity and reproducibility of research because negative or null results can then be published as well, which are generally rejected by traditional journals. PLOS ONE, like all the PLOS journals, is online only with no print version. PLOS passes on the financial savings accrued through economies of scale to researchers and the public by lowering the article-processing charges, which are below that of other journals. PLOS ONE is the biggest journal in the world and has really set the bar for publishing academic journal articles on a large scale. Other publishers see the value of the PLOS ONE model and are now offering their own multidisciplinary forums for publishing all sound science.
Louise outlined some other aspects of the research-journal business model PLOS is experimenting with, describing each as a kind of slider that could be adjusted to change current practice.
One slider is time to publication. Time to publication may shorten as journals get better at providing quicker decisions to authors. However, there is always a trade-off with scale, as the bigger the volume of articles, the more time the approval process inevitably takes.
Peer review is another part of the process that could change. It’s possible to redefine what peer review actually is, when to review, and what constitutes the final article for publication. Louise talked about the potential to shift to an open-review process, placing the emphasis on transparency rather than double-blind reviews. Louise thinks we’re moving into a direction where it’s actually beneficial for an author to know who is reviewing their paper and for the reviewer to know their review will be public. An open-review process can also ensure everyone gets credit; right now, credit is limited to the publisher and author.
Louise says research with negative outcomes is almost as important as positive results. If journals published more research with negative outcomes, we’d learn from what didn’t work. It could also reduce how much the research wheel gets reinvented around the world.
Another adjustable practice is the sharing of articles at early preprint stages. Publication of research in a peer-reviewed journal can take a long time because articles must undergo extensive peer review. The need to quickly circulate current results within a scientific community has led to a practice of distributing pre-print documents that have not yet undergone peer review. Preprints broaden the peer-review process, allowing authors to receive early feedback from a wide group of peers, which can help revise and prepare the article for submission. Offsetting the advantages of preprints are author concerns over ensuring their primacy of being first to come up with findings based on their research. Other researches may see findings the preprint author has not yet thought of. However, preprints help researchers get their discoveries out early and establish precedence. A big challenge is that researchers don’t have a lot of time to comment on preprints.
What constitutes a journal article could also change. The idea of a research article as printed, bound, and in a library stack is outdated. Digital and online open up new possibilities, such as a living document evolving over time, inclusion of audio and video, and interactivity, like discussion and recommendations. Even the size of what gets published could change. With these changes the current form factor for what constitutes a research article would undergo transformation.
As journals scale up, and new journals are introduced, more and more information is being pushed out to readers, making the experience feel like drinking from a fire hose. To help mitigate this, PLOS aggregates and curates content from PLOS journals and their network of blogs.1 It also offers something called Article-Level Metrics, which helps users assess research most relevant to the field itself, based on indicators like usage, citations, social bookmarking and dissemination activity, media and blog coverage, discussions, and ratings.2 Louise believes that the journal model could evolve to provide a more friendly and interactive user experience, including a way for readers to communicate with authors.
The big picture for PLOS going forward is to combine and adjust these experimental practices in ways that continue to improve accessibility and dissemination of research, while ensuring its integrity and reliability. The ways they interlink are complex. The process of change and adjustment is not linear. PLOS sees itself as a very flexible publisher interested in exploring all the permutations research-publishing can take, with authors and readers who are open to experimentation.
For PLOS, success is not about revenue. Success is about proving that scientific research can be communicated rapidly and economically at scale, for the benefit of researchers and society. The CC BY license makes it possible for PLOS to publish in a way that is unfettered, open, and fast, while ensuring that the authors get credit for their work. More than two million scientists, scholars, and clinicians visit PLOS every month, with more than 135,000 quality articles to peruse for free.
Ultimately, for PLOS, its authors, and its readers, success is about making research discoverable, available, and reproducible for the advancement of science.
Web links
- collections.plos.org
- plos.org/article-level-metrics
