PLOS and Open-Access publishing

Happy New Year everybody!Now that we are firmly entrenched in the 21st century is it time for a new publishing paradigm to take off in science? Is open-access 'the next big thing'? After the arguably poor success, or possibly just very slow getting off the ground, of the biomedcentral site's Journals is PLOS going to be able to make a proper go of it? Has anyone read PLOS Biology and feels it is going to revolutionise things? I certainly like the fact that the Biomedcentral model gets rid of grant money being sucked up just for getting a publication. PLOS only seems to offer discounted publishing rates, although at the top end the discount is 75% which is pretty hefty, which doesn't seem as handy to me.So what are peoples thoughts and feelings about this 'new' model for scientific publishing?

As far as PLOS is concerned the editorial board seems pretty solid, at least I recognise several big names from my own field. In terms of money, there is still cash coming in from people wanting to publish in the journal, either individual payments to publish or large one off payments by institutions allowing all their staff to publish in the journals for a year (in the case of BMC.PLOS also produces a print run of its issues which at the moment is pretty cheap compared to most journals, somewhere in the region of $160. One major advantage of the open access model is that you can simply download the PDF version of the article and keep it yourself and freely distribute it - legally, although I appreciate this won't help in finding old references several years hence.

I think the fact that anyone knows about it already after only 3 issues is a pretty good sign compared to previous efforts. BMC never really seemed to get much publicity, even when a whole lot of universities took up institutional subscriptions a year or two after it had started up. PLOS seems to have made a pretty strong concerted push to advertise themselves, particularly at lab level, I have seen a few of the online PLOS posters with people like James Watson giving endorsements, stuck up around my department.

PLOS is short for the Public Library Of Science. PLOS is a non-profit organisation starting up science journals using an open access model where the money comes mostly from the labs submitting the papers rather than from the subscribers buying the journals. The papers are published online and access to them is free.