PLOS and the Open-Access Movement A Transformation in Scientific Communication Dr Senior Editor, PLOS Medicine of

Canadian Conference October 2012 What Is PLOS (Public Library of Science)?

• A non-profit organization with a mission to transform communication • A scientific publisher of 7 peer-reviewed journals • An innovator and developer of new technologies for research communication • An advocate of open access and adapting research communication to the web • Based in San Francisco and Cambridge + Toronto office

2 PLOS October, 2003 PLOS Medicine October, 2004

PLOS Community Journals June-September, 2005 & October, 2007 (NTDs)

PLOS ONE December, 2006 Public Library of Science

• 2000: founded as a non-profit organization of scientists and physicians committed to making the world’s scientific and medical literature a freely available public resource

• 2003: launched a non-profit scientific and medical venture that publishes high-quality, high-profile journals What is open access?

• Free, immediate online access

• Deposition in a digital public archive

• Unrestricted reuse

• Author retains the (not the publisher) • Users licensed to download, print, copy, redistribute with attribution (Creative attribution )

5 PLOS the Open Access advocate By "open access” we mean: –Immediate and unrestricted access to any reader –Available for any use with no restrictions –Only requiring that the authors to be attributed

Beware imitations Free Open access ≠ access

6 The problem

• Biomedical research results—the basis of medical knowledge—are privately owned and sold only to those who can afford it • Publishers make huge profits by restricting access • Shouldn’t medical research results be considered a global public good? • Most is funded by the public • Access to this knowledge is a global problem

7 The problem

• You write the research paper

• You give your work to publishers, you hand over copyright to them, they then sell it to wealthy readers

• A high profile drug trial – Can earn a journal $1m in reprint sales

• The work is subject to extremely tight copyright restrictions

8 Scientific publishing is big business

• Worth $19 billion/year • Massachusetts Medical Society: reported $US90 million in total revenue for 2009 • STM publishing: Fastest growing sub-sector of the media industry for the past 15 years • Just 3 companies (, Springer, ) own majority of the biomedical research articles indexed in the ISI • Aggressive lobbying for tighter copyright restrictions

9 The journals crisis 300

250 Journal 200 prices

150

100

Percent change Percent CPI/inflation 50

0 Journals purchased 1986 1987 1988 1989 1990 1991 1992 1993 1994 1995 1996 1997 1998 1999 2000 2001 2002 -50 Year

Source: Association of Research Libraries Who gets to see research results?

• Results of billions of dollars of research funding (NIH: $30bn in 2011) may be seen by only a small fraction of the intended audience, because research is published in journals that few individuals or institutions can afford to subscribe to

• Annual subscription to costs $24,038.40

11 12 What is open access?

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The solution • Make all research results freely available online • The changes everything: Cheap, Fast, Global, Search and retrieval

“It is now possible to share the results of medical research with anyone, anywhere, who could benefit from it. How could we not do it?” Harold Varmus, Nobel Laureate, PLOS Co-founder The ’s position • The publishing of scientific research does not operate in the interests of scientists and the public, but is instead dominated by a commercial market intent on improving its market position How are we doing? Rise of open access Governments/institutions adopt OA policies • European Commission, Research Councils UK, , Wellcome, NIH, Medical Research Council, UNESCO, Howard Hughes Medical, MacArthur Foundation, CERN, etc. adopt OA policies • Harvard, BYU, Columbia, Duke, MIT, UCSF, of Kansas, Princeton, Stanford, Emory, Arizona State, Boston U, Caltech, Oregon State, U Penn, Purdue, Wake Forest, etc.

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Rise of Open Access

The Public Library of Science

20 PLoS ONE Published Articles (per quarter, since launch)

2010: 6,700 articles. Largest journal in the World

2007: 1,200 articles. > 99.7% of all journals in the World 2011: 14,000 articles. ~1.5% of ALL Disruption of the Subscription Fee Model • PLOS has a sustainable in which our expenses — including those of , journal production, and online hosting and archiving — are recovered by charging a publication fee to the authors or research sponsors for each article they publish.

22 Publication Fees

• Subscription fees make sense with print • But online, cost of 2 readers = cost of 2000 readers, so why charge all 2000 readers? • Recover this cost up front • Publisher is a service provider (like a midwife) Subscription journals

Researcher € Gov Publisher Funders € € € € Institutions Industry

Pay-per-view Library Subscription

Reader Open access journals

Researcher Gov Funders € Publishing € is the final Institutions Industry step in a Publisher research project Public

Reader for change Publishers

• New publishers – BioMed Central – – Public Library of Science

• Existing publishers – PNAS, Oxford , Company of Biologists, Springer, Blackwell, Royal Society, Wiley, Taylor and Francis, Cambridge University Press, Elsevier, BMJ Publishing Group Why should you pay to read them? OA Versus Subscription Journal . OA journals overall have same impact as subscription . OA journals get more citations in some categories that subscription journals. . APC-funded OA journals founded in the last 10 years are on average cited more than other OA journals. . Funding mechanism no correlation with quality . OA journals approaching same scientific impact and quality as subscription journals

Source: study by Bo-Christer Björk and David Solomon comparing 2-year impact factors of OA and subscription journals. http://www.ukdistribute.com/links/1342176501903-Open%20access%20versus%20subscription%20journals_a%20comparison%20of%20scientific%20impact.pdf

28 How PLOS Measures Impact At the ARTICLE LEVEL, we track: • Citations (, PubMed Central, CrossRef) • Web usage (views, downloads) • Expert Ratings • Social bookmarking (CiteULike, Connotea, Mendeley) • Community rating (comments, ratings, notes) • Media/ coverage (New York Times, Huffington Post) • Commenting activity • Twitter and more…

• Collectively, we call these Article-Level Metrics (ALMs) • ALMs are available for every article PLOS publishes

29 ALMs Measure How Articles Are Used

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What more can we do?

• PLOS Article Level Metrics (ALM) project

– Martin Fenner (technical lead) – Medical Doctor and cancer researcher at Hannover Medical School

34 35 36 Tracking Attention • Article-level Metrics • Sub-article metrics • Beyond the Article • Different needs – Author – Researcher – Funder – Educator Caution about metrics:

Numbers don’t tell the whole story

38 “The Dirty War Index (DWI) method has been adapted for use in NATO military environments to monitor civilian, woman and child casualties. This version of the DWI is called a „Civilian Battle Damage Assessment Ratio‟ (CBDAR). Since October 2009, the CBDAR methodology has been used by NATO forces in Southern Afghanistan in order to reduce the possibility of injuring Afghan civilians. The methodology has identified a number of military activities that historically lead to civilian mortality that has led to NATO changing procedures.” Leading the transformation – the future • Reducing time from submission to publication • Making active and living papers the norm through innovation in presentation technology • Providing a personalized view of the literature • Achieving critical mass of fully open access literature within five years • Building a truly web-native research communication system

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