New publication: PLoS Medicine
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"Call for Papers" to publish in PLoS Medicine
Helen J. Doyle, Ph.D.
Director of Development and Strategic Alliances
Public Library of Science (PLos)
San Francisco, CA, USA
mailto:hdoyle@plos.org
http://www.plos.org
For more information, contact:
Barbara Cohen (US): mailto:bcohen@plos.org
Virginia Barbour (UK): mailto:vbarbour@plos.org
PUBLIC LIBRARY OF SCIENCE TO LAUNCH INTERNATIONAL OPEN-ACCESS
MEDICAL JOURNAL
May 5, 2004, San Francisco -- New discoveries about human health
and disease will be made freely and immediately available to
anyone in the world with an Internet connection -- from physi-
cians and researchers to patients and policy makers -- in a new
open-access medical journal, PLoS Medicine, to be launched in
Autumn, 2004.
"Thanks to the Internet and new strategies for financing publi-
cation costs, 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?" argued Dr. Harold E. Varmus, Nobel laure-
ate, former National Institutes of Health Director, and one of
the co-founders of the Public Library of Science [PLoS].
PLoS, a non-profit organization whose mission is to make reli-
able scientific and medical literature a public resource, for-
mally announced today that it will publish PLoS Medicine, an
open-access, international, general medical journal, beginning
this fall. A "call for papers" has been issued, indicating that
the journal is now accepting submissions.
PLoS Medicine will publish important peer-reviewed advances in
all areas of medical research, including epidemiology and public
health, together with summaries of all research articles written
for non-specialists and features about international develop-
ments in medicine, controversial medical topics, neglected dis-
eases, and other health-related subjects. All content in the
journal will be freely available online and allowed to be repro-
duced worldwide for teaching, promoting awareness of new discov-
eries, and other purposes.
The prospect of an open-access alternative to the existing sub-
scription-based prestigious medical journals has been welcomed
by many in the health research and advocacy worlds. Already more
than 75 physicians and researchers have been recruited to the
editorial board of PLoS Medicine, ranging from an AIDS physician
in Rwanda to the leader of a gene therapy unit in Paris to a
cardiologist in Salt Lake City.
PLoS was founded in 2000 by Dr. Varmus and colleagues Patrick O.
Brown of Stanford University and Michael B. Eisen of Lawrence
Berkeley Laboratory and the University of California, Berkeley.
Last October, the organization launched its first open-access
journal of peer-reviewed scientific research, PLoS Biology,
whose content has been favorably reviewed by the New York Times,
Le Monde, and countless other media outlets around the world.
"The case for open access to medical research is even stronger
than it is for basic research in biology. The National Insti-
tutes of Health in the United States alone spends over $28 bil-
lion on biomedical research. Everyone in the country -- and
around the world -- should have access to the results of those
studies," commented Joseph L. Goldstein, a member of the PLoS
Medicine editorial board and Nobel Prize winner in Medicine
based at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center in
Dallas.
PLoS Medicine will be overseen by PLoS Senior Editors Barbara
Cohen, former editor of Nature Genetics and former executive
editor of the Journal of Clinical Investigation, and Virginia
Barbour, a physician and haematologist and former executive edi-
tor of the Lancet. Working closely with members of the editorial
board and in consultation with the wider medical and health re-
search community, they will develop an open-access forum for im-
portant studies and for discussion of medical research and prac-
tice in the broader context of global health and social respon-
sibility.
For more information about the Public Library of Science, see:
http://www.plos.org
For more information about PLoS Medicine, see:
http://www.plosmedicine.org