From: Richard Poynder <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Mon, 20 Feb 2012 14:56:52 +0000

Michael Eisen is an evolutionary biologist at University of California
Berkeley and an Investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute.
He is also co-founder of the Open Access (OA) publisher Public Library
of Science (PLoS).

Founded in 2000, PLoS was conceived as an advocacy group for what only
later became known as Open Access. PLoS’ first initiative was to
publish an Open Letter and invite scientists around the world to sign
on to it.

Those signing pledged that henceforth they would “publish in, edit or
review for, and personally subscribe to only those scholarly and
scientific journals that have agreed to grant unrestricted free
distribution rights to any and all original research reports that they
have published, through PubMed Central and similar online public
resources, within 6 months of their initial publication date.”

Nearly 34,000 scientists from 180 countries signed the pledge; but
while a small handful of publishers complied with the demands outlined
in the letter, most blithely ignored it. Worse, most of the scientist
signatories proved happy to forswear their own pledge, and continue
publishing in the very journals that had turned a deaf ear to them.

Disappointed but undeterred, Eisen and the other two PLoS co-founders
— biochemist Patrick Brown, and Nobel Laureate Harold Varmus —
reinvented the organisation as a non-profit publisher, and in 2003
they launched an OA journal called PLoS Biology. PLoS Medicine
followed a year later.

More here:  http://bit.ly/xTWJNF

Richard Poynder