Traffic overwhelms new online science journal

CNET ^ | Oct. 14, 2003 | Alorie Gilbert

[FairOpinion]

A new online science journal aimed at changing the paradigm of scholarly publishing has proved so popular it's been mired in a crush of traffic since its Sunday night launch.

The inaugural issue of the journal, called the Public Library of Science Biology, is the first journal to be published by the Public Library of Science (PLoS), a San Francisco nonprofit that's backed by several highly regarded scientists who want to see scientific research freely distributed online.

Instead of charging subscription fees that cost thousands of dollars annually, as do many traditional scientific journals, PLoS charges authors $1,500 per published article. The fee covers peer review, editing and production, while allowing the public to freely access the research. The group wants to compete with established journals while slimming publishing costs and shortening peer-review cycles.

A statement on the site says the Web makes it possible "to make our treasury of scientific information available to a much wider audience, including millions of students, teachers, physicians, scientists, and other potential readers who do not have access to a research library that can afford to pay for journal subscriptions."

Not surprisingly, the free distribution model seems be going over well. Within the first eight hours of the journal's launch, traffic on the site spiked to more than half a million hits, said Nick Twyman, director of information technology and computer operations at PLoS. The traffic has overwhelmed the group's servers, causing PLoS to direct visitors to other sites, where they can access simplified versions of the journal. Twyman said he hopes to get the site up and running again by Wednesday.

"We always expected a lot of interest, but we're surprised by this response," Twyman said.

One reason the journal has generated so much attention is a report it contains about brain implants in monkeys that enable them to control a robotic arm with their thoughts.

PLoS, which plans to launch a medical journal next year, is focusing initially on biomedical literature. The group may eventually expand into other areas, such as computer science, Twyman said.

Leading scientists who are involved in PLoS include Dr. Harold Varmus, former director of the National Institutes of Health and now chief executive officer of the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York, along with Dr. Patrick Brown of Stanford University, who co-founded the new journal.

Brown agreed with Twyman. "It was sort of a surpise," he said, "yet all along, we felt this is so obviously the way to go that I would say we never doubted it would be a success. If you have to have a problem, (too much traffic) is a good one to have."

[RadioAstronomer]

Bump for later read.

[Nebullis]

Still, they have bills to pay. Unless you want to get into a government-funded press, then the only obvious sources of funding are the authors or the subscribers -- or maybe a journal's sponsoring university.

Bills to pay and profits to be made. Which is not a bad thing if publishers of scientific journals made their money from individuals who paid out of pocket. But they don't. Their major source of income is from institutional subscribers and per page charges for authors. When you follow that profit trail, it leads to our government. The government and the taxpayers have an interest in making the content available to the public and not seeing our dollars end up in the pockets of Dutch or British publishers.

[RightWingAtheist]

Thanks a lot :)

Seriously, a strong distinction has to be made between social science research, and humanistic research. I'm in the latter, and yeah, there is an "anything goes" attitude in those fields; peer review usually consists just of people looking over it, and then asking for more references to buttress such-and-such claim. But social sciences are entirely different; people there are very serious about establishing causal connections between objects and relationships. I'm taking a course in quantitative research methods at the moment, and the instructor was a physicist by training before he got into communication studies. He brings a hard-science attitude in his approach to social studies, and frequently criticizes the approaches of us rhetoricians for being "soft". You may also be delightful to know that in one class, he took an improptu swipe at Paul Feyrabend.

[RightWingAtheist]

I used it once.

They're taking the body cast off next week.

[RightWingAtheist]

This journal couldn't have been launched at a more timely moment for me; one of my classes is currently reading a history of scientific journals from the 16th to 19th centuries. Interestingly, peer review didn't develop arise until the mid-eighteenth century, and it was largely the result of the actions of one man, named John Hill, who published a work criticizing some of the more outlandish pieces to appear in the Proceedings of the Royal Society, such as a report of a merman found washed ashore in Virginia, or "a proof of the incontestable fact that fish live in water." The Royal Society was so humbled that it henceforth set up a review committee to oversee all articles submitted for publication.

I'm doing a presentation in the class tomorrow on how grid networks are affecting scientific communication. Pace, the speed at which results are produced and disseminated, is going to be the main theme.

[FairOpinion]

"Pace, the speed at which results are produced and disseminated, is going to be the main theme. "

==

Excellent!

[Nebullis]

There will be more calls for meta-research to sift through the massive accumulation of journal articles for trends and major movements.