I read and enjoy PhD Comics a great deal. Recently, the comic has done a series of comics exploring two of the world’s most well known science publications, Science and Nature (yes, that’s right, I read comics about science and publishing!). The fourth comic covers the recent history of open access in science and how it may impact the existing models. You can find part one, part two, and part three of the series on the Phd Comics website.
The comic refers to PLOS (Public Library of Science), a series of open access journals in biology, medicine, computational biology, Neglected Tropical Diseases and other topics. Open access in this case does not mean without fees though; authors have to pay publication fees that range from $1350 to $2900 USD. I gather that such fees are so common in science that these fees are often built into grants, so perhaps that is not much of a problem. In terms of copyright, PLOS uses a Creative Commons Attribution License: “Under the CCAL, authors retain ownership of the copyright for their article, but authors allow anyone to download, reuse, reprint, modify, distribute, and/or copy articles in PLoS journals, so long as the original authors and source are cited. No permission is required from the authors or the publishers.”
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