2000: PUBLIC LIBRARY OF SCIENCE
[Overview]
The Public Library of Science (PLoS) was founded in October 2000 by biomedical scientists Harold Varmus, Patrick Brown and Michael Eisen, from Stanford University, Palo Alto, and University of California, Berkeley. Headquartered in San Francisco, PLoS is a non-profit organization whose mission is to make the world’s scientific and medical literature a public resource. In early 2003, PLoS created a non-profit scientific and medical publishing venture to provide scientists and physicians with high-quality, high-profile journals in which to publish their most important work: PLoS Biology (launched in 2003), PLoS Medicine (2004), PLoS Genetics (2005), PLoS Computational Biology (2005), PLoS Pathogens (2005), PLoS Clinical Trials (2006), PLoS Neglected Tropical Diseases (2007). All PLoS articles are freely available online, and deposited in the free public archive PubMed Central. They can be freely redistributed and reused, including for translations, as long as the author(s) and source are cited. PLoS also hopes to encourage other publishers to adopt the open access model, or to convert their existing journals to an open access model.