The initiative was started late last year by an advocacy group of scientists including Michael Ashburner of the University of Cambridge, Patrick O. Brown of Stanford University, Michael B. Eisen of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and the University of California, Berkeley, Richard J. Roberts of New England Biolabs, Matthew Scott of Stanford, and Harold Varmus of the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center. Frustrated with the rate at which journals were agreeing to put journal content into PubMed Central (PMC) (a National Library of Medicine (NLM)-sponsored public research repository that went online in January 2000), the researchers circulated an open letter, at first informally then on the Web (www.publiclibraryofscience.org).
The letter contends that the "full contents of the published record" should belong to the public and not to journal publishers. Publishers are asked to make their content not only available for free on their own Web site, but on that of any ...
