Evolving Means of Publication and Whales

I have a couple of jumping off places for this post. Please bifurcate with me.

Of big news in the science blogosphere is the publication of a paper describing the fossil find of a new species of ancestral whale (Maiacetus inuu), including a male specimen, a female specimen, and inside her, a calf specimen with which she was pregnant – a paleontologist’s dream come true. According to the Panda’s Thumb, the best place to read about this is at Laelaps blog. I’m not a judge of such matters as which is the best way to read about a technical paper, but I’m not trained to make much sense out of most technical papers either… So I’ve read about this at several sources, and Laelaps looks pretty good to me.

Now, for anyone who would like to get a little closer to the first hand account, it’s been the case in the past that one has to visit a library with a good research desk, when that research desk was open, and look at the paper in the journal of its publication. Those who held positions at the right college or university could sometimes find the articles through on-line resources – but not reliably.

Of course, this still remains the case for the vast majority of technical literature out there, but thankfully this particular paper was published in a new outlet styling itself PLoS one (PLoS is the Public Library of Science). PLoS one maintains for free on-line access any and all papers submitted to it that pass editorial and peer review muster, under the Creative Commons license. Oh, yeah – the for this paper, click here (and I would say that it’s worth that look, if you ask me).

A little more about PLoS one. I couldn’t help but wonder how such an endeavor could make money. Technical papers just don’t draw the kind of traffic that supports an advertising based revenue system, and don’t really fit that model for other reasons either. I found the answer, at least in part. on their ‘About’ page:

To provide open access, PLoS journals use a business model in which our expenses—including those of peer review, journal production, and online hosting and archiving—are recovered in part by charging a publication fee to the authors or research sponsors for each article they publish. For PLoS ONE the publication fee is US$1300. Authors who are affiliated with one of our Institutional Members are eligible for a discount on this fee.

We offer a complete or partial fee waiver for authors who do not have funds to cover publication fees. Editors and reviewers have no access to payment information, and hence inability to pay will not influence the decision to publish a paper.

From the outside looking in, this looks like a pretty legit model. The publication fee is not particularly high compared to journals that sell subscriptions at outrageous prices. I can only assume that foregoing the printing and distribution process and doing everything on-line enables them to turn a profit on this amount. It would be great to see more papers published this way. Keep an eye out for it.