Public Library of Science Offers UO Faculty Timely Access to Research Results

Ron Renchler
Director, Library Communications
ronr@darkwing.uoregon.edu

Each year the UO Libraries pay a modest membership fee to the Public Library of Science (PloS) (http://www.publiclibraryofscience.org/) to help make the world's scientific and medical literature a freely available public resource.

PloS is one of the leading organizations in creating open access publishing models that speed up and improve access to critical findings in scientific research (see http://www.plos.org/journals/model.html). This movement toward open access to research results is one of the most promising developments in improving scholarly communications throughout the world.

One immediate local benefit of the library's membership in PloS is that the entire UO community enjoys full access to all articles published in peer-reviewed PloS journals such as PLoS Biology and PLoS Medicine. Other soon-to-be-published journals include PLoS Genetics, PLoS Pathogens, and PLoS Computational Biology.

A second, less well-known, benefit of PLoS membership is that UO faculty members receive a 10 percent discount on publication charges in all PloS journals. The library encourages faculty members to take advantage of these reduced publication fees by publishing their papers in PLoS publications. By taking full advantage of PLoS publishing discounts, UO faculty can help both the library and the international scholarly community move forward in distributing information more widely and equitably. Faculty can also support open access publishing by using Scholars' Bank (https://scholarsbank.uoregon.edu/dspace/), the university's institutional repository for archiving, storing, and distributing the results of their research.