Have scientists been slow to embrace submitting their work to open access journals?
Varmus: There’s now pretty wide acceptance of Public Library of Science journals, but most of my colleagues are still tormented by the need to publish in Nature, Cell, and Science, which are not open access journals. This is about much more than just publishing; it’s about values in the scientific academic community. Biomedical trainees are completely obsessed with the idea that they can’t get a job unless they publish papers in Nature, Cell, and Science. This is unfortunate, because those journals are going to be the last to go completely open access. NYAS: PLoS is now publishing far more research than any of those journals, isn’t it? Varmus: Yes. We publish over 600 articles a month. The only way you really can change the culture is to take on those top journals, so we decided we would publish two journals, PLoS Medicine and PLoS Biology, to compete with the very best. We’ve achieved a high level of credibility for PLoS Medicine and PLoS Biology. They’re so-called high-impact journal
