[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.