Eldan Goldenberg's lab notebook

Cheering on the Public Library of Science

I am a big fan of the Public Library of Science initiative.

It has lofty goals which can basically be summed up as: support science by making access to relevant information as free as possible, in every sense of the word. In practice, this is mainly done through the publication of a set of high-quality, free to read journals, which for the moment are quite focussed on the life sciences. The only conditions attached to articles published in those journals are that any work using their contents give full attribution to the source, which is how scientific papers are expected to operate anyway.

Free access to to original research papers is highly valuable for practicing scientists, especially those who are not attached to a well-funded university (I can get most papers I need through Case; a scientist in the third world is less likely to have that privilege, not to mention one who doesn't have a formal affiliation to some institution). But it's of little use to most lay people, and reaching out beyond a specialist audience is part of the aims of the PLoS project. I think it's a very important goal, both for the benefit of people who can use the information (which I think is particularly relevant for the PLoS Medicine journal), and because the science community as a whole benefits from public understanding of what we do, and loses when we are seen as remote and disinterested.

To further this aim, all the PLoS journals I use have taken to publishing synopses of the original research articles they run. PLoS Biology explains the rationale nicely:

All PLoS Biology research articles are accompanied by a synopsis written by a professional science writer for a general audience. It is our goal that the synopses will provide non-experts with insight into the significance of the published work.

But there's also another purpose served by them, which I am personally very pleased by. They provide a useful intermediate format between the abstract and the full article. I've been finding myself using these synopses quite a lot for articles that are of interest but at some distance from my own research focus, because I just don't have time to read every interesting article, so I have to filter quite strictly based on whether the content will be useful to my work, but at the same time abstracts are so condensed that I often find myself wanting to read more than just those.