The Open Society Institute (OSI) and the Public Library of Science (PLoS) today announced a new grants program to support open access publishing in developing and transition countries. The grants will make it much easier for scientists based in developing and transition countries to submit articles to the premiere peer-reviewed research journals published by PLoS.

"Scientists in poorer countries have been virtually excluded from the journal publishing world," said Darius Cuplinskas, director of OSI's Information Program. "Open access journals will remove barriers and make these scientists full members of the international scientific community.”

PLoS is a non-profit advocacy organization and a publisher of open-access journals, which are available free of charge online and are subsidized largely by author-side charges for publication. While this “pay-to-publish” system allows PLoS to make scientific and medical literature immediately accessible to anyone in the world with an Internet connection, many authors from developing countries cannot afford the fees. Now, scientists affiliated with the OSI-funded member institutions will be entitled to a waiver of publication charges for their articles in PLoS journals.

OSI’s Information Program has been a strong supporter of the open access movement. Its Budapest Open Access Initiative, launched in 2002, advocates for the support of two parallel strategies for the adoption of open access:  self-archiving and open access journals.

The OSI/PLoS Institutional Membership grants will target developing and transition countries.  Authors from the least developed countries will receive a waiver of publication charge upon request, a policy PLoS has had in place since the launch of its first journal, PLoS Biology, in October 2003.  To ensure that ability to pay publication charges does not influence the review process, PLoS has a firewall in place to shield requests from all editors and reviewers.

“The debate about open access has shifted recently,” said Dr. Helen Doyle, PLoS director of development and strategic alliances. “Doubts about its value have been replaced with doubts about its viability. This commitment from OSI answers the question of how scientists in developing countries will be able to publish in our journals on a large scale.”

The complete list of countries and regions where institutions are eligible for the new memberships is as follows:

Albania, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Botswana, Bulgaria, Cameroon, Cote d'Ivoire, Croatia, Czech Republic, Estonia, Georgia, Ghana, Guatemala, Hungary, Indonesia, Kazakhstan, Kosovo, Kyrgyzstan, Laos, Latvia, Lithuania, Macedonia, Moldova, Mongolia Namibia, Nigeria, Peru, Poland, Romania, Russia, Serbia and Montenegro, Slovakia, South Africa, Swaziland, Tajikistan, Thailand, Turkey, Ukraine, Uzbekistan, Vietnam, Zimbabwe.

More information about the grants is available at: http://www.soros.org/openaccess/grants.shtml

The joint OSI-PLoS announcement follows the January launch of the PLoS Institutional Membership program. More information about the PLoS Membership Program is available at:  http://www.plos.org/support