Washington

The Public Library of Science (PLS) — a group of researchers who last year threatened to boycott scientific publishers unless they put their journals online for free — will unveil its own publishing venture by the end of the year, one of its leading members says.

Michael Eisen, a geneticist at the University of California, Berkeley, and a founding member of the PLS, says that the venture will produce free-access print and online journals, covering costs by making page charges to authors.

A year ago, the PLS withdrew its plan to initiate a boycott of established journals from 1 September 2001 — despite obtaining few concessions from publishers.

Eisen says that PubMed Central, a free archive established by the National Institutes of Health in 2000 for access to published biomedical research, is “woefully inadequate” in meeting researchers' needs.

Ed Sequeira, who manages PubMed Central, says that retrievals from the archive have doubled in the past year to 300,000 per month. He says that it will soon add more journals to the 80 currently archived. But the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences has revised the time lag from its original publication to free appearance on the archive from one month to six months.

And in a setback for the concept of publicly funded research archives, the US Department of Energy says that it is considering closing its PubScience search service for physical-sciences research.