PLOS Biology at 20: Ain’t no mountain high enough

Abstract

PLOS Biology enters its third decade, we reflect on our mission, what has changed, what remains to be done and our wishes for the future.This article is part of the PLOS Biology 20th Anniversary Collection.2003 was a remarkable year.The world marveled at the completion of the Human Genome Project, Twitter and Facebook did not yet exist and, as the first Chinese manned space mission took flight, so too did PLOS Biology "to demonstrate that high-quality journals can flourish without charging for access" [1].This year, we celebrate 20 years of publishing high-quality science that is available to everyone in the world.Although our work is not finished, the progress of the past two decades has been nothing short of remarkable.When PLOS launched in 2000, Harold Varmus, Michael Eisen and Patrick Brown called for articles to be made freely available 6 months after publication -an idea so radical that it failed to gain traction, prompting PLOS to become a publisher to demonstrate what was possible.Now, major funders across the world, such as the signatories of Plan S and the US Office of Science and Technology, request immediate open access (OA) publication for the research that they fund.In 2003, when PLOS Biology appeared on the scene, only a handful of life science journals were OA.The picture is dramatically different now: the Directory of Open Access Journals lists 18,881 journals and >8.5 million articles (up from 1.5 million 10 years ago [2]), and in 2020 more articles were published OA than behind paywalls for the first time, according to data from the Dimensions database.We are proud of our role in starting the ripple effect that has led to this unstoppable wave.In the years following the launch of its flagship, PLOS Biology, PLOS launched more journals, including its clinical flagship, PLOS Medicine, and PLOS ONE, the world's first multidisciplinary peer-reviewed journal to focus on rigorous research and ethics rather than conceptual advance.The whole PLOS portfolio adheres to principles of open science (OS) that go beyond OA, including, for example, the requirement that all underlying data be made freely available upon publication.While we see OA as a good beginning, full access to the results of scientific research, as well as to the code, software and materials generated, and to the methodological details that enable reproduction should be the direction of travel.The growth and increased acceptance of preprint servers in the life sciences in the past ten years has also shaken up research communication.Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory launched

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