PLoS: Public Library of Science

PLoS (Public Library of Science) is a nonprofit publisher and advocacy organization with a mission of leading a transformation in scientific and medical research communication. Everything PLoS publish is open-access – freely available online which benefits researchers, educators, and patient advocates to funders, policymakers, and the public. 

To provide open access (OA), PLoS journals use a business model in which their expenses are recovered in part by charging a publication fee to the authors or research sponsors for each article they publish.

PLoS entered the publishing arena in October 2003 with the launch of PLoS Biology, followed by PLoS Medicine. PLoS later launched four discipline-based community journals — PLoS Genetics, PLoS Pathogens, and PLoS Computational Biology and PLoS Neglected Tropical Diseases. PLoS pushed the OA envelope yet again with the PLoS ONE and PLoS Currents- make research available to the public in as little as 24 hours. 

PLoS launched a new Blog network for discussing science and medicine in public, covering topics in research, culture, and publishing. PLoS also launched PLoS Hubs: Biodiversity which aggregates content from a wide range of publishers, and expert Curators select the articles.