Fifteen years in, what next for PLOS Biology?

PLOS Biology marked its fifteenth anniversary on October 13 (Fig 1).The year we published our first issue, 2003, Europe launched its first voyage to Mars, the SARS epidemic spread through 26 countries [1], and the Human Genome Project published all the nucleotide base pairs in our DNA.Our launch predated Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, smart phones and tablets.In the US at the time, 43% of households had dial-up, 'slow internet', 38% had no internet and only 19% had home broadband; only 1% of music sales were digital; and 37% of households had no cell/mobile phone [2].Yet the promise of digital technology to transform scientific communication was already apparent."Communication among scientists has undergone a revolution in the last decade, with the movement of scientific publication to a digital medium and the emergence of the Internet as the primary means for distributing information," the PLOS founders wrote in our first issue [3]."Millions of articles are, in principle, just a mouseclick away from our computers." Early hopesThe hope was that the obvious benefits that digital technology offered by removing barriers to accessing scientific information would catalyse radical change in the scholarly publishing landscape.Progress in research publishing and dissemination, however, has not kept pace with advances in technology.As open access advocate John Wilbanks notes in the movie Paywall: The Business of Scholarship [4] (a very interesting watch if you have an hour to spare), "We can make cars that can drive; are you telling me that we can't process the literature better?"PLOS Biology has achieved a lot in fifteen years, but it's clear there is still much to be done (Box 1).Fifteen years ago, open access publishing was in its infancy.PLOS along with BioMed Central were making waves in the publishing industry, hoping that scientists and civic-minded publishers would embrace open access publishing as a public good.But the waves proved too small to create a groundswell.Subscription-based publishers reluctant to lose a steady source of income by converting to open access subverted the goals by simply adding open access options while enforcing paywalls to most scientific content.And decisions about the quality of research continue to rely on journal title as a proxy for value and impact.As a result, although more researchers are aware of open access, they continue to aspire to publish in journals that check career-advancement boxes, with little thought to how publisher business model affects the ability of science to progress.Initiatives like DORA-founded to identify ways to improve how research is assessed-have helped raise awareness of the fallibility and inappropriateness of metrics like the impact factor [5], yet the ingrained desire to publish in the 'glamour mags' persists.The revolution, it seems, has yet to happen.Overturning entrenched norms, especially those backed by powerful interests, is never easy.But some developments offer reason for hope; Plan S in the European Union is an open access policy announced recently by a group of European national funders, with support from the