| | | | THAT’S THE QUESTION that’s been bugging Michael Eisen. In early 2003 he and colleagues plan to launch the Public Library of Science, which will provide its own articles online free and aspires to become the basis for a public, searchable database of all scientific literature—a sort of Napster for nerds. The Journal of Biology, launched last week, is also free, and venerable Science has recently decided to post all its content, gratis, on its Web site a year after original publication. Of course, free content won’t matter to the public unless it’s readable, so PLoS’s articles will run next to common-language commentaries. For its part, Science is trying to keep things as simple as possible. “I get complaints from very smart scientists who can’t understand all our papers,” says editor Donald Kennedy. “We work like hell to reduce that.” Still, Science has to be technical in certain fields—after all, science is. Which is to say, download papers to your heart’s delight. Just bring a big dictionary.
-Mary Carmichael
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