The Future of Science Online

A blogger with the Public Library of Science, or PLoS, which is an open-access, Web-based family of journals covering biology, medicine, genetics and more, has an interesting post about how new work may be disseminated in the future. While traditional publications still rule—most researchers shoot for Science, Nature, Physical Review Letters or the other top journals—the open model is also making progress. And that's good news for the interested public. You can actually read about all this publicly-funded research for free instead of paying $20 or sometimes $30 for a single article online.

Yet it may also be that publishing moves out of the single-paper realm entirely. New projects like JoVE (Journal of Visualized Experiments) and SciVee, which we've written about previously, could lead to scientists posting their work in a multimedia format. If that means accurate, vivid animations like these, we're all for it.—Gregory Mone