Interview with Hemai Parthasarathy, frmr. ed. of PLoS Biology

Bora Zivkovic, From the trenches of Open Access: Interview with Hemai Parthasarathy, A Blog Around The Clock, February 8, 2008. Parthasarathy was founding Managing Editor of PLoS Biology.

When, how and why did you become a believer in Open Access publishing? I find that phrase kind of odd - like being a "believer" in evolution. I'm not sure open access is something to believe in. Its just logical, inevitable... it basically falls out of thinking about scientific communication + the internet. So, I'd say I "believed" from my first exposure, which was the open signature campaign that launched the Public Library of Science (PLoS). The question of how to make it work given the legacy of the subscription-based system, was less clear when I joined PLoS, but the last five years have seen a lot of change towards that goal.