First prize to PLoS

Christine Gorman, Name That Life Saver! Time Magazine, January 8, 2007.  Excerpt:

Forget Myspace. You should see what the Web 2.0 revolution is doing to medical journals. There's a contest to name the most important medical advance since 1840 over at the venerable British Medical Journal. (Results to be posted on Jan. 18) ...

But first prize still has to go to the Public Library of Science journals..., which jumped on the open-access research bandwagon early, and has been shaking up the paid-subscription journals ever since. No special licenses are required for doctors in poor countries to read high-quality PloS articles in full. As long as readers have internet access, the articles are free.

PloS.org's latest offering: PloS One, where research articles from a wide variety of disciplines undergo minimal pre-publication review. The heavy lifting comes from what the editors call "community peer review," which is done completely transparently through reader annotations on the web....

PS:  Is this first prize as a life saver or first prize as an example of Web 2.0?  Both? 

Note to Gorman:  While there were OA journals before PLoS, it's more true to say that PLoS helped create the bandwagon than jumped on it.