Dr. Richard Smith Joins the Public Library of Science and the Escalating Open Access Movement; Former Editor of the BMJ Joins the PLoS Board of Directors

SAN FRANCISCO--(BUSINESS WIRE)--July 28, 2004--For the last 13 years, Dr. Richard Smith, as the editor of the British Medical Journal (BMJ) and chief executive of the BMJ Publishing Group, has been a central figure in the world of scientific and medical publishing. He has championed the causes of increased access to research articles, particularly in the developing world, improved ethical standards for researchers and authors, and most recently, open access publishing models. In May of 2004, Dr. Smith announced his resignation from the BMJ to become chief executive of the European arm of UnitedHealth Group, the largest healthcare company in the United States.

Dr. Smith has agreed to join the Board of Directors at the Public Library of Science (PLoS) and he is now calling for a complete overhaul of current biomedical publishing models. "I thoroughly support universal free access to research," he said, "because the wonderful thing about ideas is more people being exposed to more ideas leads to still more ideas. I regret as somebody who has been running a medical publishing company for 13 years that publishers have made money by restricting access to research and so limiting the development of new ideas. We need a new model, and the Public Library of Science is providing one."

“We are thrilled that he is now helping us to develop an innovative and outstanding open access medical journal.”

Dr. Smith's commitment to PLoS is a significant step in the movement toward open access to medical research. "Under Dr. Richard Smith's leadership over the past decade, BMJ was consistently the most innovative and forward-looking medical journal in the world, and helped catalyze the open access movement," states Dr. Patrick O. Brown, co-founder and member of the Board of Directors of PLoS. "We are thrilled that he is now helping us to develop an innovative and outstanding open access medical journal."

In recent years, Dr. Smith, while running a for-profit commercial publishing business, has encouraged the development of new business models that would maintain publishing revenues while offering free access to full-text versions of original research. His commitment to open access publishing at the BMJ, and now at PLoS, reflect a growing movement towards making biomedical research a truly public resource.

Dr. Smith believes that the October launch of PLoS Medicine, the second top tier open access journal published by PLoS, is an exciting prospect. "PLoS Medicine provides an opportunity to reinvent medical journals. I fret that many journals have been very slow to introduce new thinking on peer review, design, electronic publishing, contributorship, ethical issues, and the involvement of patients. I hope that through my membership of the board of PLoS I can contribute to the development of a journal for the 21st century."

Dr. Richard Smith

Dr. Richard Smith in September will become the chief executive of a new company started in Europe by the UnitedHealth Group, the United States largest health and well being company, to work with the National Health Service and other European health services. He was editor of the BMJ, and chief executive of the BMJ Publishing Group for 13 years until July this year. He is a visiting professor at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. A graduate in medicine from Edinburgh, he worked in hospital medicine in New Zealand and Scotland before joining the BMJ. He has written and broadcast on a wide range of topics and has a degree in management science from the Stanford Business School.

Public Library of Science

The Public Library of Science (PLoS) is a non-profit organization of scientists and physicians committed to making the world's scientific and medical research a public resource. PLoS publishes open-access journals of original peer-reviewed research, including PLoS Biology and PLoS Medicine, which are available for free to anyone in the world with a connection to the Internet. Visit www.plos.org for more information.

Editor's Note: To pre-arrange interviews, contact Cynthia Blair at 415-624-1218 and cblair@plos.org, or Virginia Barbour at 01223-494-482 and vbarbour@plos.org. For more information about PLoS and the open access movement, go to http://www.plos.org.