Each year WIRED Magazine selects nominees in 14 categories, ranging from music and film direction to science, business, and software. PLoS founders and Board members, Harold Varmus, Patrick Brown, and Michael Eisen were named for "cracking the spine of the science cartel" by founding PLoS as an example for an open access model in scientific publishing. On hand to accept the award for PLoS were Patrick Brown, professor of biochemistry at Stanford University, and Michael Eisen, computational and evolutionary biologist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.
"We were thrilled to receive a Rave award", commented Patrick Brown, co-founder of PLoS, "first because it recognizes the amazing work that our staff has done in bringing the idea of the Public Library of Science to life, and second because it shows how much people value open access to the results of scientific and medical research".
Other nominees in the category of Science were Charles Bennet of the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center for astrophysics, Boldizsar Janko of the University of Notre Dame for physics, Craig Venter of the Center for the Advancement of Genomics, and Alessandro Vespignani of the Universite Paris-Sud for theoretical physics.
PLoS shared the stage both figuratively and literally with famous names such as director Peter Jackson, artist David Byrne, and Wired Renegade of the Year, Steve Jobs.
Next on the agenda for PLoS is the Fall 2004 launch of its newest journal, PLoS Medicine, which follows the successful introduction of PLoS Biology last fall. These open access journals serve as a model of one way in which the highest quality scientific and medical communications can be produced and offered for free.
About PLoS The Public Library of Science (PLoS) is a nonprofit organization of scientists and physicians committed to making the world's scientific and medical literature a public resource. For more information, visit http://www.plos.org.