Founded in October 2000, the Public Library of Science (PLoS) created a non-profit scientific and medical publishing venture in early 2003, to provide scientists and physicians with free high-quality, high-profile online journals in which to publish their work. # PLoS as a catalyst With the internet being a powerful medium to disseminate information, it seems quite outrageous that the results of research -- original works requiring many years of efforts -- are "squatted" by publishers claiming ownership on these works, and selling them at a high price. The work of researchers is often publicly funded, especially in North America. It would therefore seem appropriate that the scientific community and the general public can freely enjoy the results of this research. 1,000 new scientific and medical articles reviewed by peers were published daily in 2000, with few of them free available on the internet. The Public Library of Science (PLoS) was founded in October 2000 in San Francisco, California, as a non-profit organization whose mission was to make the world’s scientific and medical literature a public resource in free online archives. Instead of information disseminated in millions of reports and thousands of online journals, a single point would give access to the full content of these articles, with a search engine and hyperlinks between articles. PLoS posted an open letter requesting the articles presently published by journals to be distributed freely in online archives, and asking researchers to promote the publishers willing to support this project. From October 2000 to September 2002, the open letter was signed by 30,000 scientists from 180 countries. The publishers' answer was much less enthusiastic, although a number of publishers agreed for their articles to be distributed freely immediately after publication, or six months after publication. But even the publishers who initially agreed to support the project made so many objections that it was finally abandoned. # PLoS as a publisher Another objective of PLoS was to become a publisher while creating a new model of online publishing based on free dissemination of knowledge. In early 2003, PLoS created a non-profit scientific and medical publishing venture to provide scientists and physicians with free high-quality, high-profile journals in which to publish their work. The journals were PLoS Biology (launched in 2003), PLoS Medicine (2004), PLoS Genetics (2005), PLoS Computational Biology (2005), PLoS Pathogens (2005), PLoS Clinical Trials (2006) and PLoS Neglected Tropical Diseases (2007), the first scientific journal on this topic.