Freedom fighter

Harold Varmus is a Nobel prizewinner and a founder of the Public Library of Science (www.plos.org), which works to make scientific research freely available. From 1993 to 1999, Varmus was director of the National Institutes of Health, where he pioneered PubMedCentral, a full-text repository for scientific articles housed at the NIH. In 2001, in his current job as head of the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, he helped organise a petition asking journal publishers to make their articles freely available online by placing them in PubMedCentral. Last month, PLoS published the first issue of PLoS Biology, an online, refereed, open-access journal.…