The PLS group not only wants free content. It unfortunately also wants journals to allow their content to be posted by any web server wishing to post it. We consider this demand to be poorly thought-out, unnecessary, a waste of money and a potentially dangerous threat to scientific exchange forums like The JCB . The nature of scientific information makes its reproduction delicate. It is more than the reproduction of plain text and sequence information.
Complications arise in producing the myriad special symbols involved.
Greater problems exist in displaying the complex visual images so integral to modern scientific papers, particularly in cell biology. Each journal has its own idiosyncratic translation software, typically formatted to suit the publication of a print version and convert it into a digital, online format. Frequent manual interventions are needed to correct inevitable errors. Posting this information on a second site is fraught with the same difficulties. Different journals and different publishers all use different parsers to control text.