When Harold Varmus‘s very timely and influential 1999 Ebiomed Proposal (a pot pourri of ideas about publishing, journals, archiving, peer-review, and what would eventually come to be called “Open Access” or “OA”) (Bailey 2006) managed to elicit staunch opposition from its foes and constructive criticism from its friends – but very little in the way of actual OA – it led to the creation of the Public Library of Science (PLoS), whose first action was to launch an Open Letter, signed by 34,000 biologists worldwide, threatening to boycott their journals – i.e. to cease publishing in or refereeing for them – unless by September 2001 they began to make their contents OA (within 6 months of publication).