Displaying posts categorized under

open access

PLoS-1 published a “creationist” paper: some thoughts on what followed

As everyone knows by now, PloS-1 published what seemed to be a creationist paper. While references to the ‘Creator’ were few, the wording of the paper strongly supported intelligent design in human hand development. A later statement from the first author seemed to eschew actual creationism, but maintained teleological (if not theological) view of evolution, […]

Open Access: green vs. gold, and the culture of the disconnect

Four years ago I wrote about how Open Access would be adopted if it were convenient. Polls at the time showed that few scientists actively seek to publish OA, even though many support it. Reasons given, in no particular order: aiming for journals that were not OA and high publication fees. My conclusion was that researchers […]

My PLoS-ONE Academic Editor Activity Summary

I recently received an email from PLoS-ONE summarizing my editorial activity for the first half of 2014. That’s a good thing: for one, I’m terrible at keeping track of all my service activities, and this helps in keeping them straight for my own annual activities report for my university. Second, I can see how I […]

The Right to Read

Since this is Open Access Week, I thought I’d do the Open-Access / CC thing and share someone else’s work. In this case, a highly topical short story written by Richard Stallman.  The author also has a constantly updated page with comments on the restrictions placed today on sharing reading materials. As you will see, […]

Group review, continued

I love it when other people use my ideas, especially before I think them up. After my previous post advocating group review of scientific articles, it was pointed out to me that two journals are already using group reviews to referee their papers. One is Frontiers (which is a collection of journals, rather than a […]

PeerJ

I didn’t have a clever title. “PeerJ: a new kid on the block” was already taken by Bora Zivkovic.  “PeerJ: Publish there or suffer” is aggressively counterproductive. “PeerJ is awesome”. Meh. So: PeerJ. A new open access scientific journal. PeerJ is the brainchild of Peter Binfield who was the managing editor of PLoS-one, and  Jason Hoyt who […]

Open Access Explained. Well.

Today is the last day of Open Access Week, where all things Open Access are heralded. William Gunn gave a great talk here at MU on how open access is changing scholarship. (And a big thank you to our librarians Jen Waller & Kevin Messner for hosting William!)  I have posted about Open Access before, […]

Does Open Access benefit small universities?

There has been quite a lot of chatter recently about different scientific publishing models. Prompted by Elsevier’s support for the Research Works Act, and the resulting proposed  academic boycott. Let there be no mistake: I value the Open Access (OA )model of publication, for both moral and practical reasons that have been elaborated upon in […]

Rumors of The Scientist’s Demise Have Been Greatly Exaggerated

The Scientist is one of my favorite go-to destinations for keeping up with current biomedical research. That’s why I was rather sad when it was recently announced that The Scientist will be closing down. However, it seems like The Scientist will continue to be published after all:   NEW YORK, NY–(Marketwire – Oct 14, 2011) – […]

Suggest a name for the next BIG journal

The Max Planck society, Howard Hughes Medical Institute and Wellcome Trust have announced their plans for a new journal for biomedical and life science research to be launched summer 2012. From the joint press release: The journal will employ an open and transparent peer review process in which papers will be accepted or rejected as […]

Open Access: the Revolution Will be Convenient

Some time ago an article in Linux Journal discussed the adoption of free/open course software (FOSS) by the general public. The article (I can’t seem to find it now) talked about the people that do not care about the distinction between Free as in Free Beer vs. Free as in Freedom (libre). They want software […]

A Bad Rap

This came in my inbox today: solicitation to submit manuscripts to a journal completely outside my area of interest and proficiency. My email client software had an interesting reaction to it: The next email in my inbox was this: OK, that’s taking things a bit too far. Random solicitation of editors (did I mention that was not […]

Open Access: what’s in it for me?

One problem that I am facing is convincing colleagues of the utility of an Open Access publication. The usual arguments: more visibility, retention of the right to re-use material, the Greater Good, taxpayer access to taxpayer-funded research and so on don’t stick very well when faced with a $1500-$2500 or higher publication fee. These can […]