How would you like to win a subscription to Seed, the journal Nature, and a boatload of other prizes? If you've got Photoshop and a good idea, you could earn those prizes, plus the admiration of the academic blogosphere, with just a few minutes of effort.
As you may know, BPR3 is trying to create a universal icon that everyone can use on their blog posts whenever the post is a serious commentary about a paper published in a peer-reviewed journal, and not just a link to a press release or media commentary. We'd like the icon to be something special and memorable, which is why we're opening up the process in a design contest.
If you want to give it a shot, here's a link to the contest thread. If you don't think you've got the design skills, how about giving the contest a mention on your own blog, or telling your friends about it? The better the icon we develop, the more likely this idea will catch on.
I've placed more information about the prizes, and more details about the contest, below.
Prizes
- A free subscription to Seed Magazine, a ScienceBlogs coffee mug, and a copy of Natalie Angier's The Canon (courtesy of Seed Media Group)
- A subscription to the journal Nature (courtesy of the Nature Publishing Group)
- A PLoS coffee mug and PLoS ONE T-shirt (courtesy of Public Library of Science [they'd offer a subscription but there's already no subscription fee for all PLoS journals])
- A 1GB USB data key and a travel mug courtesy of BioMed Central.
- A subscription to the CAB Abstracts bibliographic database courtesy of CABI.
For more information about the requirements for the icon, see these posts
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So Dave... I've ben thinking about this off and on over the last week - because you do have a point, but my concerns about openness are releavant too.
So I threw this together:
http://halfanhour.blogspot.com/2007/09/open-journal-format.html
... and now I have a question. Suppose I created a journal of the format I've described. It has what could be arguably called peer review - but the review is open and a posteriori.
If I launched a journal following this model, would it qualify for an icon?
Well, Stephen, in this comment I've come up with a set of guidelines that I think are probably pretty close to the final standards we'll have in place:
-Reviewed by experts in field
-Edited
-Archived
-Clearly stated publication standards
-Viewed as trustworthy by experts in field
The sticking point for your journal would probably be the "experts in the field" part. I expect the way this would work in practice is that we'd initially take the blogger's word for it as to whether a source is reviewed and respected by experts in the field. But down the line, if the standards of your journal (or any journal) appeared to be deteriorating, then we might advise BPR3 users to refrain from using our icon when referencing that journal.
I think I'll probably put your comment up over on BPR3 and see what our readers have to say about it.