Open Access
evolgen | May 21, 2008I recently chastised Harold Varmus for equating open-access publishing with pay-to-publish. While open-access journals do tend to have higher author charges than pay-access journals, many journals make money from both author charges and subscriber charges. That is, they are pay to publish and pay to read.
A letter to Nature this week challenges the idea that open-access publishing is good for the developing world by assuming the same fallacy as Varmus (doi:10.1038/453450c). Raghavendra Gadagkar, of the Indian Institute of Science, argues that the pay to publish model prevents underfunded…
evolgen | April 13, 2008Harold Varmus is one of the most high profile advocates of open access to biomedical research. As one of the cofounders of the Public Library of Science (PLoS), he has played an important role in making published results freely available to all. And he's a Nobel Laureate, which ain't too shaby either.
Varmus was interviewed by Ira Flatow for NPR's Science Friday program about the NIH's new policy requiring that research publications presenting results funded by the NIH be deposited in PubMed Central (the NIH's free online archive of biomedical journal articles) within a year of publication.…
sporte | April 8, 2008I love using molecular structures as teaching tools. They're beautiful, they're easy to obtain, and working with them is fun.
But working with molecular structures as an educators can present some challenges. The biggest problem is that many of the articles describing the structures are not accessible, particularly those published by the ACS (American Chemical Society). I'm hoping that the new NIH Open Access policy will include legacy publications and increase access to lots of publications about structures.
It would also be great if other funding agencies, like the National Science…
evolgen | March 7, 2008I really like the PLoS journals. Their mission -- to make research freely available -- is totally awesome. And, on top of that, the journals publish very interesting research. PLoS Biology is a top notch journal, with papers on par with those in Science and Nature. And the specialty journals, like PLoS Genetics and PLoS Computational Biology, consistently have articles that I find quite attractive.
But the website is totally fucked. I can't access most of the articles in PLoS Genetics. Thankfully, the articles are all mirrored on PubMed Central, but it's a major pain to track those down after…
revere | February 15, 2008"Open Access" is apparently an Idea whose Time has Come:
All papers by Harvard scholars accepted for publication as of today will be freely available to the public. The Harvard Faculty of Arts and Sciences unanimously passed a motion last night (February 12) that requires all arts and sciences faculty articles to be made publicly available.
Harvard is the first US university to mandate open access to its faculty publications, Peter Suber, open access advocate, wrote on his blog yesterday. The mandate "should be a very powerful message to the academic community that we want and should have…
revere | December 10, 2007The debate about how much wild migratory birds contribute to the spread of highly pathogenic influenza/A H5N1 goes on. According to a sensible Commentary in Nature (Dec. 6) it needn't. We should have taken steps some time ago to answer an answerable question. But we didn't and still haven't initiated those steps:
Two years ago, some believed that H5N1 viruses were poised to spread around the globe on the wings of migrating wild birds. A massive effort was mounted to track their movement but, as of September 2007, very few positive birds have been found in tests of over 300,000 healthy wild…
revere | December 5, 2007Most people in the developed world think of measles as a pesky but fairly benign childhood disease. For the current generation, who has had the benefit of immunization with measles vaccine, it is also a historical curiosity. Not so for the developing world, where measles has been a major killer of children and infants. Africa has become the poster child for failed public health programs so it is nice to be able to say that when it comes to measles prevention, Africa is a special success story:
Africa, which has long had the most measles deaths, has seen the biggest drop, 91 percent. In many…
evolgen | December 2, 2007
BioMed Central advertises itself as "The Open Access Publisher" (see their logo floating next to this text). They publish a lot of journals, but I think the Public Library of Science (PLoS) has the lead when it comes to being THE open access publisher. That's because everything published by PLoS is Open Access -- it's free to read, distribute, and reproduce, provided there is proper attribution. BioMed Central, not so much.
That's right, BioMed Central, The Open Access Publisher, publishes paid-access articles. In fact, it publishes entire journals that are not open access. That includes…
aardvarchaeology | November 20, 2007
Fornvännen is one of Scandinavia's main scholarly journals about archaeology, Medieval art and adjacent disciplines. Its first volume appeared in 1906, and for the past several decades it's been issued quarterly. I've been an avid reader since 1990 and one of the journal's editors since 1999.
I'm very proud to announce that the first 100 volumes of Fornvännen are now available freely on the web! Roughly 3000 PDF files including complete scans, illustrations and all, and searchable text! The site has an excellent search & browse engine.
Most papers in the journal are in Scandinavian…
revere | November 15, 2007SciBling Bora (aka coturnix) at Blog Around the Clock has scored a major coup for Open Access publishing today. Fittingly the subject matter is a dinosaur, an apt symbol for the new nail in the coffin of traditional scientific publishing that the paper represents. Bora is the Online Community Manager at PLoS-ONE (Public Library of Science), one of the leading Open Access science publishers. PLoS ONE is unusual even among OA publications in that it concentrates on rapid publication after a baseline technical review by Editorial Board members. It covers all areas of science and medicine and…
sporte | November 12, 2007I had some strange notions when I made the jump from working at the lab bench to teaching at the white board. I thought good teaching meant interesting lectures. And I was completely unaware that people actually conducted research in science education. If I had been asked about education research, I would have replied that it was largely anecdotal, probably limited to sociologists and primary grades, and as far as I was concerned, useless.
And, honestly, to me it was useless.
I never saw any of science education articles or journals. No other instructors every discussed them and…
evolgen | November 6, 2007During my first semester of college I took an introductory chemistry class from a poet, playwright, and Nobel laureate -- that's all one guy, not three. His Nobel Prize is in chemistry, which made him more than qualified to teach us about acids, transition metals, and the other basics of chemistry. He also advocated a well rounded education, and he required we read The Periodic Table by Primo Levi. In addition to our exams and lab reports, we had to write an essay about one of Levi's short stories.
I bring this up because the intro-chem instructor, Roald Hoffmann, gave a lecture last night…
revere | November 1, 2007In an Open Letter to the American Chemical Society my Scibling Janet Stemwedel at Adventures in Ethics and Science, an ACS member, asked several pointed questions about how the Society was running its publications. One of the flagship publications is Chemical & Engineering News, whose editor in chief, Rudy Baum responded to her via email and she posted it, without comment, on her blog. That is right and proper. But I am under no constraint, so I will comment. If I were polite, I'd say Baum's response was disingenuous. But I'm not so polite, so I'll just say I don't believe him.…
revere | October 23, 2007Two weeks ago we reported getting an anonymous email from within the fetid bowels of the American Chemical Society. We weren't the only ones. Apparently it was also sent to college librarians, ACS administrators and a science writing listserv. Now it is making its way onto more conventional media (more conventional than this blog, anyway; but you heard it here first, by two weeks):
It said that the ACS is growing more corporate in structure and described how it manages the 36 chemical journals under its purview. Among other criticisms, the anonymous Emailer wrote that the bonuses given to ACS…
evolgen | October 16, 2007I want to highlight two excellent items related to scientific communication:
The first is a post by Tim Lamber on Deltoid in which he reproduces a comment by John Mashey. Mashey provides a very nice description of how scientists should deal with members of the media. Rather than merely berating bad science reporting (as some are wont to do), Mashey suggests some more pro-active ways for scientists to support good science news.
The second item is an Editorial in PLoS Biology entitled "When Is Open Access Not Open Access?". In the article, Catriona MacCallum draws the distinction between Open…
revere | October 12, 2007We've written before about the disgraceful behavior of the American Chemical Society regarding its attempts to scuttle Open Access publishing in taxpayer supported science (see also here and here). To recap, taxpayers have paid for research once through research grants, usually from the National Institutes of Health if it is health related research. Upon submission to a scientific journal published by a big for profit publisher or scholarly society (like the ACS) the author is asked to sign over the copyright to the journal, who then can charge again, through subscription or licensing fees.…
scientificactivist | September 12, 2007Via A Blog Around the Clock comes news that the Senate will be voting on mandatory public access to NIH research later this month (on September 28, apparently). Such a bill has already passed the House (in July 2007). The Alliance for Taxpayer Access is urging citizens to contact their Senators in support of this legislation. Check out the site for more information and for Senator contact information.
The Alliance for Taxpayer Access offers these talking points:
American taxpayers are entitled to open access on the Internet to the peer-reviewed scientific articles on research funded by…
clock | September 4, 2007Two excellent articles about Open Access and the future of scientific publishing appeared today: The irony of a web without science by James Boyle in Financial Times, and Next-Generation Implications of Open Access by Paul Ginsparg in CTWatch. Obligatory Readings of the Day.
evolgen | August 30, 2007BioMed Central has posted videos of interviews of some notable scientists. Included is a video of friend of evolgen (and enemy of Prof. Steve Steve) Michael Ashburner espousing the virtues of open access. Ashburner was a signatory on the letter to Science encouraging publishers to make their journals publicly available. He also walks the walk, proclaiming that he will not publish in non-open access journal, nor review articles for non-open access journals. Not only is he in favor of open access publishing, he also pushes for open access software.
One of Ashburner's recent project has involved…
revere | August 30, 2007I don't suppose I can sue somebody for negligence resulting in impairment of my mental health. But if I could, I would surely go after the assholes at the PRISM coalition, an alleged grassroots group (such front groups for industry are often called astroturf groups) whose task in life is to lock up tax payer financed research under copyright laws they and their cronies wrote for their own benefit. And THEY ARE MAKING ME CRAZY! So there was at least some therapeutic benefit to the discovery of my SciBling Dave Munger at Cognitive Daily that these hypocrites were violating copyright on their…