Open-access
Of the People, By the People
27/06/11 16:52 Filed in: GenomeWeb Daily Scan
The Wellcome Trust, Howard Hughes Medical Institute, and the Max Planck Society announced that they'll be jointly launching a new, open-access scientific journal that will ensure fair, swift and transparent editorial decisions followed by rapid online publication. S. Pelech comments that it is commendable that these agencies that are funding biomedical research are taking a greater initiative to ensure that the fruit of their investments are going to reach a larger number of scientists with open-access publication. Read More...
An App for Papers?
14/07/11 14:31 Filed in: GenomeWeb Daily Scan
Blogger Joe Pickrell at Genomes Unzipped questioned why researchers publish their work in peer-reviewed journals, which among other things, is costly, time-consuming, and random. Pickrell proposes a system of immediate publication, connected to a social media network, in which readers could recommend papers and researchers could search for them based on the community's opinions or rankings. S. Pelech agrees with Joe Pickrell that the current journal system is fast becoming obsolete on many fronts, including mounting costs, publication speed, labour, environmental problems and the fact that few scientists actually search online for articles based on the reputations of scientific journals. In the end, it is the number of times that a particular scientific paper is quoted that counts and not the impact factor of the journal that it appears in. Read More...
Oh, the Vanity
03/05/10 12:39 Filed in: GenomeWeb Daily Scan
Apparently authors with connections to industry are more than twice as likely to pay open access fees to make their work free — a bias that some think could lead to preferential publishing and reading of pro-industry results. S. Pelech argues that even with the traditional journal subscription model, there has alway been an "author-pays' element to scientific publishing in most cases and academic authors are just as inclined to publish "favorable work" as industrial authors, because they are subjected to even more pressure to publish or perish that those in industry. Ultimately, a scientific manuscript stil has to pass independent, scrutiny from peer-review before it is published. Read More...