Open science breakthrough of the year 2010: OA journal now largest scientific journal in the world

“Two weeks ago, I had posted a list of candidates for open science breakthroughs of the year 2010, and invited votes on the matter. However, only 13 votes have been cast since (which is even less than for the 2009 breakthroughs, and less than the number of individuals who tweeted about the vote), so these data won’t yield themselves to any kind of serious analysis, but they are available under a CC0 license if anyone is interested... an Open Access journal now being the largest scientific journal came out in front of all other candidates. This fits well with the wave of PLoS ONE envy that is currently rolling over the publishing landscape and has already washed ashore a number of PLoS ONE clones, namely Nature ONE, Medicine ONE, Humanities ONE, Physics ONE, and — with an additional mutation — Genetics THREE. As usual, further details on Open Access developments over the year are available from Peter Suber, who compiled a very comprehensive review and also provided his personal highlights as “The best of 2010...″ Adding to the notion that the Open Access movement is still the major driving force behind advances in Open Science, the other publishing-related candidates also fared rather well — XML-based journal workflows, public peer review and the open data mandate by ecology and evolution journals. The latter is accompanied by several other open data-related initiatives — the Panton Principles for sharing public data, the Open Data Awards and Biotorrents, which resonates well with Rufus Pollock’s remark at OKCon 2010 about “the year open data went mainstream”. Many a little makes a mickle, and so it is probably worth to mention again that GeneWiki got NIH funding, and that #altmetrics set out to provide means of impact assessment that go beyond the current practice of basically counting the letters on the containers in which scholarship is formally published.”