Open access science news is mostly good, with a bit of ugly | Ars Technica

abernard102@gmail.com 2013-04-25

Summary:

" ... There have been many developments in open access publishing lately, so we thought we'd do a rundown of the latest news. PeerJ launches and expands. We covered the announcement of PeerJ, an open access journal that has a radically different model for financial support: researchers pay a membership fee, and can then publish as much as they want (memberships range for annual to lifetime). The journal has now officially launched, and has plenty of articles available for anyone to look at. And, since the launch, the people behind PeerJ have been busy. One of the things they've done is launch a preprint server for biologists, similar to what physics has with the arXiv ... BMC Biology turns 10 and looks at the challenges of peer review. One of the earliest open access journals, BMC Biology has just celebrated its 10th birthday (it's now owned by publishing giant Springer). It celebrated in part by hosting a panel discussion on whether peer review, at least in biology, is broken ... eLife launches with a new review model. eLife is another new open access journal, this one with a simple business model: get some money from the organizations that pay for a lot of bioscience research (like the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, Wellcome Trust, and Max Planck Institute). The journal has now launched, and is taking another approach to peer review ... F1000 goes from pre-prints to real prints. F1000 research is yet another open access journal with a distinctive take on publishing and reviewing papers. It is also operating a pre-print server for papers that are in draft form. When the paper is complete, however, authors can just press a button and request review. If enough of the reviewers approve it (or approve it with reservations), the paper is then deemed 'published' and submitted to the NIH for indexing. And the reviews get published right next to the paper (a process called open review), so that anyone can see what, precisely, those reservations are.  Nature Publishing goes open access. The Nature Publishing Group (which is behind—wait for it—Nature and a host of other high-quality journals) isn't quite ready to let its top end journals leave paywalls behind. But it is interested in the potential of open access publishing. So, it has decided to invest in an open access publisher called Frontiers, which has a large collection of journals in the sciences and medicine. The publications of the Frontiers journals are all covered by a Creative Commons license..."

Link:

http://arstechnica.com/science/2013/04/open-access-science-news-is-mostly-good-with-a-bit-of-ugly/

From feeds:

Open Access Tracking Project (OATP) » abernard102@gmail.com

Tags:

oa.new oa.npg oa.gold oa.business_models oa.publishers oa.comment oa.peer_review oa.funders oa.wellcome oa.bmc oa.hhmi oa.preprints oa.elife oa.peerj oa.f1000research oa.max_planck_society oa.frontiers oa.milestones oa.versions oa.journals

Date tagged:

04/25/2013, 12:02

Date published:

04/25/2013, 08:02