Chemistry Central Blog

Jan Kuras joins Chemistry Central

Greetings!  I join Chemistry Central as the new Associate Publisher.

After a brief sojourn away from science publishing - and a couple of exciting vacations - I am back on familiar territory. 

I garnered an interest in how chemists can efficiently communicate their research findings when I was studying chemistry, and then specializing in analytical chemistry.  My first meaningful employment was at Thomson Scientific (in what was then Derwent). I worked on pharmaceutical information products, and was involved in the development of the company’s first structure searchable and web-based databases.

This stimulated an interest in the application of Web technologies to search and display scientific data.  I joined BioMedNet and then ChemWeb at Elsevier.  My roles encompassed product development, publisher relations and community site development, and I was fortunate to collaborate with some prestigious publishers and database vendors.  We were motivated by producing intuitive website functionality and easily accessible information.  Our highest usage was always for free access, high quality journals and databases.

I am now pleased to be joining Chemistry Central, where we are striving to accelerate the growth in open access publishing of chemistry research, and I look forward to keeping you informed through the Chemistry Central blog.
 

Posted by Jan Kuras at 14:07    Comments (0)

 

 

Chemistry Central now providing support for 'mini-websites' associated with articles

When submitting an article, authors upload 'mini-websites' as additional material files, ensuring that the homepage is named index.html, and sits in the root folder of the content. They then convert the folder hierarchy into a ZIP archive, and upload this ZIP file using the regular manuscript submission system, which will recognise and process it automatically.

All guidelines are outlined in the 'mini-websites section' in Chemistry Central's instructions for authors.

Posted by Gino D'Oca at 15:44    Comments (1)

 

 

Best wishes for the festive season

The staff at Chemistry Central Journal would like to wish you all a very happy holiday season, and much success in 2008!

 

Posted by Bryan Vickery at 14:29    Comments (0)

 

 

A view from the inside: post-acceptance and publication

Last week I talked about the pre-acceptance stage. Once a manuscript has passed through the pre-acceptance stage and is accepted, then a provisional PDF of the manuscript is published by Chemistry Central Journal. The content of the provisional PDF is the formatted version of the manuscript that the reviewers and the author have agreed upon during peer review.

Post-acceptance
Once accepted, the final version of the manuscript is then sent to an outside company, which formats the manuscript into XML. XML (Extensible Markup Language), is a markup language much like HTML (Hypertext Markup Language), but was designed to describe and structure data, unlike HTML which was designed to present data on a webpage. XML is not a replacement for HTML, but rather an addition that allows for more information to be stored and organized.

XML tags are used to link different references in the text. For example, XML tags link sources cited in the text with the appropriate references; tables and figures are linked in the same manner. These tags make searches for specific authors or subjects easier and more effective, because XML organizes data so that search engines can find the right information. For example from the advanced search on Chemistry Central Journal, it is possible to restrict a search to the title, authors or any other part of the article.

After the manuscript has been formatted into XML, the production team validates the XML to ensure everything has been correctly tagged and formatted. The manuscript is then sent back to the editorial team for one last check, and then the author has one week to look over the final version. After the author approves the manuscript, Chemistry Central Journal publishes the final version as both a PDF and a full-text webpage.

Timeframes
In theory, the whole publication process takes approximately twelve weeks. Our editorial team strives to provide the author with an initial decision after six weeks from the time of submission. This time is highly variable, however being dependent on the responsiveness of authors and reviewers. The formatting carried out by the editorial production team in the pre-acceptance stage usually takes three weeks, dependent partly on the responsiveness of the author and also on the number of rounds of revision. The final checks and production of the final version of the manuscript last another three weeks. So after only three months, an article can go from being submitted to being published in its final version in Chemistry Central Journal.

DOIs
Upon publication, every article is assigned a DOI (Digital Object Identifier), which is like a bar code for objects of intellectual property on the Internet. The DOI of an article remains the same regardless of how the URL changes over time and can be used to locate the abstract or the full-text of a published article by resolving the DOI of that article. We register the DOI, along with the article’s information and URL, with CrossRef. That way, if we ever change the URL for an article, we send the new URL to CrossRef and they will update that DOI’s information. DOI’s can also be used directly as links. This article <http://www.journal.chemistrycentral.com/content/1/1/10>
has a DOI: 10.1186/1752-153X-1-10. This article can also be reached using <http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/1752-153X-1-10>
and this link will always work, even if the URL above changes.

Post-publication
All of our articles are published under a Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. This license also encourages archiving of full-text articles in institutional repositories and full-text hosts, such as PubMed Central. Digital repositories have the advantage of giving articles a wider distribution, because they are indexed by search engines, such as Google Scholar, Scirus, Scopus, PubMed, DOAJ, etc., increasing the likelihood that others will be able to find your research. Digital repositories also safeguard articles and ensure their long-term preservation. Chemistry Central deposits all open access articles in multiple digital archives around the world, including INIST, Koninklijke Bibliotheek, Potsdam University, PubMed Central, and UK PubMed Central. Institutional repositories are also important in enabling a research institution to have access to its own research. BioMed Central operates a repository hosting service called Open Repository, which lowers the cost to institutes of setting-up and running their own repository.

The main advantage of open access publishing is its visibility and accessibility. The full text of published articles is immediately available online in multiple databases. For example the following article was recently published in Chemistry Central Journal:

Research article      
Enantioselective transacetylation of (R,S)-β-citronellol by propanol rinsed immobilized Rhizomucor miehei lipase
Abir B Majumder, Shweta Shah, Munishwar N Gupta
Chemistry Central Journal 2007, 1:10 (18 April 2007)

A quick search on Google for “enantioselective transacetylation” yielded full-text entries of this article from Chemistry Central, PubMed Central, and the authors’ own institutional repository.

Farewell
This will be my last blog post, as my time as an intern at Chemistry Central is coming to an end. It has been an exciting and insightful time for me. I have learned all about the publishing process for an online scientific, open access journal, which has helped me understand how important open access to information is for the continuation scientific research. I hope to continue using and benefiting from open access research in the future.

Posted by Andrea Albright at 11:33    Comments (0)

 

 

A view from the inside: pre-accepted manuscripts

Last week I gave you a lot of information about the peer-review process. Once the peer-review process is finished, the manuscript moves into the pre-acceptance stage, so called, because many formatting checks must be made before a manuscript can be accepted for publication. The editorial production team checks the manuscript for style and formatting, making sure that the manuscript is up to scratch. The most common formatting changes made pertain to the references, the tables and figures, section headings, and the corresponding author’s details.

The biggest challenge for the production team is properly tagging all the citations in the text with the references listed by the author, which is why it is imperative that authors correctly cite their sources. We encourage all submitting authors to use a reference program, such as EndNote 5 (or later versions) or Reference Manager 10. These programs are especially helpful because they automatically tag all the references in the article, so that we do not have to send the manuscript to an outside team. Using EndNote or similar programs saves us time and money, so we pass those savings on by offering a £30 discount.

Another major concern for the production team is the figures and tables in the manuscript. These must be properly oriented and cropped, and have corresponding labels. Cropping is especially important for the graphical abstracts, which look unprofessional and untidy on the website if improperly cropped. Tables must be divided into cells/fields with clear and consistent text alignment, or else tables with large amounts of text can look muddled and confusing. Tables and figures must also be properly labelled in the order in which they are cited, because all tables and figures will be tagged to their respective references in the text.

One thing that authors frequently do not include is permission to use pictures or figures in their manuscript. If a figure or picture is copyrighted, then the author must obtain explicit permission to use it in his manuscript.

The section headings are another frequently neglected area. Chemistry Central Journal has specific names for its sections and all articles published must reflect this – ‘Introduction’ must be labelled ‘Background’, etc. The sections must also appear in a certain order – ‘Experimental’ after ‘Conclusions’, etc.

Last but not least, it is absolutely essential that a corresponding author be clearly identified on the title page of the manuscript. All articles published in Chemistry Central Journal are deposited in PubMed, which requires a corresponding author before it will accept articles. For more information about proper formatting see our Instructions for Authors.

Typically changes to be made are sent to the author, who responds to these before sending the revised manuscript back. Occasionally, the editorial team may also make changes to the manuscript that the author must approve. The manuscript may get sent back and forth several times before all the appropriate changes are made. Once all the formatting is appropriate, the manuscript is accepted and published in the form of a provisional PDF on the Chemistry Central Journal website. The provisional PDF is not the final version, but our top priority is to provide open-access to information by publishing articles as soon as possible.

Posted by Andrea Albright at 16:31    Comments (0)

 

 

A view from the inside: the peer-review process

As I mentioned last week, peer-review is a very important part of the publication process. Chemistry Central Journal uses an anonymous peer-review system, which means that authors do not know their reviewers’ identity. Chemistry Central Journal also uses an online peer-review system in order to speed up publication times. How long the peer-review process takes depends on the responsiveness of both reviewers and authors and whether the reviewers require minor or extensive revisions of the manuscript.

Our editorial board members play a key role in the peer-review process. They suggest appropriate reviewers for every manuscript and even, on occasion, act as reviewers themselves. The in-house team evaluates all reviewers suggested by our editorial board, and those selected are invited to review for us via the online system. Reviewers receive an email, with a link to a webpage that lets them tell us their decision. They are given a week to accept the invitation and those who do are then automatically sent another email with a link to the manuscript files and access to an online review form. Reviewers are asked to return their reports in three weeks.

We take reviewers’ comments very seriously and the content of these reports helps us to determine the fate of a given manuscript. On the other hand, we never make a decision about a manuscript based solely on a single report. We use the feedback of every report to help the author effectively revise his article and get it ready for publication. The report contains several sections that every reviewer must fill out.

General Comments
The reviewers use this section to write a short review of the article, which demonstrates their own understanding of the subject. Reviewers can also make any comments about the manuscript, positive or negative. To further clarify the importance of these comments, we ask reviewers to also fill out the following sections. 

Major Compulsory Revisions
These are revisions that the author must respond to before a decision on publication can be reached. These revisions typically mean that we go back to the reviewer for a re-review.

Minor Essential Revisions
These are suggested changes such as missing labels on figures, or the wrong use of a term. The in-house team checks that these changes have been made.  

Discretionary Revisions
These are suggestions, which the author can choose to ignore, if he feels that no change is needed.

What next?
The reviewer can suggest the next step for this article, whether a manuscript is ready for publication, needs major revisions, or should be rejected. Reviewers have a choice of:

    - Accept without revision

    - Accept after minor essential revisions

    - Unable to decide on acceptance or rejection until the authors have responded to     the major compulsory revisions

    - Reject as not of sufficient priority to merit publishing in this journal

Level of interest
The reviewer comments on whether this article is interesting enough to warrant publication.

Quality of written English
The reviewer has a chance to evaluate the standard of English used in the manuscript.

Statistical review
The reviewer can comment on the use of statistical analysis in a manuscript, if applicable. In some cases, we will bring in a statistician to review the statistical analysis of a manuscript, if other reviewers are unable to comment.

Confidential comment
Reviewers can also return separate confidential comments that the author will not see in the report, if there is some concern that the reviewer does not want the author to know about.

Our editors take into account the comments of all reviewers. One “reject” does not automatically mean a manuscript is rejected. Similarly, if two reviewers immediately return reports that tell us to “Accept without revision”, we generally seek the opinion of a third reviewer to make certain that the manuscript is ready for publication. Once the reviewers have turned in their reports, we send copies of each report to the author. If major changes or revisions are requested, then the author has to make the changes suggested and send a revised manuscript and a cover letter addressing each of the reviewers’ comments back for a re-review. Depending on the responsiveness of the author, this process can occur several times until the reviewers are satisfied. We typically allow authors two rounds of revision. Once all reviewers have unanimously decided to “Accept without revision”, the manuscript will be pre-accepted.

Posted by Andrea Albright at 14:10    Comments (0)

 

 

View from the inside: the submission process

I am back, as promised, this time to give an insider’s view of the early stages of the submission process at Chemistry Central Journal. 

Scientists and researchers from all over the world submit their manuscripts to us, starting the whole publication process. Once a manuscript has been submitted via the Chemistry Central Journal submission system, our in-house editors read the article and perform initial checks.

Has this manuscript been published before?

We always search journal databases, like PubMed, to see if another author has already published the same article; it is vital to rule out the possibility of plagiarism. We also want to ensure that the author has not previously published a similar study.

Does this article present new chemistry and is it appropriate for Chemistry Central Journal?

One of our key concerns is whether a manuscript is sufficiently novel. We want our articles to add to the overall knowledge of chemistry, and not repeat what has already been published. Our editors also think critically about whether an article belongs in Chemistry Central Journal, especially given that authors sometimes submit manuscripts that would be more appropriate for consideration by one of our parent company’s (BioMed Central) other journals.

Has the manuscript been correctly categorized?

We ask our authors to list their article under three categories, one primary and two secondary.  We then contact the members of our editorial board in these sections and ask for their suggestions for appropriate reviewers for the article. It is imperative for an article to be correctly categorized; otherwise our editorial board members will not be able to suggest appropriate experts. Once an article has been published, these categories are essential in helping your article find its target audience.

We also publish many different types of articles (e.g. research, commentary, methodology, etc.) and it is essential that a manuscript be submitted as the right kind of article. For example, if an author had incorrectly labelled his commentary as a research article, then a peer reviewer might unduly reject his manuscript, having reviewed it in the wrong light.

Will reviewers be able to read the manuscript?

We check the overall readability of the manuscript. We also assess the standard of the manuscript’s English, a necessity considering that many of our submitting authors are not native speakers of English. This check is important, because an ineffectual use of language can confuse the reader, even if the ideas behind the words are groundbreaking.

Who should or should not review a manuscript?

Potential reviewers are always asked if they have any conflicts of interest that could affect their ability to remain impartial, such as a personal relationship with the author, etc. We also ask if their fields of study correspond with that of the manuscript. We need reviewers that will be able to critically evaluate the content of the article. 

I have mentioned the peer-review process several times, but what precisely is peer-review?

Peer-review is exactly what it sounds like, an evaluation by a peer, another expert in the field. When a manuscript is submitted to us, we ask the relevant editorial board members to recommend appropriate people to read and review the article. Reviewers are very familiar with the subject of inquiry and are able to spot any illogical data or unsubstantiated conclusions. They will also hopefully be up-to-date with the current and previously published research, allowing them to determine if the work is sufficiently novel. Reviewers also give us valuable feedback about whether an article should be published at all or if major revisions are needed.

Peer review is the most important part of the publication process, because otherwise it would be impossible to trust the validity of published research articles. We rely on the peer review system of checks and balances as a rigorous evaluation process to guarantee that published research is trustworthy.

We start the peer review process by sending the manuscript to the editorial advisory board members whose research or area of expertise overlaps with the subject of the article. Our editorial board members come from all over the world and do research in almost every area of chemistry (see Sections).  Board members respond with comments about the article’s subject headings and either accept or decline to review the manuscript personally. Most importantly, they give recommendations of other appropriate reviewers, who are then invited to review the manuscript. Two or more experts review every article published in Chemistry Central Journal, ensuring that we publish only the highest quality of research.

Posted by Andrea Albright at 16:43    Comments (0)

 

 

View from the inside: Chemistry Central takes on an intern

I’m Andrea Albright and since Monday November 5th I have been an editorial intern at Chemistry Central.  I will be working here for six weeks. I am a student at Grinnell College in Grinnell, Iowa, USA, where I am studying for my bachelor’s degree in chemistry. My particular area of interest in chemistry is organic chemistry, and last summer I participated in organic synthesis research, "Green Chemistry – Organic Synthesis in Ionic Liquids".

When I’m not in the office, my nose is usually in a book (fiction is my favorite), or I am teaching myself how to cook and making a mess of the kitchen. I enjoy learning foreign languages and travelling, especially to visit friends and family in exotic places.

Right now, I am taking a break from Iowa and spending an exciting semester studying in London.  I came to Chemistry Central, an innovative and exciting new open-access journal, in order to find a chemistry-related internship not directly on a lab bench. I am thrilled to explore the world of academic publishing. I hope to learn the ins and outs of the peer-review system and to discover if a career in publishing is right for me. I will continue to update this blog in the upcoming weeks in order to share what I have learned about the publishing process.

Posted by Andrea Albright at 16:31    Comments (0)

 

 

20% discount on article processing charge for peer reviewers

We are delighted to announce that a reviewer discount now exists for all those who review manuscripts for Chemistry Central Journal, and this is linked to the rest of the the BMC series journals. The review must have been received on time, and during the last 12 months.

This means that if the submitting author has reviewed a manuscript for Chemistry Central Journal or any of the BMC series, they are entitled to a 20% discount off the article processing charge (APC) when submitting articles to any of these journals. We ask that qualifying authors request this discount at the time of submission.

The number of articles submitted to these journals continues to grow significantly, and we are grateful those who agree to review for our journals.

For more information on this discount and the others available please visit the BioMed Central APC FAQ page.

Posted by Gino D'Oca at 15:29    Comments (0)

 

 

Symyx Technologies to Acquire MDL from Elsevier

It seems that Elsevier has finally decided the synergies between its journal/book/database businesses and MDL aren't going to fully materialise - which is a shame given that one can see huge advantages in bringing electronic laboratory notebooks, reaction/property databases and journal content into a seamless platform for both academia and industry.

Symyx Technologies has announced today a $123m all cash purchase of MDL, which, given the undisclosed but heavily speculated price Elsevier paid for the Beilstein Database in March can't possibly include these products.

Chemistry Central is currently working with MDL on improving author support for submission of ISIS/Draw and MDLDraw schemes, graphical abstracts and figures.
 

Posted by Bryan Vickery at 12:28    Comments (1)

 

 

The findings of the SPECTRa project's final report

The final report for of the JISC's SPECTRa project (Submission, Preservation and Exposure of Chemistry Teaching and Research Data) was recently published. The project was funded by JISC's Digital Repositories Programme as a joint project between the libraries and chemistry departments of the University of Cambridge and Imperial College London, in collaboration with the eBank UK project. (It is worth noting that a member of our editorial advisory board, Dr Simon Coles of the University of Southampton, was an eBank Project representative for the SPECTRa study).

The aim... The broad aim of the eighteen month study, which ended in March, was to "address the provision of Open Access to primary chemical research data in molecular and related subjects through institutional repositories". The project focussed on three areas of chemistry: synthetic organic chemistry, crystallography and computational chemistry.

Various chemistry data repositories have been launched in recent years, such as the University of Southampton's eCrystals and Cambridge's World Wide Molecular Matrix. However, in general "Chemistry as a discipline has been slower than the physical and biomedical sciences to adopt and exploit OA concepts in the handling of experimental data and research publications. Most of the data (analytical, spectral and even crystallographic) associated with peer-reviewed publications from chemistry departments are never communicated to the scientific community. In those limited instances where a publisher does provide a means of accessing primary data to supplement a published paper, the data may then be subject to the publisher's IPR practices. In most cases the primary data are simply not published...".

In light of this, the five key objectives of the SPECTRa study were established as being; to undertake surveys of communities in computational and organic chemistry; to and refine crystallography tools developed by eBank; to develop automated validated and indexing tools specific to computational and synthetic chemistry, and provide interactions with the OAI-compliant DSpace repository platform; to develop chemical metadata functionality based on Dublin Core; and, to disseminate and promote project outcomes to encourage widespread adoption.

The findings... Surveys of chemists at Imperial College and Cambridge University investigated their current use of computers and the Internet and identified specific data needs. The salient points to emerge from the feedback were: a lot of data is not stored electronically (e.g. lab books, paper copies of spectra); a complex list of data file formats (particularly proprietary binary formats) are being used; there is significant ignorance regarding digital repositories; there is a requirement for restricted access to deposited experimental data.

In addition, two interesting statistics to come out of the surveys were that "[o]ver half (52%) of the [171] respondents stated they were aware of digital repositories however, but only 9% of respondents are currently using one", whilst, "[a]bout 50% of the data created by research chemists is still stored in non-digital formats." Also to emerge from the survey results was the concept of a "golden moment" - a point at which the researcher best understands the process, possesses a comprehensive package of information to describe it, and is motivated to submit it to a data management process.

Based on interviews with key researchers, distributable software tool development using Open Source code was undertaken to facilitate deposition into a repository. The project has provided tools which allow for the preservation aspects of data reuse. All legacy chemical file formats are converted to the appropriate Chemical Markup Language scheme to enable automatic data validation, metadata creation and long-term preservation needs. Additional tools would however be required to add value to any large-scale data aggregates. The deposition process adopted the concept of an "embargo repository" allowing unpublished or commercially sensitive material, identified through metadata, to be retained in a closed access environment until the data owner approved it for release. The resultant repository architecture envisages a federated framework in which data will first be deposited into an intermediate departmental repository, before possibly later being pushed into a central OA repository.

The project's main findings included the following: scientific data repositories are more complex to build and maintain than are those designed primarily for text-based materials; the specific needs of individual scientific disciplines are best met by discipline-specific tools, though this is a resource-intensive process; institutional repository managers need to understand the working practices of researchers in order to develop repository services that meet their requirements; IPR issues relating to the ownership and reuse of scientific data are complex, and would benefit from authoritative guidance based on UK and EU law.

In conclusion, the report states that "[t]here is no universal ‘shrink-wrapped’ approach which works for every discipline. We have designed a toolkit to address problems which should be applicable in a generic fashion to other institutions with similar research interests... The organisational and technical architecture of institutional repositories may be improved by creating intermediate "departmental" repositories between the researcher and the central institutional repository. Such departmental repositories, designed to meet the needs of specific local communities of researchers, and in particular offering an embargo facility, may be more successful in establishing the degree of confidence, competence and trust that will persuade researchers to deposit data readily."

The full report can be viewed here.

Posted by Gino D'Oca at 10:12    Comments (0)

 

 

US Department of Energy and the British Library launch new global gateway for scientists

The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) and the British Library launched on June 22 an online global gateway, WorldWideScience.org, aimed at anyone interested in searching science portals.

The aim of the website is to '[connect] users to national and international scientific databases' and 'accelerate scientific discovery and progress by providing one-stop searching...' The gateway will allow access to information from 15 national portals including UK PubMed central and Science.gov, the US search engine for federal science agencies. In addition to the US and UK involvement, the portal provides access to research information from Australia, Brazil, Canada, Denmark, France, Germany, Japan and the Netherlands. 

The gateway uses 'federated search technology', a search method that simultaneously executes a query against an array of disparate databases, then merges and ranks the results. In contrast to traditional search engines -which only allow sources that have been indexed by the search engine’s crawler technology to be searched, retrieved and accessed - federated searching therefore offers users a single entry point for searching distant science portals in parallel with only one query.

The gateway's signature of intent, signed in January by the DOE's under-Secretary for Science and the Chief Executive of the British Library, stated that '...international collaboration is essential to revolutionary advances in the fields of sustainable energy, medicine, agriculture, environment, and basic sciences' and that '...advances in science can be accelerated when the diffusion of science knowledge is accelerated'. 

Also reassuring for all those keen on things OA, is the statement that 'Much of the information accessed via this gateway will be freely available and open domain'.

Posted by Gino D'Oca at 11:07    Comments (0)

 

 

Prof Paul W. O. Hoskin joins Chemistry Central Journal Editorial Advisory Board

We are pleased to announce that Prof Paul W. O. Hoskin, the Canada Research Chair of Solid Earth Geochemistry of Orogenic Belts at the University of Calgary, has joined the editorial board for Geochemistry.

Prof Hoskin, a petrologic mineralogist, focuses his studies on the occurrences, textures, and compositions of minerals as a means of interpreting the processes that formed the rocks in which they are found. He also investigates the mechanisms of growth, modification, and exhumation of continental margins and their orogenic belts. In addition to being the author of one of the most cited papers published in the Journal of Metamorphic Geology since its inception, he was awarded the 2005 Max Hey Medal for 'excellence in mineralogy and its applications' by the Mineralogical Society of Great Britain and Ireland. He has also published highly cited papers in both Geochimica et Cosmochimica Acta and the Journal of Petrology.

Posted by Gino D'Oca at 10:12    Comments (0)

 

 

Unemployed/retired Might Lose Touch with their Fields of Research

I came across a blog posting by Derek Lowe this morning, who, since January 2007, has been looking for a new position. An every day occurrence one might think (redundancy happened to me not so long ago), and not enough to tug on your heart strings. But Derek, with years of expertise in medicinal chemistry and pre-clinical drug discovery, makes a very valid point - now that he is unemployed, how can he access the chemical literature?

For those in Derek's position, keeping up-to-date with research in your field is crucial to helping you back into work. The field he operates in covers many subject areas, and so he has very few options

• struggle to pay personal subscription charges to a huge number of journals, from a variety of publishers
• pay excessive "pay-per-view" charges, of around $30 an article
• visit a library, which increasingly likely doesn't keep a print copy, and where you are unlikely to be able to email yourself a copy of a pdf
• contact each author and hope that they will send you a copy

Of course, this is not just the plight of the unintentionally unemployed. What about those who are retired and either wanting to remain up-to-date, or to offer their significant talents as consultants?

There is some light at the end of this tunnel however. The rise and rise of institutional repositories will certainly help, but they are still difficult to find, often poorly populated and may not contain the "official" version of the manuscript. Thankfully, this is changing.

The other option, as Derek highlights, is to turn to open access journals - and there are a growing number of these in chemistry. Our own broad-ranging Chemistry Central Journal  is one of them, there's Geochemical Transactions, and the Beilstein Journal of Organic Chemistry, and Bentham has recently announced that it plans to launch 300 OA journals this year, many of them chemistry based.

We could all be faced with unemployment at any time, and with some luck will make it to retirement - just something else to consider the next time you think about submitting to a closed chemistry journal. Your access now might be fine, your future access could be cut-off!
 

Posted by Bryan Vickery at 14:09    Comments (1)

 

 

Biotechnology for Biofuels Launches Summer 2007

BioMed Central is pleased to announce that Biotechnology for Biofuels, which will emphasize understanding and advancing the application of biotechnology and synergistic operations to improve plants and biological conversion systems for the production of fuels from biomass, will launch in the summer. The Editors-in-Chief of this new open access journal will be Charles Wyman (UC Riverside), Chris Somerville (Stanford), Michael Himmel (NREL) and Bärbel Hahn-Hägerdal (Lund).

Posted by Bryan Vickery at 13:37    Comments (0)