PhysMath Central Blog
PMC Biophysics - open access to the latest research in this interdisciplinary field
We are very pleased to announce the launch of the third fully-open access journal on PhysMath Central, PMC Biophysics.
The journal with it's prestigious editorial board - headed by Huan-Xiang Zhou
- will publish research on all aspects of biological physics,
including theoretical and experimental aspects of; physical concepts
with potential applications to biological systems, physical models
inspired by biological systems, biological problems addressed by
physics-based methods and soft condensed matter & mesoscale systems.
Biophysics
is a rapidly growing interdisciplinary field drawing on expertise in
physics, biology, chemistry, computer science, mathematics and even
engineering, and as such is one of the most vibrant areas of scientific
research. Examples of some of the primary areas if interest for the new
journal are:
- Thermodynamics and kinetics of biological processes
- Structural stability and confomational transition of biomolecules
- Correlation of macromolecular dynamics and biological function
- Macromolecular assembly
- Modeling of cellular environments
- Protein-membrane interactions and ion channels
- Signaling and interaction networks
- Energy transduction and motility
- Novel biophysical methods
Given
this interdisciplinary nature and the cross-over interest to people
working in bioinformatics, structural biology and associated fields, PMC Biophysics will be cross-listed on the BioMed Central site.
PMC Biophysics aims to provide
researchers in the field of biological physics with an open access venue where
they can communicate and discuss technological or theoretical
developments as well as novel applications of physics to biology. Along with other PhysMath Central journals, PMC Biophysics
will offer authors unparalleled dissemination of their work, no
restrictions on the length of their manuscript, or the number of
figures, and the ability to host multimedia elements, such as movies,
animations and audio descriptions alongside their text and figures.
Coupled to speedy referee processes and immediate publication upon
acceptance, we hope that this will make PMC Biophysics an outstanding venue for biophysicists to publish their research.
In
addition to the usual article types (editorials, research articles and
reviews) PMC Biophysics will also be soliciting work in the form of
Letters (short communications about a previously published article in
the journal), Mini-reviews (shorter reviews on an emerging field) and Problems (where readers are
invited to suggest biological problems which may merit further
investigation by physical methods).
Submissions to PMC Biophysics
are fully peer-reviewed. The peer-review process will be overseen by
the Editor-in-chief, working in association with expert Editorial Board
members to ensure that only the highest quality referees review
all submissions.
After peer-review, accepted papers will normally be subject to an Article Processing Charge.
However, to celebrate the journal's launch, there is no article processing charge for all accepted articles which are submitted before 30 July 2008.
This is the perfect opportunity to see for yourself how online-only
publishing offers many advantages over traditional journals, and to see
that open access means that your work is available to everyone, all
over the world, permanently and for free, leading to greater impact and
citations.
Submit your article now!
Posted by Chris Leonard at 19:08 Comments (0)
Zotero support for PhysMath Central
We are very pleased to announce that PhysMath Central now has Zotero support.
On each abstract and full-text article page you will notice the blue Zotero icon in the address bar, which you can click to add the bibliogrpahic information to your Zotero account. And if you don't know what Zotero is, click here and find out more. You'll be glad you did.
Posted by Chris Leonard at 17:08 Comments (0)
Travis Brooks, posting on the new symmetry breaking blog, has analysed the titles of all 51 2007 Topcites from SPIRES (as well as abstracts from 37 of them and keywords from DESY for 27 of them) and thrown them at the TagCrowd.com generator to see what came out. Click on the image above, or here, to find out and get a flavour of HEP in 2007.
Posted by Chris Leonard at 12:18 Comments (0)
Editorial Board for PMC Physics B
We're delighted to be able to announce the first members of the Editorial Board for PMC Physics B, our open access journal on condensed matter, atomic, molecular and optical physics and, particularly, the interfaces between these areas. Along with Editors-in-Chief, Stephen Buckman and Peter Hatton, they welcome your submissions to this new and exciting journal.
- Mohammad Akhavan - Sharif University of Technology, Tehran
- Klaus Bartschat - Drake University
- Simon Bending - University of Bath
- Michael Brunger - Flinders University
- Daniel Fruchart - CNRS
- Franco A. Gianturco - University of Rome
- Helen Gleeson - Manchester University
- Mark Golden - University of Amsterdam
- Alexandr L Ivanovskii - Russian Academy of Sciences
- Yoshiyuki Kawazoe - Tohoku University
- Kliment Kugel - Loughborough University
- Marco A. P. Lima - University of Campinas
- Dennis Lindle - University of Nevada
- C K Maiti - Indian Institute of Technology
- Nigel J. Mason - Open University
- Zoran Petrović - Institute of Physics, Belgrade
- Bernard Raveau - ENSICAEN
- Ifor Samuel - University of St Andrews
- Siddharth Saxena - Cambridge University
- Kenneth Taylor - Queen's University Belfast
- Tseung-Yuen Tseng - National Taiwan University
- Howard M. Wiseman - Griffith University
- Zhongxian Zhao - Chinese Academy of Sciences
Posted by Morag Hickman at 15:36 Comments (0)
Open Access is not just a free pdf!
There is an exceptional editorial published recently in PLoS Computational Biology which goes into some detail about the benefits of making the full-text version of open access articles available to all as XML. The authors (Philip Bourne, Lynn Fink and Mark Gerstein) sometimes border on evangelism, but that is what is needed to inspire programmers & researchers to not only make use of this data (for thats what it is), but also to publish their results in open access journals which convert the full-text to XML. From the editorial:
Papers published as PDFs do not lend themselves to easy manipulation by computer. HTML is better, but the markup has more to do with presentation on a Web page than the semantic content of the paper, which is where the great opportunities lie. XML versions of the paper offer the most promise. When publishers make XML versions available, most conform to the National Library of Medicine (NLM) Document Type Definition (DTD) (http://dtd.nlm.nih.gov). In addition, several markup languages have been developed, such as CellML (http://www.cellml.org) and MathML (http://www.w3.org/Math), which can be used in addition to the NLM DTD to further describe the semantic content of a paper. Semantically aware markup is further elaborated in a systematic fashion in the construction of the semantic Web, where the XML tags are related to each other in explicit ontologies. The analogy between an XML file of content offered by a publisher and XML content provided by a database provider should not be missed. As a community, we have been at the forefront of using the latter; will we be at the forefront of using the former? While the DTD and markup languages provide for extensions to meet the needs of each discipline, publishers and researchers have made little use of them to date. This is somewhat of a chicken-and-egg situation. When significant markup is available, it will be used; then again, why go to the trouble of adding significant markup if there are no applications demanding it? The best way out would seem to be to do something significant with the markup we have, which may then inspire authors, publishers, and others to see the research and commercial potential of the corpus.
The use of such markup is a hallmark of Web 2.0 and is manifest in the idea of a mashup. Simply put, a mashup is an integration of Web content from multiple sources to provide a new and more powerful service beyond what can be achieved by any of the individual sources of information it comprises. This type of integration is facilitated if the semantic content from each information source can be identified and thus allow meaningful integration to take place. Specifically in relation to publishing, the mashup manifests the blurring of the distinction between databases and journals, which will continue in future.
Here, here! That is why we ensure that all papers published by BioMed Central, Chemistry Central and PhysMath Central are all available as XML and we implore people to make use of this data in a way which could potentially allow for forward leaps, rather than steps, in scientific research.
Open Access: Taking Full Advantage of the Content
PLoS Comput Biol 4(3): e1000037 (March 28, 2008)
Posted by Chris Leonard at 16:46 Comments (0)
The latest installment in what I imagine will be a very short-lived series - 'British Comedians and The LHC' - comes from the CERN Podcast where comedy actor Kevin Eldon and League Against Tedium head honcho Simon Munnery are shown around the Large Hadron Colilder by PMC Physics A editorial board member Brian Cox. Eldon and Munnery worked together the arrestingly entitled 'Attention Scum' and you can see them get somewhat awed at the scale of the ATLAS detector here.
Although it's not a laugh-a-minute tour, it is a fascinating insight into the state of modern particle physics as Cox pitches his explanations at an educated layman level and tries to answer some very perceptive questions, especially from Eldon, like 'Why do different particles have different masses' and 'How does gravity work'.
Eldon & Munnery at the LHC with Brian Cox: Part 1 - Part 2
Posted by Chris Leonard at 16:34 Comments (0)
Subscription prices still shocking
The Engineering Library at Cornell University has announced a new exhibit online and in the library - Sticker Shock 2. This is an update to the original 2002 Sticker Shock exhibition which highlights the cost of journal subscriptions and equates them to items, holidays and scholarships that a similar amount of money can buy.
Via PAMNET.
Posted by Chris Leonard at 11:48 Comments (0)
Continuing from the great success of the Particle Game, we had an enthusiastic response to the Elements Game from attendees of the APS March Meeting. Congratulations to Hugh Wilson of UC Davis and Saswati Pujari of Northwestern University, who matched up their element cards and won an iPod Shuffle each. Come and visit us at our next conference for your chance to win!
Posted by Morag Hickman at 16:28 Comments (0)
Videos from Berkeley's SCOAP3 day
[hat tip to Peter Suber's Open Access News]
The videos from UC Berkeley's day on open access and, more specifically, SCOAP3 are now online. The video and sound quality are excellent and the presentations not too long. Worth watching.
1. Welcome & Opening Address
Tom Leonard, University Librarian, University of California, Berkeley
George Breslauer, Executive Vice Chancellor and Provost, University of California, Berkeley
2. What is Open Access, Anyhow?
Rick Luce, Emory University
3. The SCOAP3 Model
Salvatore Mele, CERN
4. Fund-raising in Europe
Jens Vigen, CERN
5. Expectations of a Large Research Institution
Ralf Schimmer, Max Planck Digital Library
6. US Consortia in SCOAP3
Ivy Anderson, California Digital Library
7. Individual US Libraries and SCOAP3 - Part 1
Miriam Blake, Los Alamos National Laboratory, LANL
8. Individual US Libraries and SCOAP3 - Part 2
Kimberly Douglas, Caltech
9. OA Synergies: Repositories for High Energy Physics
Travis Brooks, Stanford Linear Accelerator Center, SLAC
Posted by Chris Leonard at 13:40 Comments (0)
Back from the APS March Meeting
At long last, we are back in the London office after the APS meeting in New Orleans. I was stricken by a stomach bug/chest infection whilst I was there, so it was a relief to recuperate in my own bed. As I did so I was able to catch up on some excellent blogged summaries of the talks and presentations around the Morial Convention Center. Thankfully there were people there who made their notes available to all as there were so many interesting parallel sessions going on it was like going to a great party where you're convinced there's another, more excellent party happening somewhere else. So thanks to Doug Natelson and Dave Bacon for providing their own takes on the meeting.
Elsewhere, a storm in a teacup, or the beginnings of something more serious? APS declines to publish papers asking for Wikipedia-friendly licenses. See also comments on Peter Suber's blog and Slashdot. Interestingly I had a long chat with someone from the APS about what a Creative Commons license (as all articles on PhysMath Central have) allows that their copyright agreement does not allow. This story cropped up just as I was landing back at Gatwick.
Posted by Chris Leonard at 15:52 Comments (0)
The PhysMath Central team are at the APS March meeting in New Orleans. Come and visit us on stand 441 and play the elements game to win an iPod shuffle for you and whoever has the matching element to you.
Posted by Chris Leonard at 11:58 Comments (0)
Reminder - Today is SCOAP3 day on PhysMath Central
Don't forget, in honour of the SCOAP3 initiative, today is SCOAP3 day!
All articles submitted to PMC Physics A on today, March 7th will be peer-reviewed and accepted articles will be published without incurring an Article Processing Charge. Simply request a waiver with the words 'It's SCOAP3 day!'.
Posted by Morag Hickman at 15:03 Comments (0)
Open Access is the answer for interdisciplinary research
A fascinating feature on interdisciplinary research in the lastest issue of Nature. Of particular interest is this quote (section marked in bold by me):
“Younger faculty tend to be concerned that if they get involved [in interdisciplinary work], their colleagues in the departments in charge of promotion and tenure will feel they haven't lived up to the standards of the discipline.” Other problems, he says, include finding places to publish — “it's much easier for people to get published in traditional disciplinary settings” — and finding an audience. A physicist could, say, publish a paper on stock-market patterns in Physical Review E, but how many economists will read it is another matter."
How many economists would subscribe, have access to or search a physics journal? Probably not many. However, research published in open access journals requires no subscription, is available to all and - due to the full-text being available online - is indexed by regular search engines, as well as the more specialist A&I databases. Serendipity is afoot.
Open access journals in interdisciplinary subjects makes sense. That is why we encourage researchers to get in touch and suggest areas where traditional journals are not working for their field.
Independent, open access journals on PhysMath Central.
Posted by Chris Leonard at 16:31 Comments (2)
Looking and laughing at the LHC
Listening to comedian Bill Bailey on my iPod on the way to work isn't something which would usually warrant a mention on the blog here, but today was different. Today he was talking about the Large Hadron Collider and that the fact that the experiment has such a wide spectrum of success:
"The spectrum of success for this scientific experiment ranges from 'nothing will happen' when they switch it on...
- Turn it off, turn it on again.
...or, it will create a black hole under Switzerland. That seems to me to be huge margin of error. Nothing or Apocolypse."
He goes on to speculate that if it doesn't work, scientists will get bored and put other things in it, like Maltesers and satsumas.
And to complement that thought, some great photos from the latest issue of National Geographic of the LHC. Although they refer to the Higgs as 'The God Particle', something which annoys every physicist I know.
Posted by Chris Leonard at 10:56 Comments (2)
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Hi PMCers, just a quick post to introduce myself.
I'm Morag Hickman, and I've answered PMC's call for an Assistant Editor. You can read the Official version of what I'll be doing here. I've got the Physics BSc, I've got the publishing experience, I even brought my own pen.
Personally, I spend my time making and selling shiny things, trying not to be deafened by two parrots and missing the seaside.
I'll be at the APS March meeting with Chris, so come and meet us if you dare!
Posted by Morag Hickman at 16:08 Comments (0)