PhysMath Central Blog
No charges for PMC Physics A through 2009
We are pleased to announce that PMC Physics A will not be levying any article processing charges for all articles accepted for publication between now and December 31st.
Please pass this news on to your colleagues as this is the perfect opportunity to have your worked published in a fully peer reviewed, open access journal at no cost to you.
View the editorial board here and submit your manuscript here.
Posted by Chris Leonard at 15:29 Comments (0)
PhysMath Central and Open Access
Posted by Chris Leonard at 12:58 Comments (0)
Apologies for the long break between postings, but with moving office, having a baby and being ill, there really don't seem like enough days in the week or hours in the day, but we'll try to make up for it with some good news.
PMC Biophysics, our latest journal covering all aspects of biological physics, has been accepted for coverage in PubMed and PubMed Central. All articles will have their full text available through PubMed Central and PubMed will ensure the abstracts are indexed and available through Medline.
This important step in the journal's development validates the hard work and speedy repsonse of authors and reviewers in getting high-quality work out in very short timeframes. We thank you all.
Posted by Chris Leonard at 10:36 Comments (0)
New functionality on PhysMath Central
So, in the words of Britney Spears, 'it's been a while' - but here we are with some updates on new outward-facing features we have recently added to PhysMath Central [we're always tinkering with things behind the scenes].
Firstly, the more eagle-eyed among you will have already noticed that the search bar now also sports an 'advanced' option where you can restrict your searches by field or article type or date. We'll be adding more options in to this area soon, so keep your eyes peeled for them.
Secondly, on the right hand side of the homepage you will see a new icon called 'sign up for article alerts'. As you might expect, this allows you to get the titles of the latest articles emailed to you on a schedule of your choosing (every 7, 14 or 30 days, or each time an article is published). This feature, available for each journal PhysMath Central publishes, complements the exisiting RSS feeds for people who prefer to receive updates by email instead.
In the next few weeks, as well as augmenting the functionalities in advanced search, we'll be releasing a whole host of new features including a spanking new design for the whole site, so stay tuned.
Posted by Chris Leonard at 12:01 Comments (0)
From Bill Hooker's blog:
Science Online '09 is less than a week away, and I'm going to be co-moderating an unconference session with Björn Brembs, the theme of which is "Open Access publishing: present and future".
Björn has already put some notes up on the wiki, and there's an interesting contribution from Antony Williams of Chemspider. As both Björn's and Antony's notes make clear, we think the future of Open Access (indeed, all scholarly) publishing will feature prominently the long-overdue death of the Impact Factor. In fact, audience willing, we plan to use some of this session as a sort of preface for Björn's Sunday session with Peter Binfield, which is titled "Reputation, authority and incentives. Or: How to get rid of the Impact Factor".
It's difficult to overstate the extent to which that single figure has come to dominate scholarly and administrative decision making: where to publish, who to fund or promote, which candidate to hire, and so on. It's also difficult to overstate how bad an idea it is to put so much weight on a single journal-level metric derived by undislosed calculations and decisions from a proprietary database.
Read the article in full - and let Bill know your thoughts.
Personally I think OA will simply make it easier to construct new metrics which are much more transparent and therefore inherently superior to proprietary impact factors.
Posted by Chris Leonard at 15:02 Comments (0)
BioMed Central (and PhysMath Central)'s deputy publisher Bryan Vickery was interviewed briefly at Online Information 2008 yesterday. Read the interview with Dirk Kaser here.
Posted by Chris Leonard at 15:25 Comments (0)
It is with some pride we announce the publication of the first articles in PMC Biophysics, PhysMath Central's 3rd open access research journal. The editor-in-chief, Huan-Xiang Zhou, and the editorial board have worked fantastically well in the last few months to get the initial batch of articles to publication and we look forward to many more in the near future. The first articles for this journal are:
The Debut of PMC Biophysics
Huan-Xiang Zhou PMC Biophysics 2008, 1:1
Label-free electrical quantification of the dielectrophoretic response of DNA
Anja Henning, Jörg Henkel, Frank F Bier and Ralph Hölzel
PMC Biophysics 2008, 1:2
On the electrostatic component of protein-protein binding free energy
Kemper Talley, Carmen Ng, Michael Shoppell, Petras Kundrotas and Emil Alexov
PMC Biophysics 2008, 1:3
ATR-FTIR spectroscopy detects organotin(IV) carboxylate induced alterations at sub-cytotoxic/-genotoxic concentrations
Muhammad S Ahmad, Bushra Mirza, Mukhtiar Hussain, Muhammad Hanif, Saqib J Ali, Michael J Walsh and Francis L Martin
PMC Biophysics 2008, 1:4
Posted by Chris Leonard at 18:46 Comments (2)
Michael Brunger on open access publishing in atomic physics
Posted by Chris Leonard at 18:11 Comments (0)
Open access at Elsevier: Is it really?
Elsevier, the world's largest scientific publisher, has recently recognized that all results from the Large Hadron Collider will be published exclusively in OA journals, and to that end has magnanimously "agreed to sponsor any articles accepted for publication that
report the initial experimental results from CERN’s LHC project".
However, a closer look at what has been reported as a no-fee, open access option shows that it is lacking several key OA characteristics. A closer look at what your $3000 (+VAT) buys for a typical, non-LHC 'sponsored article' is hard to come by. The official Elsevier page is lacking in any detail, but I would suggest that any author, or group of authors, willing to take up this offer should answer these questions to their own satisfaction first.
Is your copyright being signed over to the publisher, or are you encouraged to retain it?
Will the free access be permanent? Is this article to be archived in a third-party repository in case the publisher one day decides that the free period is over?
Is the full-text available not only as pdf, but also in machine-readable format for data-mining (e.g. XML & MathML)?
Can you and others reuse, host and modify the data and article, in whole or in part, freely?
Some others are questioning what sponsored article status means - certainly Elsevier make a point of not referring to it as open access, maybe we all should too?
Posted by Chris Leonard at 09:12 Comments (0)
Open Access books from Bloomsbury
An interesting experiment has arisen from Bloomsbury - the people behind the Harry Potter books. They are about to launch a venture offering full-text of research monographs online for free. This company, Bloomsbury Academic Publishing, has adopted some of the facets of open acccess journal publishing and applied them to the peculiarities of academic book publishing.
Authors of a weighty tome on some esoteric area of science are often horrified to find out that - due to sales figures and print runs likely to be in the low hundreds - costs need to be recouped by charging very high prices for their work. In a field such as mathematics, this can often be around $150 for a 300 page book. Unfortunately this prices it out of the reach of students and postgrads, and increasingly even libraries are questioning the value of the more highly-priced books.
However, Bloomsbury have decided to offer the full-text of these books online for free - and with no author charges payable either. They hope to make their money from print-on-demand versions available for libraries.
It is early days yet, and the website is still short on a few details - like how much the print-on-demand books will cost (costs still need to be recouped - but there are no upfront print costs at least), and it is notable that they are - for now at least - concentrating on easily marked-up text heavy subjects (humanities and social sciences, no mathematics or physics), but should it succeed it will open up the way for many more books to be published which are simply not economical to proceed with at the moment. What surprises hide in the long tail? We'll just have to wait and see. At least, due to their open access nature, we will be able to find them easily as they will all be indexable by Google and other search engines too.
Posted by Chris Leonard at 11:58 Comments (0)
PMC Biophysics extends free period
After a number of requests citing summer holidays and conference travelling, we have decided to extend the fee-waiver period for PMC Biophysics. As a result, there will be no article processing charge for all accepted articles which are submitted before 30 September 2008.
Now is an ideal opportunity to experience the benefits of publishing in an open access journal. Read about the scope of the journal and submit your paper here.
We are also pleased to announce that the journal will be archived in PubMed Central.
Posted by Morag Hickman at 14:16 Comments (0)
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 its 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 September 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 (3)
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)
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)
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)