PhysMath Central Blog
Regular visitors to the PhysMath Central site will have noticed that, following the pdf redesign at the start of this year, the online journal and article pages have also recently had an overhaul. See for yourself below and let us know what you think. The final stage of our redesign, the top level portal pages, will be happening later this summer.
Posted by Chris Leonard at 11:47 Comments (0)
Good news for OA from Netherlands
“The NWO wants scientific and scholarly publications to be freely accessible to everyone on the Internet. The organisation will provide five million euros to cover the cost of this kind of publication. This is a major policy shift for the NWO. Moreover, NWO chairman Jos Engelen has made an urgent appeal to leading scientists and scholars not to publish their articles in the established journals but to place them in an Internet journal.”
Read more here: http://www.surffoundation.nl/en/actueel/Pages/NWOtoogoesforOpenAccesstopublications.aspx
Posted by Chris Leonard at 17:59 Comments (0)
Nobel Prize winners urge US open access to federally funded research
"The open availability of federally funded research for broad public use in open online archives is a crucial building block in laying a strong national foundation to support accelerated discovery and innovation. It encourages broader participation in the scientific process by providing equitable access to high-quality research results to researchers at higher education institutions of all kinds – from research-intensive universities to community colleges alike. It can empower more members of the public to become engaged in citizen science efforts in areas that pique their imagination. It will equip entrepreneurs and small business owners with the very latest research developments, allowing them to more effectively compete in the development of new technologies and innovations. Open availability of this research will expand the worldwide visibility of the research conducted in the U.S. and increase the impact of our collective investment in research."
Read full text here: http://www.taxpayeraccess.org/supporters/scientists/nobelists_2009.shtml
Posted by Chris Leonard at 17:34 Comments (0)
How much of arXiv goes on to be peer-reviewed and published?
Sorry the not-so-snappy title, but this is a question someone asked me yesterday: How many papers on arXiv eventually end up published in a peer-reviewed journal? I had to confess I had no idea.
Tim Ingoldsby of the AIP has done some fantastic work recently in working out the reverse of this, how many papers in published journals are also available on arXiv.org [answer: it varies wildly across sub-disciplines but averages out to around 40%]. I emailed Tim, but he didn't have the information for this particular question.
So has there ever been any work done on signal-to-noise in arXiv? ['noise' may be a little unfair, but you get my drift]. If there isn't - then a Friday afternoon project may well have presented itself to me!
Posted by Chris Leonard at 10:23 Comments (0)
Why machine-readable data should matter to you
One of the things we do here at PhysMath Central (and our sister companies BioMed and Chemistry Central) which not all publishers do is format our full-text articles in freely-available XML and MathML. From a production point of view it makes sense as we can generate html and pdf versions of the article from the same source, but beyond that there are a plethora of possibilities that anyone could exploit due to their machine-readability. However it seems that machine-readable documents have yet to find an enthusiastic audience beyond a few data-miniing specialists.
However, a recent presentation by Mike Ellis entitled 'don't think websites: think data' re-ignited my belief that the future lies not in postscript, tex or pdf, but in a complete cultural shift in what we consider to be a publishable unit (I resist using the term 'article' or 'maunscript' here as that ideologically harks back to era of preparing data for print publications).
The following is a quote from the associated blog entry: 'Pushing MRD out from under the geek rock':
MRD (That’s Machine Readable Data – I couldn’t seem to find a better term..) is probably about as important as it gets. It underpins an entire approach to content which is flexible, powerful and open. It embodies notions of freely moving data, it encourages innovation and visualisation. It is also not nearly as hard as it appears – or doesn’t have to be.
...
The problem isn’t the geeks. The problem is that MRD needs to move beyond the realm of the geek and into the realm of the content owner, the budget holder, the strategist, for these technologies to become truly embedded. We need to have copyright holders and funders lined up at the start of the project, prepared for the fact that our content will be delivered through multiple access routes, across unspecified timespans and to unknown devices. We need our specifications to be focused on re-purposing, not on single-point delivery. We need solution providers delivering software with web API’s built in. We need to be prepared for a world in which no-one visits our websites any more, instead picking, choosing and mixing our content from externally syndicated channels.
In short, we now need the relevant people evangelising about the MRD approach.
Now in this case, Ellis is envisioning a future where the data is open, interoperable & reusable, but there is no reason why raw scientific data and the associated text (a publishable unit) should not be so right now.
We are envisioning a future where semantic markup and interoperable, resuable text, code and 'other' files are constructed to deliver a peer-reviewed scientific advance that is as far removed from today's html/pdf standard article as html itself is from Guttenberg's press.
In order to make this work, we'll need an army of evangelists in the right field, but once it is working, researchers in all fields should take notice and if you want your work to be relevant, cited and reused in 10 years time, you should be making MRD your priority. Either do it yourself, or publish the work with someone who will do it for you, but - and this is a bit of a personal hobby horse, rather than the views of my employer - please don't rely on tex/ps/pdf as being the best way you can present your data and results. Their usefulness is finite and their days, numbered.
Posted by Chris Leonard at 13:02 Comments (0)
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 (1)
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)