PhysMath Central Blog
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)
The above is a Wordle representation of a recent talk at Ted by Murray Gell Man on Beauty and Truth in Physics.
Below is a Wordle representation of the abstracts of published manuscripts in PMC Physics A to date [click image to reveal full awesomeness]. Why not play with it yourself to see what you can create?
Posted by Chris Leonard at 13:31 Comments (0)
Mathematicians criticize impact factors
The Wall Street Journal's blog reports on the increasing dissatisfaction of mathematicians with impact factors. Nothing really new in the blog posting (for those who follow bibliometrics), but interesting to see that the arguments are getting much wider exposure now.
The posting was inspired by the release of the report by the International Mathematical Union (IMU) in cooperation with the International Council of Industrial and Applied Mathematics (ICIAM) and the Institute of Mathematical Statistics (IMS) on Citation Statistics. Brief excerpt:
For journals, the impact factor is most often used for ranking. This is a simple average derived from the distribution of citations for a collection of articles in the journal. The average captures only a small amount of information about that distribution, and it is a rather crude statistic. In addition, there are many confounding factors when judging journals by citations, and any comparison of journals requires caution when using impact factors. Using the impact factor alone to judge a journal is like using weight alone to judge a person's health.
Posted by Chris Leonard at 15:12 Comments (0)
To further celebrate the launch of PMC
Biophysics, we have a T-shirt competition for you!
We have pun-tastic
tshirts for PMC Physics A and B, but now it's up to you: come up with a clever
slogan for the new journal, ideally referencing both biophysics and open
access:
Inspiration might be found from the scope of the journal -
beyond that, it's up to you.
The reward for the winning slogan will be
nifty, high-quality tshirts for you and two friends, with your biophysical
slogan across the front, and our logo on the back.
Entries should be
emailed to info@physmathcentral.com by
the 31st of July, and we will announce the winners and their idea on the
blog.
Pun away!
Posted by Morag Hickman at 13:04 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 (2)
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
- R. N. P. Choudhary - Indian Institute of Technology
- 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)