PhysMath Central Blog

Unconstrained joy

We had a fun time reading through the entries to our PMC Biophysics T-shirt slogan competition entries. Many thanks to all of you who entered. There were some excellent puns on free-energy barriers, open conformations and a bizarre one suggesting 'denature yourself' (!) but we are happy to announce the winner is....[drumroll].... Paul Jackson with his entry of 'unconstrained'. 

We liked this as - apart from it's obvious link to pendant groups being free to wiggle about - it also gets across the idea of unconstrained access to the article and data and also the fact that the author is not constrained by traditions of print journals as they are free to publish as much supporting data, video and applications as they wish. Thus, it was an easy decision in the end.

Sorry to the others, but Paul, your t-shirts will be winging their way to you soon.

Posted by Chris Leonard at 15:42    Comments (0)

 

 

Commenting on the commenters

I found this interesting blog post on Nature's dissection of BioMed Central's comments today:

While the normal forms of commenting occurred (criticism, requests for clarification, interpretive comments), to me the most interesting part of the commentary generated was the additional information users contributed, including links and downloads. This is new in richness and immediacy, factors that are unique to the online form.Kent Anderson, The Scholarly Kitchen, Jul 2008

It made me wonder why people are generally more likely to reply to a blog post than comment on a scholarly article. Certainly it is easier to comment on a blog post (often no registration or email verification needed), but maybe the fact that the comment is archived alongside the article makes people reluctant to comment unless they are 100% sure of their facts. After all, no one wants to be seen to be wrong in perpetuity! If you have never commented on a scientific article, what are your reasons. Did you agree 100% with all the articles you have read?

 

Posted by Chris Leonard at 16:01    Comments (0)

 

 

Come and meet us in Edinburgh at ESSDERC & ESSCIRC

PhysMath Central will be attending and exhibiting at the solid-state devices and ciruits meeting ESSDERC & ESSCIRC 2008 in Edinburgh this year. If you are at the conference, which runs from 15-18th September, come and meet us to grab some freebies and discuss how open access can benefit research in your field.  We would be especially interested to receive papers on these subjects for consideration in PMC Physics B.

 

Edinburgh- city street by Angelrays

Posted by Chris Leonard at 15:13    Comments (0)

 

 

Why scholarly publishers should blog

Ginny Hendricks writes on the 'Marketing Publishers' blog:

 Scholarly publishers should blog for the same community engagement and reputation management reasons as any corporation:

• Open and more frequent dialogue with customers.
• Release news and comment faster.
• Influence perceptions.
• Other influential blogs will link to you.
• You become an authority in your field.

All of which got me thinking, which other publishers blog? Nature, PLoS, BioMed Central. Any others? Is the ethos of open access more in keeping with the openess blogging?

I will also follow Ginny's advice and start blogging again. Sorry for the large gap in postings, but holidays don't take themselves you know.

Posted by Chris Leonard at 15:03    Comments (1)

 

 

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)

 

 

Wordle - cool tag clounds

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. 

Full report available here. 

Posted by Chris Leonard at 15:12    Comments (0)

 

 

T-shirt Slogan Competition

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 (1)

 

 

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)

 

 

Tag clouding 'topcites'

 

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)

 

 

More laughing matter

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)