New Open access journal -- HSM
Polymers Polymers (ISSN 2073-4360), an Open Access journal of polymer science, is published by Molecular Diversity Preservation International (MDPI) online quarterly. The first issue will be released in 2010.
Showing posts with label journal news. Show all posts
Showing posts with label journal news. Show all posts
Friday, January 8, 2010
Impact of Open Access on Citation - Digital & Scholarly
Impact of Open Access on Citation - Digital & Scholarly
Impact of Open Access on Citation By Adrian K. Ho on January 6, 2010 8:50 PM |
Yassine Gargouri, Chawki Hajjem, Vincent Lariviere, Yves Gingras, Les Carr, Tim Brody, and Stevan Harnad have archived their article, Self-selected or mandated, open access increases citation impact for higher quality research, in arXiv.
Here is the abstract: Articles whose authors make them Open Access (OA) by self-archiving them online are cited significantly more than articles accessible only to subscribers. Some have suggested that this "OA Advantage" may not be causal but just a self-selection bias, because authors preferentially make higher-quality articles OA. To test this we compared self-selective self-archiving with mandatory self-archiving for a sample of 27,197 articles published 2002-2006 in 1,984 journals. The OA Advantage proved just as high for both. Logistic regression showed that the advantage is independent of other correlates of citations (article age; journal impact factor; number of co-authors, references or pages; field; article type; or country) and greatest for the most highly cited articles.
The OA Advantage is real, independent and causal, but skewed. Its size is indeed correlated with quality, just as citations themselves are (the top 20% of articles receive about 80% of all citations). The advantage is greater for the more citeable articles, not because of a quality bias from authors self-selecting what to make OA, but because of a quality advantage, from users self-selecting what to use and cite, freed by OA from the constraints of selective accessibility to subscribers only. BTW, the Open Citation Project has created a bibliography of studies on the effect of open access and downloads on citation impact.
The Imaginary Journal of Poetic Economics: Strong open access growth reported by Hindawi
The Imaginary Journal of Poetic Economics: Strong open access growth reported by Hindawi
Strong open access growth reported by Hindawi Hindawi Publishing reports strong growth for 2009. Submissions more than doubled, from 7,600 in 2008 to more than 16,500 in 2009. The number of accepted manuscripts grew from 2,500 in 2008 to 4,400 in 2009. Note that the growth in accepted manuscripts is smaller than the growth in submitted manuscripts, indicating an increased rejection rate. This data and indication of strong growth at PLoS One is important in indicating that not only is growth rate of open access journals very strong (two per day based on DOAJ rates), the growth of articles published in open access journals is strong as well. Thanks and congratulations to Hindawi's Paul Peters and Ahmed Hindawi.
The Imaginary Journal of Poetic Economics: Strong open access growth reported by Hindawi
Friday, October 23, 2009
SPIE Digital Library - Subscription Information and Support for Librarians
SPIE Digital Library - Subscription Information and Support for Librarians
Open-access SPIE Reviews journal to launch in mid-2009 with focus on emerging topics in optics and photonics
December 12, 2008 -- SPIE announced today the launch in mid-2009 of the new open-access journal SPIE Reviews under the editorship of William T. Rhodes. The new journal will publish original, in-depth review articles on emerging and evolving fields in applied optics and photonics of use to researchers as well as industry innovators.
"Articles will serve both as valuable overviews of significant new technologies and as portals to the primary literature in those areas for practitioners, researchers, and students." Dr. Rhodes said. "The optics community has long needed a good journal of review articles. I am extremely pleased that SPIE is launching this new publication, and doubly pleased because it comes at no cost to readers or authors." Rhodes is a professor of electrical engineering and Associate Director of the Imaging Technology Center at Florida Atlantic University, and Emeritus Professor at Georgia Institute of Technology.
As editor, Rhodes will be assisted by a broadly interdisciplinary editorial board that will provide the expertise needed to ensure that SPIE Reviews covers the full range of topics important to SPIE constituents.
SPIE Reviews will be available as an open-access publication in the SPIE Digital Library, the world's largest collection of optics literature. Articles in the SPIE Digital Library incorporate features such as extensive CrossRef-linked bibliographies, multimedia, bookmarking tools, and RSS feeds. In addition to these features, SPIE Reviews will feature links to related resources such as book chapters. SPIE Reviews joins the open-access SPIE Letters virtual journal as an additional open-access offering in the SPIE Digital Library, which also includes articles available by subscription or pay-per-view from SPIE's other six journals and the Proceedings of SPIE.
"SPIE Reviews will offer timely insights on emerging technologies of benefit to researchers and students, while also providing industry managers with overviews of developing fields and a front-view perspective on technology trends," said CEO Eugene Arthurs.
SPIE Reviews' open-access status will ensure its availability to researchers in developing countries and in schools with limited access to primary research journals, Arthurs noted. "This supports SPIE's mission to advance devierse new technologies throughout the world."
Articles will be invited by members of the editorial board and the editor. Proposals from prospective authors also will be considered by the editor. Proposals and inquiries may be sent to journals@spie.org. Additional information on SPIE Reviews is available at www.spie.org/reviews.
SPIE Digital Library - Subscription Information and Support for Librarians
Friday, June 12, 2009
Open-Access Publisher Appears to Have Accepted Fake Paper From Bogus Center - Chronicle.com
Open-Access Publisher Appears to Have Accepted Fake Paper From Bogus Center - Chronicle.com
Open-Access Publisher Appears to Have Accepted Fake Paper From Bogus Center
The medical-research industry is under growing pressure to improve its ethical standards. Similar pressure has extended to peer-reviewed medical journals, after Elsevier, a publishing leader, admitted to publishing at least nine fake journals from 2000 to 2005.
In other words, it’s an especially bad time for a medical journal to be duped by an author who, say, submits a fake computer-generated research paper from a fake institution he named the Center for Research in Applied Phrenology — or CRAP.
And yet that’s exactly what appears to have happened.
The deception was the work of Philip M. Davis, a doctoral student in communication at Cornell University who serves as executive editor of the Society for Scholarly Publishing’s Scholarly Kitchen blog.
Mr. Davis said he had concocted the plan after receiving numerous “aggressive” unsolicited e-mail messages from Bentham Publishing, which finances its line of 200 open-access scientific journals by charging authors a publication fee.
Mr. Davis and the blog’s editor in chief, Kent R. Anderson, submitted two research papers that were created by a computer program at MIT called SCIgen that describes itself as generating random text intended to “maximize amusement, rather than coherence.”
One of the papers was rejected by Bentham, and the other — a nonsensical five-page report with footnotes and graphical charts that purported to describe an Internet process called the “Trifling Thamyn” — was accepted after the publisher said it had been peer-reviewed. Mr. Davis reported that an invoice for $800 had been issued by Bentham, without any evidence that the article was actually peer-reviewed.
The publications director at Bentham, Mahmood Alam, told The Chronicle by e-mail that, “to the best of our knowledge, we have not published any article from the Center for Research in Applied Phrenology in any of our journals.” Mr. Davis said he had written to Bentham to withdraw the paper after its publication was approved.
Bentham’s subscription manager, Pradeep Menon, reached by telephone at the company’s headquarters in the United Arab Emirates, said he was aware of the accusation but had no further details and could not offer any other company official to comment.
“It’s the first of its kind because we never had such an insinuation charged against us,” Mr. Menon said. “All of our journals are peer-reviewed — that is 100 percent sure.”
Similar scammers have had success in the past, most notably the hoax published in the journal Social Text in 1996 by Alan D. Sokal, a physicist at New York University.
The “popular conception” that open-access publishers rely on publication fees, meanwhile, may not even be true, according to Stuart M. Shieber, a professor of computer science at Harvard University. Mr. Shieber, in his blog, The Occasional Pamphlet, said he had devised a program to pull data out of computerized medical-journal listings and concluded that only about 23 percent of open-access journals charge publication fees. —Paul Basken
Open-Access Publisher Appears to Have Accepted Fake Paper From Bogus Center - Chronicle.com
Wednesday, May 27, 2009
MDPI.com: peer-reviewed, fully open access scholarly journals since 1996 « Life Sciences Info @ Imperial College London Library
MDPI.com: peer-reviewed, fully open access scholarly journals since 1996
MDPI.com is a platform providing open access to peer-reviewed journals published by Molecular Diversity Preservation International (MDPI). Access is available to material published from 1996 onwards and includes:
- International Journal of Environmental Research & Public Health
- International Journal of Molecular Sciences
- Marine Drugs
- Molecules
- Nutrients
- Remote Sensing (New as of March 2009)
- Sustainability (New as of March 2009)
- Toxins
- Viruses
Visit www.mdpi.com to access these journals and more, and hook up to an RSS feed from the site too.
Major research institute moves publications to open-access system | News | Breaking News | Feedstuffs
Major research institute moves publications to open-access system
(5/27/2009)
The spiraling cost of subscriptions to scientific journals is fueling a movement toward web-based open access for papers detailing new scientific findings. The International Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics (ICRISAT) formally launched an open-access (OA) system for its scientific publications on May 27.
"ICRISAT has declared the Green OA Mandate in the Institute, thereby making available a digital, web-accessible repository of pre-prints of the scientific and scholarly publications emerging from ICRISAT's research," according to a statement from the institute.
"According to the registry on global OA initiatives maintained by the University of Southampton in the U.K., ICRISAT is among the earliest agricultural research institutes to declare the green mandate," the statement noted. The University of Southampton maintains the database, which is called Roarmap.
ICRISAT noted that critical research information to researchers across the globe has been affected by the costs of the journals, and "even institutions in developed countries find it difficult to meet increasing journal subscription costs."
In recent years, the OA movement has sprung up in many developed countries, ICRISAT reported. "Champions of the OA movement believe that in spite of publisher-mandated copyright restrictions, authors of scientific and scholarly papers have the fullest freedom to share their findings with their peer community," the statement said.
ICRISAT, based in India, has research stations throughout the world in semi-arid tropical regions. It is one of the institutions of the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research.
The OA repository of ICRISAT can be accessed at http://openaccess.icrisat.org. Most of the institute's print publications can be accessed at http://books.icrisat.org.
Monday, May 4, 2009
RELIGION Blog | The Dallas Morning News
RELIGION Blog | The Dallas Morning News
Perkins and other UMC seminaries launch Methodist Review
Sam Hodges/Reporter
Perkins School of Theology at Southern Methodist University is one of the seminary partners in the launch of Methodist Review, an open access, peer-reviewed electronic academic journal. Here's a press release with details:
Methodist Review begins electronic publication May 1
The board of directors and the sponsors of The Methodist Review, Inc., are pleased to announce the launch of Methodist Review: A Journal of Wesleyan and Methodist Studies. As an open access, peer-reviewed electronic academic journal, Methodist Review (MR) publishes scholarly articles in all areas and eras of Wesleyan and Methodist studies, including biblical, theological, ethical, philosophical, practical, historical, biographical, and social-scientific topics and methodologies. The journal's URL is: www.methodistreview.org.
Methodist Review is sponsored by Candler School of Theology, Emory University; Perkins School of Theology, Southern Methodist University; the Association of United Methodist Theological Schools (AUMTS); and the General Board of Higher Education and Ministry of the United Methodist Church (GBHEM). The corporate office of The Methodist Review, Inc., is located at GBHEM in Nashville; the MR editorial office is located at Candler School of Theology in Atlanta. Technical support is provided by the Digital Systems division of the Emory University Libraries, where MR is hosted.
Methodist Review is partly a successor to and partly a transformation of Quarterly Review: A Journal of Theological Resources for Ministry (QR), which was published jointly by GBHEM and The United Methodist Publishing House from 1980 to 2005. Russell E. Richey of Candler and Ted A. Campbell of Perkins serve as the general editors of MR; Rex D. Matthews of Candler is the managing editor; and Valerie J. Loner of Candler is the current editorial assistant.
Although its entirely digital format and blind peer-review policy are new, said Richey, MR seeks to continue a rich intellectual tradition that dates back far beyond QR, its immediate predecessor, to the establishment in 1818 of the Methodist Magazine, a North American Methodist effort to emulate John Wesley's own Arminian Magazine which began publication in 1778.
Campbell observed that the rigorous peer-review procedure used will help to ensure the academic credibility and quality of Methodist Review. To that end, MR has assembled a large editorial board of highly qualified senior scholars, including non-U.S. Methodist/Wesleyan scholars, all of whom serve on a voluntary basis, reviewing and evaluating articles submitted for publication in MR and advising the editors about their suitability for publication in the journal.
Methodist Review will not be published on the regular schedule of a print journal. Instead, articles will be published on the MR web site when they are ready, and registered users will be notified of their publication by e-mail. Matthews noted that the electronic format was purposely chosen for the journal to best serve an increasingly global Methodist/Wesleyan academic audience by allowing for more timely delivery of articles and lower production costs. The financial support provided by its sponsors enables MR to provide immediate access to its content at no cost to its readers. A one-time, free user registration is required to access the articles published in the journal.
The first articles to be published in Methodist Review are these:
• Sarah Heaner Lancaster (Methodist Theological School in Ohio), et al., "What Makes Theology 'Wesleyan'?" featuring contributions by Catherine Keller (Drew University Theological School), Donald A.Thorsen (Asuza Pacific University), Dennis C. Dickerson (Vanderbilt University), and Charles M. Wood (Perkins School of Theology), with an introduction by Sarah Lancaster.
• Russell E. Richey (Candler School of Theology), "The United Methodist Church at 40: Where Have We Come From?"
• Woodie W. White (Candler School of Theology), "The United Methodist Church at 40: How Have We Done?"
• Mary Elizabeth Moore (Boston University School of Theology), "The United Methodist Church at 40: What Can We Hope For?"
The first of these articles originated in a program session of the Wesleyan Studies Group at the 2008 Annual Meeting of the American Academy of Religion. The other three derive from the plenary addresses given to the consultation on "The United Methodist Church at 40: Considering Our History, Teaching Our Traditions, Anticipating Our Future" hosted by the Candler School of Theology, 14-17 August 2008.Perkins School of Theology, founded in 1911, is one of five official University-related schools of theology of The United Methodist Church. Degree programs include the Master of Divinity, Master of Sacred Music, Master of Theological Studies, Master of Church Ministries, and Doctor of Ministry, as well as the Ph.D., in cooperation with SMU's Dedman College of Humanities and Sciences.
Friday, May 1, 2009
Academic innovation hits the legal Web
Academic innovation hits the legal Web
Open-access law journal. Harvard University Press recently launched the Journal of Legal Analysis an open-access law journal published in cooperation with the John M. Olin Center for Law, Economics and Business at Harvard Law School. JLA's editors say their plan is to publish "the best legal scholarship from all disciplinary perspectives and in all styles, whether verbal, formal, or empirical." Articles are faculty-edited and subject to peer review.
By describing itself as an open-access journal, the JLA is promising to maintain immediate and no-cost access to its articles via the Web. Once a year, articles published online will be gathered into bound volumes and made available for purchase. The JLA's editor-in-chief is Harvard law professor J. Mark Ramseyer.
The debut issue included an article that argues that raising judicial salaries would do nothing to improve judicial performance. Another contended that judges should be deferential in reviewing class action settlements. The articles all were written by well-known names from the world of legal academia.
Friday, April 24, 2009
Journal Covers the Science and Application of Deformation and Flow Properties of Biological Materials
Journal Covers the Science and Application of Deformation and Flow Properties of Biological Materials
Starting in May 2009, Springer will publish the Journal of Biorheology, the official publication of the Japanese Society of Biorheology. This international, peer-reviewed journal provides a platform for biophysicists, physiologists and materials scientists to exchange and discuss their ideas and scientific research.
The Journal of Biorheology covers the science and application of deformation and flow properties of biological materials, including food materials. The biannual journal includes original articles, brief communications and authoritative review articles and will be published both in print and electronically. Basic science and its applications in the broad field of biorheology will be covered, including the rheology of macromolecules as well as cell, tissue, organ and food rheology. Coverage also includes biorheological analysis of pathological processes and their clinical implications, including basic clinical research on hemodynamics and hemorheology and scientific research between the fields of engineering and medicine.
Editor-in-chief Naoki Sasaki, professor in the Department of Biological Sciences, Graduate School of Science, Hokkaido University in Sapporo, Japan, said, “The Journal of Biorheology will publish high-quality articles in this interdisciplinary field on topics dealing with biology, rheology, physiology, medical science, biophysics and food science. Through the association with Springer, the Journal of Biorheology is certain to attract excellent manuscripts by authors from all over the world.”
Dr. Dieter Czeschlik, Editorial Director for Life Sciences at Springer, said, “Springer is delighted to welcome the Journal of Birorheology to its portfolio. The journal deals with areas bordering on biology, medicine and materials science and thus touches fields in which Springer is already well positioned. We look forward to working with the Japanese Society of Biorheology to guarantee even better, truly international visibility of their high-quality articles."
Fast publication in Online First™ will provide immediate access to new research results in the Journal of Biorheology on www.springerlink.com, Springer’s online information platform. In addition, all authors, via the Springer Open Choice™ program, have the option of publishing their articles using the open access publishing model. Cross Reference Linking and Table of Content Alert services will be fully implemented for the journal.
The Japanese Society of Biorheology was established in 1977. The aim of the society is to contribute to the development of biorheology-related fields by providing a forum for the exchange of ideas among a wide range of professionals.
Wednesday, April 22, 2009
Laboratorytalk newsletter issue 387
Laboratorytalk newsletter issue 387
Latest Laboratory News from Laboratorytalk
Written by the Laboratorytalk editor Apr 21, 2009
I'm delighted to see two announcements this week which offer small but worthwhile fillips to the open access movement. It seems to me hardly worth stating that knowledge should be free, and in these days of easy and cost-free digital communications there is less and less justification for the stranglehold on knowledge maintained by the old-school academic journals. The arguments are well-rehearsed: a great deal of scientific research is financed with public money, and therefore the fruits of that research should be freely available to the public.
In the bad old days before the global availability of the web, the only practical way to keep up with research was to subscribe - at significant cost - to the these journals. That is no longer the case, but the inertia in the system and the residual prestige of the august organs of knowledge have allowed the profiteering to continue. Slowly and steadily, though, open access is gaining ground. It is a development we welcome and one we would like to see accelerate.
The first news here is from Cambridge Journals, which has just published the journal European Review on behalf of the Academia Europaea, an association of scientists and scholars which aims to promote learning, education and research. European Review is an open access journal all about, err, open access publishing. It includes a series of articles that examine technology developments and what they mean for publishing academic research. Theo D'haen, editor-in-chief of European Review says: "These articles are vital for anyone with an interest in open access and what it means for the future of scholarly publishing. The authors come from a range of disciplines and so are able to present the arguments from a range of viewpoints. The philosophy of Open Access is discussed along with the practicalities of how it can work in a business environment."
To view the articles free of charge, go to: journals.cambridge.org/erw/17:01
The second news item is a little closer to home: the US-based Association for Laboratory Automation (ALA) has had a change of heart regarding open access, and announces that the scientific content published in its official peer-reviewed journal, the Journal of the Association for Laboratory Automation (JALA), will become freely available via (Link) two years after its initial publication. Non-scientific content will continue to be available online immediately upon publication.
While these are both steps in the right direction, they are also of limited impact: the navel-gazing approach of Cambridge Journals allows only the topic of open access to be discussed under open access, while all actual new scientific knowledge remains locked behind an expensive subscription. ALA's toe in the water is encouraging, but the two-year delay makes the policy change somewhat half-hearted. Even so, the days of the exhorbitantly-priced journal subscription must be numbered.
Friday, April 3, 2009
Bench Marks » Blog Archive » JOVE ends open access
Bench Marks » Blog Archive » JOVE ends open access
JOVE ends open access
Thursday, April 2, 2009 at 8:07 am CDT by David Crotty permalink
What at first seemed to be an odd April Fool’s joke turned out to be real–the Journal of Visual Explanations (JOVE) has gone from an open access publishing model to a closed access subscription model. No official statement was made, but on Noah Gray’s blog, JOVE’s Moishe Pritsker made the following statement:
“We (JoVE) are changing our model, and from now will provide our content under subscription. Until now it was all for free.
The reason is simple: we have to survive. To cover costs of our operations, to break even, we have to charge $6,000 per video article. This is to cover costs of the video-production and technological infrastructure for video-publication, which are higher than in traditional text-only publishing. Academic labs cannot pay $6,000 per article, and therefore we have to find other sources to cover the costs.
As much as I would like to continue to provide our content for free, JoVE has to survive. I believe the world would be a better place having a video-publication under subscription than not having a video-publication at all.”
More details can be found on this Friendfeed thread:
“…we are indeed closing access. Not an April Fool’s joke. We’ve been trying to get universities to subscribe to us, but nobody seems to be taking us seriously and, given our situation, being free is just not sustainable.”
I can’t say I’m terribly surprised. JOVE set themselves a monumental task, trying to break ground with a new type of science publishing AND at the same time trying to do so with an unproven business model. Doing both together was perhaps a bit too ambitious. I can think of several reasons why open access wasn’t going to cut it for them:
1) their insistence on high production values–the only journals I know that are sustainable/profitable using an author-pays open access model are those that emphasize high quantities of publication and minimal editorial oversight and support. By striving for high production values, JOVE added significant editorial overhead and costs.
2) A large number of JOVE’s publications are demonstrations of techniques. As the editor of a methods journal, I’m painfully aware of the “second-class citizen” attitude most scientists take toward writing up methods. Obviously data papers are the bread and butter of the working scientist–that’s where they’re going to advance their careers. Methods papers are a nice addendum, but they are not a priority. It’s hard to get scientists to write up methods, and much of my time is spent trying to commission articles. At CSH Protocols, we go so far as to pay our authors a royalty as an incentive for writing up methods for publication with us. I find it hard to believe that there will be very many willing to not only spend the time to put together a video of a method, but willing to pay JOVE’s costs to do so.And so the economic realities seem to have hit home. I wish the best to JOVE, the folks I’ve met from the journal are all smart, nice people and their experiment is an intriguing one. I worry though, that so much of their support and hype came from the small but very vocal group of open access proponents so prevalent online. This shift in business models may not be taken very well by that community.
Posted in Online Tools, Science Publishing, Web 2.0 |
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