Wiley Converts Five Top Journals to Open Access (OA)

Wiley is to convert five of its leading journals to Open Access, taking its total number of OA journals to 61.

All articles in Plant Biotechnology Journal, GCB Bioenergy, Health Expectations, Atmospheric Science Letter and Clinical and Translational Science are now free to read, download and share, with all five journals now accepting OA submissions for publication under a creative commons (CC BY) license.

Fiona Hutton, executive editor of Open Access at Wiley, said: “It is evident that our authors strongly endorse open access publishing. We are confident these established journals will flourish under the open access model.”

What is open science?

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What is open science?

This is the fifth and final instalment of the “What is…” series of posts focusing on open science. Previous posts in this series covered open access, open peer review, post-publication peer review and open data.

This is the fifth and final instalment of the “What is…” series of posts, in which we focus on open science. Previous posts in this series covered open access, open peer review, post-publication peer review and open data. Here we look at open science as a collective term, and some of the other concepts that fall under the open science term. - See more at: http://blog.f1000research.com/2014/11/11/what-is-open-science/#sthash.4t7DE1HK.dpuf

This is the fifth and final instalment of the “What is…” series of posts, in which we focus on open science. Previous posts in this series covered open access, open peer review, post-publication peer review and open data. Here we look at open science as a collective term, and some of the other concepts that fall under the open science term. - See more at: http://blog.f1000research.com/2014/11/11/what-is-open-science/#sthash.4t7DE1HK.dpuf

This
is the fifth and final instalment of the “What is…” series of posts, in
which we focus on open science. Previous posts in this series covered
open access, open peer review, post-publication peer review and open
data. Here we look at open science as a collective term, and some of the
other concepts that fall under the open science term. - See more at:
http://blog.f1000research.com/2014/11/11/what-is-open-science/#sthash.5SEfzQrI.dpuf

This
is the fifth and final instalment of the “What is…” series of posts, in
which we focus on open science. Previous posts in this series covered
open access, open peer review, post-publication peer review and open
data. Here we look at open science as a collective term, and some of the
other concepts that fall under the open science term. - See more at:
http://blog.f1000research.com/2014/11/11/what-is-open-science/#sthash.5SEfzQrI.dpuf

The meaning of ‘impact’: prestige or relevance for developing world research?

This guest post by Eve Gray (a researcher on open access scholarly communications at the Centre for Innovation in Teaching and Learning and the IP Law Unit at the University of Cape Town) on the BioMed Central blog "Open Access in the Developing World" discusses impact (and impact factors), scholarly communication, research prestige and relevance and the inclusion/exclusion of developing world research in established indices.

Open Access Journals in the Science Citation Index Expanded (includes Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences)

From the Library for the Research Institutes within the ETH Domain (a union of Swiss governmental universities and research institutions)

Dr Jochen Bihn reports on a useful list of open access journals which are indexed in the Science Citation Index Expanded. 

 Almost all of the journals on the list received a Journal Impact Factor from Thomson Reuters.  The list might offer some guidance when selecting a journal for your next publication from the ever growing list of Open Access journals.

Why open access is the next frontier for science

Around the world, scientific journals are making money by publishing the work of researchers without paying them. Even worse, their high subscription fees mean important discoveries are locked away from all but a privileged few. QUT’s Professor Tom Cochrane argues for a new system of distributing knowledge.    Read more.............

No one denies the right of publishers to derive revenue from the sale of content which has had value added. However, in most scientific journal literature the main intellectual input comes from researchers, who act as both authors and peer reviewers.

F1000Posters - Life Sciences, Health & Medicine, Biochemistry, Biotechnology, etc

F1000Posters, an open access repository, provides a permanent, structured environment for the deposition of posters and slide presentations as well as a trustworthy venue for ongoing discussion and development of the information being presented.

The early scientific information presented in conference presentations is universally agreed to be an important resource but, unfortunately, it is almost always completely lost once a conference is over. As a result, the work is only viewed by a handful of people before it disappears, either forever or until the research is later published as a paper. Often important work never gets published, particularly if it focuses on negative results or case studies. The system of removing work from view after a conference is over represents a vast loss to the scientific community of unique and potentially valuable information.

Subjects covered

Anesthesiology & Pain Management
Biochemistry
Bioinformatics & Computational Biology
Biotechnology
Cancer Biology
Cardiovascular Biology
Cardiovascular Disorders
Cell Biology
Chemical Biology
Critical Care & Emergency Medicine
Dermatology
Developmental Biology
Diabetes & Endocrinology
Ecology
Evolutionary Biology
Gastroenterology & Hepatology
Gastrointestinal Biology
Genomics & Genetics
Hematology
Immunology
Infectious Diseases
Metabolic & Endocrine Science
Microbiology
Molecular Biology
Molecular Medicine
Nephrology
Neurological Disorders
Neuroscience
Oncology
Ophthalmology
Otolaryngology
Pharmacology & Drug Discovery
Physiology
Plant Biology
Psychiatry
Public Health & Epidemiology
Rare Diseases
Renal Biology
Research Methodology
Respiratory Biology
Respiratory Disorders
Rheumatology & Clinical Immunology
Science Communication
Structural Biology
Urology
Women's Health

Author's rights re their publications (more information and comment)

This is a topic which is attracting a fair amount of interest in academia

Richard Poynder posted the below comment on the BOAI Forum today:

"The recent decision by Elsevier to start sending take down notices to sites like Academia.edu, and to individual universities, demanding that they remove self-archived papers from their web sites has sparked a debate about the copyright status of different versions of a scholarly paper.

Last week, the Scholarly Communications Officer at Duke University in the US, Kevin Smith,published a blog post challenging a widely held assumption amongst OA advocates that when scholars transfer copyright in their papers they transfer only the final version of the article. This is not true, Smith argued.

If correct, this would seem to have important implications for Green OA, not least because it would mean that publishers have greater control over self-archiving than OA advocates assume.

However Charles Oppenheim, a UK-based copyright specialist, believes that OA advocates are correct in thinking that when an author signs a copyright assignment only the rights in the final version of the paper are transferred, and so authors retain the rights to all earlier versions of their work, certainly under UK and EU law. As such, they are free to post earlier versions of their papers on the Web.

CharlesOppenheim explains his thinking"

Free access to research articles - the state of Open Access

Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge in the Sciences and Humanities

Half of 2011 papers now free to read  (from Nature-News 20 Aug 2013) (thanks to Prof Roy Jobson for alerting me to this article)

"Search the Internet for any research article published in 2011, and you have a 50–50 chance of downloading it for free. This claim — made in a report1 produced for the European Commission — suggests that many more research papers are openly available online than was previously thought. The finding, released on 21 August, is heartening news for advocates of open access. But some experts are raising their eyebrows at the high numbers...."

Alexander Grossmann on the state of Open Access: Where are we, what still needs to be done?

One of a series exploring the current state of Open Access (OA), [this Q&A] is with Alexander Grossmann. Earlier this year Grossmann took up a post as Professor of Publishing Management at the Leipzig University of Applied Sciences. To do so he gave up a job as Vice President at the scholarly publisher De Gruyter, returning to research after ten years in the publishing industry. In that time he also served as Managing Director at Springer-Verlag GmbH in Vienna and as Director of physics publishing at Wiley. Prior to his stint in publishing, Grossmann held posts as a researcher and lecturer at the Jülich Research Centre, the Max Planck Institute in Munich, and the University of Tübingen. 

-  "What is required today, he says, is for “one or a few key scholarly institutions to make a significant change in how their libraries acquire and fund their research content.”.”
  

Peter Suber on the state of Open Access: Where are we, what still needs to be done? 

"Philosopher, jurist, and one-time stand-up comic, Peter Suber was one of the small group of people invited by the Soros Foundation to the Budapest Open Access Initiative (BOAI) meeting held in Hungary in 2001. It was in Budapest that the term Open Access was chosen, and a definition of OA agreed.And it was Suber who drafted that definition, doing so with words that still stir, inspire, and motivate OA advocates everywhere..."

?????s answered:  major achievements of the OA movement; main disappointments? respective roles of Green and Gold OA today?; What about Hybrid OA?; current state of OA; What still needs to be done, and by whom?; single most important task that the OA movement should focus on today? ; What does OA have to offer the developing world?; expectations for OA in 2013?; Will OA in your view be any less expensive than subscription publishing?

The future of Scientific Publishing....?

•   A recent post on "Homologus - Frontier in Bioinformatics" highlights some of the economic issues surrounding scientific publishing and raises some provocative questions of what the future will be like - for example:

           (in 10 years time: "......Suppose the academic journals did not exist and young scientists of  today wanted to build an infrastructure to communicate effectively. Will they create the expensive journals, work for them for free and then get their articles locked up? That does not make sense at all. We expect the publication model of ten years later to be completely distributed and it will use all benefits of ‘online publication’ rather than recreating paper publication as web text. Also, we expect search engines and social communities to be the primary sources useful information. A newly uploaded arxiv paper explores those aspects regarding twitter...."

• and The Economist of 4 May 2013 presents an article entitled:  Academic publishing: Free-for-all - Open-access scientific publishing is gaining ground and outlines recent developments in mandatory open access requirements by various bodies - e.g. Research Councils UK, and the  European Union
• The issue of who pays for open access publishing is discussed in a May 3rd post on the Smithsonian Institute blog  

UCT Scholarly outputs: online and discoverable- not always accessible (what about Rhodes??)

This report from the Open UCT Initiative investigates, by means of a limited analysis (using Google Scholar), the availability of articles by selected UCT researchers, and highlights the importance both of publishing in open access journals (if possible), and of depositing post-prints in discoverable repositories - (for example the Rhodes eResearch Repository!).

I suspect that if a similar study were to be conducted at Rhodes, the results would be much the same as at UCT.

"Impact has a bad name among many researchers, but thinking of impact as re-use could be key to uniting both funders and researchers" (Dr Camerom Neylon of PLos).

 

Please contact me if you are interested in adding your publications to the Rhodes eResearch Repository (ReRR) Most publishers will allow you to deposit your post print.  See details regarding permissions at SHERPA/RoMEO.

Those who publish research behind paywalls are victims not perpetrators

(acknowledgements to Guardian newspaper)

Mike Taylor's recent Guardian article on the ‘ímmorality’ of closed-access research has evoked a strong response from Chris Chambers in the same publication:

“…But we won't create this utopia by turning on each other, as Taylor does. We need to recognise that scientists are the victims of these incentives, not "immoral" perpetrators. We need to target policymakers and change future Research Excellence Frameworks to incentivise and mandate OA. And we need to pressure our local MPs and governments. Until we drive others to change the system from outside, it is futile to expect scientists to act like true believers, sacrificing their own livelihoods – and those of their protégés – on the altar of open access."

Hiding your research behind a paywall is immoral

Read this article** by Mike Taylor in the Guardian newspaper's Science Desk blog to find the answer!

 

** which has raised a storm of comments from researchers!

"If you are a scientist, your job is to bring new knowledge into the world. And if you bring new knowledge into the world, it's immoral to hide it. I heartily wish I'd never done it, and I won't do it again." (Mike Taylor)

"But aren't there special cases (for not publishing in open access journals)?

• I really need to publish in Science/Nature/Cell for my career …
• But I can't afford article processing charges for open access (APCs) 
  
• But this paywalled journal's subscription fees fund its scholarly society …
• But this paper is a rebuttal, and we want to submit to the same journal, because..
  
• But my co-authors want to publish in this paywalled journal …"
  
  

Open Access explained!

A great contribution from phd.comics:

 What is open access? Nick Shockey and Jonathan Eisen take us through the world of open access publishing ...   Make sure to watch it in HD and Fullscreen!