Open access journals

[Skye]

There's been a few groups pushing for scientific journals to be more freely available to the public, especially as they pay for much of the research. The Public Library of Science (PLoS) was trying to get the big name journals like Nature and Science to allow free online access to articles six months after they were published. While they release some selected articles for free, these journals believe that it's not commercially viable to produce quality journals for free. In response, PLoS decided to produce their own journals, covering the costs with grants and a $1500 fee to the authors of published articles. They have recently released some of their early articles of their first journal 'PLoS Biology' [link].

 

There are already some other journals that offer free articles at BioMed Central [link], the British Medical Journal [link], the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences [link] and BioMedNet [link].

[bioteam]

In addition to open access, a forum to openly discuss reserach is needed. That is why I think this new and free site PubMed Wizard is great. It lets you Rank and Discuss all your favorite papers. You can Discuss ANY paper found in the PubMed database, all 16 million of them! You can also Save interesting papers to your personal folder and Share them with friends. In addition, you can see what everyone else is reading by following the Most Viewed and Top Ranked papers. The site also hosts a social network for life scientists, Lab Wizard. Take a look at BioWizard (http://www.biowizard.com).

[badchad]

In response, PLoS decided to produce their own journals, covering the costs with grants and a $1500 fee to the authors of published articles.

 

So now author's have to pay to get their work published? I'm not sure if thats a better alternative.

 

Also, while I didn't put forth a lot of effort, the biomedcentral link was the only one offering "open acess". The rest of the direct links still required access.

 

While I tend to agree in concept, the "public" has very little need to access articles. Think of the people reading scientific journals now: While there are certainly exceptions, the only people reading them are professional scientists. Professionals already have access. Also, consider that if you aren't a professional, much of the literature is "over your head".

 

Obviously there are enthusiasts who certainly would benefit (e.g. a lot of SFN members) however, they represent a very small amount of people.

 

EDIT: I just tried the pubmed wizard to. It simply linked me right back to pubmed, which again, required access. Am I doing something wrong?

[ajb]

In physics and mathematics we have pre-print servers. Most of the articles posted are then summitted to journals, but now some people only post online.

I think it is a great thing, as well as being very easy to find papers it allows everyone to get access to scientific results for free.

 

http://xxx.soton.ac.uk/

http://www-spires.dur.ac.uk/spires/hep/

http://cds.cern.ch/

http://www.ma.utexas.edu/mp_arc/

http://www.ictp.trieste.it/~pub_off/

http://www.sm.luth.se/~norbert/home_journal/electronic/elect.html