Tuesday, October 14, 2008

Happy Open Access Day: Back to Genome Biology for Me

Well, good timing on this one. A new paper from Martin Wu in my lab has recently been accepted to Genome Biology and the provisional PDF was posted online 10/13. The paper ( A simple, fast, and accurate method of phylogenomic inference ) describes a new program Martin wrote called AMPHORA and shows how it can be used to build phylogenetic trees based on concatenated alignments of housekeeping proteins and also for metagenomic phylotyping using a diversity of protein markers. As today is Open Access Day I thought I would just put in a plug for this OA paper and thank Martin for his great work and commitment to Open Access.

I should note - I really really like Genome Biology as a journal - even though they have been rejecting many of my papers lately (or maybe in part because of this). I am really glad this one got in there. I published my first fully OA paper in Genome Biology in 2000 (on symmetric genome inversions in bacteria and archaea -- a paper co-authored with Steven Salzberg, Owen White and John Heidelberg - see Evidence for symmetric chromosomal inversions around the replication origin in bacteria). It is one of my favorite papers from my entire career, as in it we report on a pattern that turns out to appear to be one of the few rules of bacterial and archaeal genome evolution. Anyway - glad to be back in Genome Biology.

2 comments:

  1. ...and of course, our original Genome Biology paper has been free ever since. According to Google Scholar it has 134 citations so far. I'm pretty sure that open access articles get more citations than others, because they're easier to get to!

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  2. yup --- the benefit of Creative Commons licenses --- once free -- always free --- and our work gets wide distribution thanks to the CC license so it benefits us too (ps - hi Steve)

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