Just a quick post here. Interesting news from Nature on the Open Access front: Press release archive:
Nature is starting a new open access journal "Scientific Reports". Some detail from their press release:
All articles published in Scientific Reports will be open access and subject to an article-processing charge (APC). The 2011 APC rate will be US$1350/GB£890/ EURO1046 per accepted manuscript*...NPG will make an annual donation to Creative Commons equivalent to $20 per APC paid for publication in Scientific Reports...Scientific Reports will publish original research papers of interest to specialists within a given field in the natural sciences. It will not set a threshold of perceived importance for the papers that it publishes; rather, Scientific Reports will publish all papers that are judged to be technically valid and original. To enable the community to evaluate the importance of papers post-peer review, the Scientific Reports website will include most-downloaded, most-emailed, and most-blogged lists. All research papers will benefit from rapid peer review and publication, and will be deposited in PubMed Central.
Wow - sounds remarkably like PLoS One, even though they do not mention PLoS One in the announcement. Good news all around I think - the more OA we have out there the better.
H/T to Tom Sharpton and Katie Pollard for pointing this out.
Does sound good. The only thing I found weird was this:
ReplyDelete"Scientific Reports is accepting submissions from today, and will publish its first articles in June 2011"
Doesn't 5 month turn around time seem quite long?! Hopefully this is due to the journal just starting out, and will improve once it is running more smoothly. The other main reason for the PLoS One model is that publishing is usually quite quick and efficient.
Great, the more true OA journals, the merrier!
ReplyDeleteI remember vaguely that there was a similar delay with their Nature Communications journal. Probably because of setup issues, ms handling/submission system, etc.
Maybe they can add some people from the ecology and evolution fields on the EdBoard... unless I misread, EEB seems to be missing from their categories.
Another sign of PLoS ONE's sweeping success! It's also a sign of where the future is heading...
ReplyDeleteThey don't mention PLoS One in their press release, of course, but their "introductory" price is EXACTLY the same as PLoS One's....
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ReplyDeleteOne very important thing to note is that they are using a Creative Commons - NON-COMMERCIAL - attribution license. Thus, in a rather absurd bit of irony, PLoS or any other commercial entity will by largely unable to reuse articles published in this new journal. This is NOT open access. People should shun this new journal until that change this.
ReplyDelete@Morgan; yes, Scientific Reports is certainly aiming for fast turn-around once up and running.
ReplyDelete@sergios-orestis; thanks for the feedback on the EEB, will pass it on.
@Michael: We're aware that use of non-commercial CC licenses is not satisfactory for some. What commercial re-use of articles are you thinking of for PLoS, specifically? Would be helpful to know and then perhaps we can clarify.
Grace Baynes, Nature Publishing Group
Just submitted the story to the slashdot flamewars...
ReplyDeletehttp://science.slashdot.org/story/11/01/24/2143253/Nature-Publisher-Launches-PLoS-ONE-Competitor
Why would they have explicitly NON-commercial access? What's the point of spending all this government money on research if we're going to limit the ways in which it can be made useful for the public?
ReplyDeleteThis is strange. First, Nature hurled all accusations of different sort at PLoS ONE and now they themselves getting into the business of the so called 'low tier, all inclusive, Open Access'! That simply means PLoS ONE rocks at the end.
ReplyDeleteJust saw this now... I'm not a scientist but I think it's reassuring that the "Nature" team has discovered that PLoS is the way of the future, even if they can't exactly acknowledge their debt....
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