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PLoS Launches Open Access Biology Journal
Vojtek writes "An international grass-roots organization of scientists is lauching an open access journal, PLoS Biology, that will compete with existing publications. See PLoS.org for details. Read their FAQ, download and post their Poster, support their cause!" We've done several previous stories about these guys - this one is pretty thorough.
Sounds like slashdot. :-)
PLoSdot.org?
+.
--"The perfect example of the man of action is the suicide." - William Carlos Williams
Except, where are the journals? I couldn't find either of their journals on their website. I am very interested in them however. I'm sure peices published in that journal will not be funded by large companies or groups and will probably be more theoretical, and possibly more impracticle.
http://github.com/gbook/nidb
hopefully it will work out. There are so many hurdles to overcome. It has to gain popularity and now deal with all this censorship brewha that has come in teh sciences post 9/11.
Personally, i think that open journals are the way to go. It just seem rediculous that people can't learn about stuff becuase the cost is porhibitively high, but i guess that really isn't anything new. Nevertheless, it sux, and hopefull this jounal will help end this.
SWEEET!
Aren't open journals best kept to the internet? Where they can be easily edited and veiwed by all in real time?
It's a good idea though
"Trying is the first step towards failure" - Homer Simpson
Are people too cool to tell us what acronyms mean? How fucking hard it is to write Public Library of Science?
It wasn't supposed to end up this way.
Finding articles has begun to become a real big problem. Cheap universities cut down on subscriptions. My place of work, the University of Stockholm, canceled all science journals at the main library this year Online periodicals are still very expensive.
The problem with free online journals is getting an ISSN number for your journal. Without this, it is not even counted as a publication, and won't appear in any reference databases. To get an ISSN, the journal has to be printed and submitted to something like 50 libraries.
So, to publish an online journal you still have to kill trees...
One more crippling bombshell hit the already beleaguered *BSD community when IDC confirmed that *BSD market share has dropped yet again, now down to less than a fraction of 1 percent of all servers. Coming on the heels of a recent Netcraft survey which plainly states that *BSD has lost more market share, this news serves to reinforce what we've known all along. *BSD is collapsing in complete disarray, as fittingly exemplified by failing dead last in the recent Sys Admin comprehensive networking test.
You don't need to be a Kreskin to predict *BSD's future. The hand writing is on the wall: *BSD faces a bleak future. In fact there won't be any future at all for *BSD because *BSD is dying. Things are looking very bad for *BSD. As many of us are already aware, *BSD continues to lose market share. Red ink flows like a river of blood.
FreeBSD is the most endangered of them all, having lost 93% of its core developers. The sudden and unpleasant departures of long time FreeBSD developers Jordan Hubbard and Mike Smith only serve to underscore the point more clearly. There can no longer be any doubt: FreeBSD is dying.
Let's keep to the facts and look at the numbers.
OpenBSD leader Theo states that there are 7000 users of OpenBSD. How many users of NetBSD are there? Let's see. The number of OpenBSD versus NetBSD posts on Usenet is roughly in ratio of 5 to 1. Therefore there are about 7000/5 = 1400 NetBSD users. BSD/OS posts on Usenet are about half of the volume of NetBSD posts. Therefore there are about 700 users of BSD/OS. A recent article put FreeBSD at about 80 percent of the *BSD market. Therefore there are (7000+1400+700)*4 = 36400 FreeBSD users. This is consistent with the number of FreeBSD Usenet posts.
Due to the troubles of Walnut Creek, abysmal sales and so on, FreeBSD went out of business and was taken over by BSDI who sell another troubled OS. Now BSDI is also dead, its corpse turned over to yet another charnel house.
All major surveys show that *BSD has steadily declined in market share. *BSD is very sick and its long term survival prospects are very dim. If *BSD is to survive at all it will be among OS dilettante dabblers. *BSD continues to decay. Nothing short of a miracle could save it at this point in time. For all practical purposes, *BSD is dead.
Fact: *BSD is dying
PLOS only addresses free access. But it does not address the real hairy problem, the lack of peer-review in science and the abscence of free publication. PLOS still hangs on the obsolete idea that science must be censored to be good. Yes, censored, because there can be no re-view before publication, and because the decision is the editor's, not author's peer (most never find out!). What the scientific stablishment calls ``peer review'' is truly called censorship.
PLOS is better than the parasitic `scientific' journals, but it's not good enough. Too little, too late.
``L'imagination au povoir.''
I really feel sorry for the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation who have been roped into funding this effort. At the moment the money is being used to fund the salaries of the staff - who having been lured from Cell, Nature et al. are probably being paid a pretty penny. $9 million is probably seems like quite a lot of money - and there is additional in-kind support from Howard Hughes, but believe me these guys are burn through this cash in a very quick time. The track record of thr PLoS: A free journal repository - which failed. A campaign to boycott peer review - which failed Hardly inspires confidence in their ability to make this one a winner. Another free at source journal with virtual the same aims - The Journal of Biology - has thus far attracted about three papers in six months (and one of them came from the journal's editor in chief). They also have failed to attract one advertiser. It is going to very difficult to make this work financially. What happens when Gordon and Betty's money runs out - you can bet that PLoS will be back cap in hand to them pretty damn quick. Yes, it's good to see new products coming along and attempting to shake up the status quo - but I question whether charitable money should be punted on what is essentialy a very high risk start up company. They would have been better to put their money directly into medical research. I dunno why Biologists need to go for these high cost projects with highly paid editors and complex revenue models. As many have pointed out in the past, many physicists have made do with basic document servers which have ensured free distribution of papers and data for years, and very successfully they have been too.
People should use the ABBR tag like so:
Example: PLoS
Code: <ABBR title="Public Library of Science">PLoS</ABBR>
Hovering over PLoS above should show the acronym's expansion (update: actually slashcode doesn't even allow ABBR tags! so the above doesn't work). However it is obvious why people don't use the ABBR tag; acronyms are there because they save people time so why on earth waste even more time by writing the acronym, it's expanded form and some miscelaneous markup!
I'd like to see Slashdot automatically add ABBR tags for known acronyms like OSS, KDE, CSS etc. Maybe I should submit the concept? I'm already instigating a system to do this for my personal web journal..