Faster and Open Access to Scientific Results

Tim O'Reilly has a post about how the prominent scholarly journal Nature has recently launched an open-access service for pre-publication research and presentations. In Nature Precedings, all content is released under a Creative Commons Attribution License, and can be commented and voted on. The service will cover research in biology, chemistry, and earth science, much like arXiv.org does for physics, mathematics, and computer science.

Comments

Science databases

[the_kanzure]

Here's an important list of science databases. Don't forget CiteSeer, PubMed Central, Google Scholar, Science Direct, American Chemical Society, Institute of Physics, IEEE, EBSCO Host, etc. Also, an older discussion might be useful, and this one and online science information portals.

just the prepublications?

[pimpimpim]

Isn't that what Arxiv.org has been doing for ages already?

In germany there is an UNESCO backed project trying to open scientific information as a whole

I personally would be glad if scientific publishing would open up. Of course, someone has to do the editorial work, but currently many journals actually dare to ask money for publishing with them, ask thousands of dollars for including color pictures, and to subscribe to them is not cheap as well. This unfortunately gives the smaller universities a huge disadvantage, even when the people working there might be very good. Also, I suggest that peer review gets some working through, by either always opening up the names of the reviewers, or anonymizing the article. As it is now, many articles get good or bad reviews based mainly on personal views, or on the fact that the reviewer wants to publish the same subject and has an interest in delaying it. With these things fixed, science would get a step in the right direction becoming the honest thing it should be.

Re:just the prepublications?

[aibob]

Isn't that what Arxiv.org has been doing for ages already? But this service is specifically intended for fields which are not covered by Arxiv.org. Quoting http://precedings.nature.com/about

We do not accept submissions from fields in the physical sciences that are are already well served by preprint servers such as arXiv.org.

wonderful

[iHasaFlavour]

Anything like this is great, really great.

I'm writing up my phd, and for months (years if you actually include research time), I had to beg/borrow access to pay per bloody paper portals, or hunt around for non locked up copies of papers. Even then I have often had to rely on abstracts and what other people cite papers for as a guide to what I myself can cite, it's not easy.
I guess it would be if I were more monied, but I'm not. Yes my uni has subs to some portals, but not them all, and usually not the ones I find in the middle of the night after searching for hours.

Anything that makes new research more readily available is great news in my book.

Re:wonderful

[Metasquares]

You're correct, but most of us don't care. Until the journals write my papers for me, the public's right to access that information and my own right to dictate what to do with my content, as the author, trumps the journals' right to restrict access in the name of profit. When we receive neither compensation for nor rights to our own work, the intellectual property system is broken.

As scientists, it is our mission to advance our fields. A necessary precondition to this is enabling access to our work for the widest audience possible, so other scientists may build upon or refine our methods. I would argue that any "scientist" holding back results in the name of personal gain is not a scientist at all.

Open Access is already widespread in certain areas

[RasmusW]

While it's certainly very nice that the big journals like Nature take steps towards offering Open Access to (some of) their material, it has already been a growing trend in certain research areas for the past, say, five years or so. I do research in the field of Bioinformatics/Molecular Biology and except for high-profile stuff that could go into Science or Nature, I simply will not publish anything in a journal that is not Open Access.

The journal being Open Access is of tremendous importance to the researcher as it makes it _much_ more likely, that your paper will actually be found and read by other scientists. I know this from my own literature searches: hits found the PubMed database links to the journal webpage, and if no Open Access version is available, it really have to look like a promising paper, before I spend my time ordering through the University Library.

Also, it should be noted that an ever increasing number of Open Access journal exists in the areas of Life Science in general - for example all the BMC journals, the PLoS journals and even journals from "old school" publishers such as Oxford University Press (e.g. Nucleic Acids Research) have gone Open Access. Also an increasing number of traditional journal now offer an Open Access option, where your pay to make your specific paper availably under Open Access.