Open Access : OA and impact factor. In today's issue of the UKSG Serials eNews, Peter Evans excerpts many of the contributions to a discussion thread on LibLicense about open access and impact factor. [Open Access News]  10:45:35 AM   [Feedback ]  

Open Access : More on the Nature OA debate. There are two new contributions to the Nature OA debate:

1. Kate Worlock, Will open access prove a blessing or a curse to learned societies?
2. Andrew Odlyzko, Why electronic publishing means people will pay different

[Open Access News]  10:04:23 AM   [Feedback ]  

Open Access : "Cracking the spine of the science cartel". We've known since March 16 that Pat Brown, Mike Eisen, and Harold Varmus --the founders of PLoS-- had won the 2004 Wired Magazine Rave Award in the category of science. But now the April issue of Wired has come out with a write-up of winners in each category. Excerpt from Ted Greenwald's article on PLoS, For cracking the spine of the science cartel: "If science is a search for universal laws of nature, why do scientific journals copyright the papers they publish and charge as much as $20,000 a year for a subscription? 'It's insane that the scientific community has allowed publishers to limit the impact of our research,' says UC Berkeley geneticist Michael Eisen. Starting in the late '90s, Eisen and two of his colleagues, Stanford molecular biologist Patrick Brown and Nobel Prize-winning oncologist Harold Varmus, tried to work with traditional publishers to make research more widely available on the Web, but the publishers wouldn't cooperate. So the three scientists devised an end run: the Public Library of Science. In October 2003, PLoS published [its] first open source, peer-reviewed journal, PLoS Biology." [Open Access News]  10:03:47 AM   [Feedback ]