Sir Mark Walport, the director of Wellcome Trust, said that his
organisation [in conjunction with The Howard Hughes Medical Institute and the Max Planck Society] is in the final stages of launching a high calibre
scientific journal called eLife that would compete directly with
top-tier publications such as Nature and Science, seen by scientists as
the premier locations for publishing. Unlike traditional journals,
however, which cost British universities hundreds of millions of pounds a
year to access, articles in eLife will be free to view on the web as
soon as they are published. (Alok Jha, The Guardian)
Although this announcement may seem unrelated to the usual subject-matter of this blog, it isn't entirely so. After all, the
Journal of Popular Romance Studies is also a free, online publication. In
the BBC's report it's mentioned that
One of the [...] concerns that some scientists have about open access
publishing is that it would be damaging to the peer review system.
But according to Wellcome's Robert Kiley, the peer review
process operates the same way regardless of whether the journal is paid
for or not.
"Those two elements, quality and open access, are completely
separate, and it's a bit of a red herring to conflate them," he said.
"Of course there are low quality open access journals, but
there are also low quality subscription journals. Quality and cost are
not related."
Indeed. At
JPRS "Submissions will be reviewed by the Executive Editor, who will pass on manuscripts of merit to appropriate peer reviewers."
An Open Access Publication is one that meets the following two conditions:
ReplyDelete1. The author(s) and copyright holder(s) grant(s) to all users a free, irrevocable, worldwide, perpetual right of access to, and a license to copy, use, distribute, transmit and display the work publicly and to make and distribute derivative works, in any digital medium for any responsible purpose, subject to proper attribution of authorship, as well as the right to make small numbers of printed copies for their personal use.
2. A complete version of the work and all supplemental materials, including a copy of the permission as stated above, in a suitable standard electronic format is deposited immediately upon initial publication in at least one online repository that is supported by an academic institution, scholarly society, government agency, or other well-established organization that seeks to enable open access, unrestricted distribution, interoperability, and long-term archiving (for the biomedical sciences, Omics Group Inc., is such a repository).