Richard Horton, editor-in-chief of The Lancet (published by Elsevier), “suggested that journals like The Lancet “need to be advocates for open science — we need to believe in tearing down the barriers that stop people from accessing that information, generating that information and disseminating it. We need to be strong voices; in a sense, the moral conscious of our community, holding us accountable.” …”
Category Archives: oa.science
PubMed Commons to be Discontinued | NCBI Insights
PubMed Commons has been a valuable experiment in supporting discussion of published scientific literature. The service was first introduced as a pilot project in the fall of 2013 and was reviewed in 2015. Despite low levels of use at that time, NIH decided to extend the effort for another year or two in hopes that participation would increase. Unfortunately, usage has remained minimal, with comments submitted on only 6,000 of the 28 million articles indexed in PubMed. While many worthwhile comments were made through the service during its 4 years of operation, NIH has decided that the low level of participation does not warrant continued investment in the project, particularly given the availability of other commenting venues.
Altmetric Scores, Citations, and Publication of Studies Posted as Preprints | Medical Journals and Publishing | JAMA | The JAMA Network
“As preprints in medicine are debated, data on how preprints are used, cited, and published are needed. We evaluated views and downloads and Altmetric scores and citations of preprints and their publications. We also assessed whether Altmetric scores and citations of published articles correlated with prior preprint posting….Published articles with preprints had significantly higher Altmetric scores than published articles without preprints….”
The Center for Open Science and MarXiv Launch Branded Preprint Service
The Center for Open Science (COS) and MarXiv have launched a new preprint service for the earth sciences, sources for both organizations announced today. The new service, called MarXiv, provides free, open access, open source archives for the ocean conservation and marine climate sciences.
Has the Time Come for Preprints in Chemistry? A Perspective onto a Meaningful Change
Abstract: Chemistry is the last natural science discipline to embrace prepublishing, namely the publication of non-peer reviewed scientific articles on the internet. After a brief insight into the origins and the purpose of prepublishing in science, we conduct a concrete analysis of the concrete situation, aiming at providing an answer to several questions. Why the chemistry community has been late in embracing prepublishing? Is this in relation with the slow acceptance of open access publishing by the same community? Will prepublishing become a common habit also for chemistry scholars?
Open data, [open] access: linking data sharing and article sharing in the Earth Sciences
“INTRODUCTION The norms of a research community influence practice, and norms of openness and sharing can be shaped to encourage researchers who share in one aspect of their research cycle to share in another. Different sets of mandates have evolved to require that research data be made public, but not necessarily articles resulting from that collected data. In this paper, I ask to what extent publications in the Earth Sciences are more likely to be open access (in all of its definitions) when researchers open their data through the Pangaea repository. METHODS Citations from Pangaea data sets were studied to determine the level of open access for each article. RESULTS This study finds that the proportion of gold open access articles linked to the repository increased 25% from 2010 to 2015 and 75% of articles were available from multiple open sources. DISCUSSION The context for increased preference for gold open access is considered and future work linking researchers’ decisions to open their work to the adoption of open access mandates is proposed.”
Gates Foundation announces open-access publishing venture : Nature News & Comment
“One of the world’s wealthiest charities, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation in Seattle, Washington, is set to launch its own open-access publishing venture later this year. The initiative,Gates Open Research, was announced on 23 March and will be modelled on a service begun last year by the London-based biomedical charity, the Wellcome Trust. Like that effort, the Gates Foundation’s platform is intended to accelerate the publication of articles and data from research funded by the charity.”