Publishing Group
From OpenWetWare
There is a current opportunity in Synthetic Biology to re-evalute issues relating to scientific publishing. We are discussing possible improvements/alternatives that we would like to see, and how possibly to go about implementing them.
Announcements
Please add your ideas/questions below that you would like to discuss.
Past Meetings
Things to discuss
- Do we need a Synthetic Biology specific journal?
- Does the peer review process, as practiced work?
- Is peer review needed for engineering research articles?
- What features would we like for our papers? Reader comments? Reader Wiki?
- How should the structure of a paper be changed to reflect things like, well, the Internets?
- What existing journals are the most appropriate/receptive venues for publication of SB work?
- How is publishing on SB topics different from any other field?
- What are the other (if any) alternate publishing models already out there?
- Non-synthetic biology improvement:Author IDs or URIs or something. Noticed this while trying to set up myNCBI searches for people with more common names, what a pain. I'm changing my name to xyuitk.
- Can we ensure that publishing and access to publications is equally open to all institutions regardless of rank?
- <your question/idea>
Relevant material
- Hal Abelson and John Wilbanks gave interesting talks on Open Networks and Open Society: The Relationship between Freedom, Law, and Technology.
- An OECD report on scientific publishing was published a couple of weeks ago and seems especially relevent. Here are links to the press release and report
- A new journal relevant to our discussions today Biology Direct. Be sure to check out the "novel peer review process". from Drew.
- Slashdot post on Indirect Documents At Last. In particular, see this post with the full article text. It discusses a different type of document structure from that used now which formed a different vision for the web. Also touches on copyright issues.
- From Drew: http://www.royalsoc.ac.uk/news.asp?id=3881 Royal Society warns hasty ’open access’ moves may damage science, 24 Nov 2005. Funders may be forcing scientific researchers to change the way they publish scientific papers so quickly that "disastrous" consequences could result, the Royal Society warns today (Thursday 24 November 2005).
Comments
Perhaps we should begin gathering thoughts on a secondary page that synthesizes our discussions into a logical format. Perhaps the beginning of that is here. -Sri Kosuri 15:22, 6 Oct 2005 (EDT)
