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http://www.publiclibraryofscience.org/

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[RightWingNilla]

The list might be interested in this one...

[js1138]

ping

[Dog Gone]

Boy, I want to own a website that charges authors $1,500 for the privilege of posting an article.

JimRob, don't get any ideas....

[RonF]

A couple of questions:

1) Who's doing the peer reviewing for this journal? Is it a peer reviewed journal?

2) The problem with an author-financed journal is that the publisher has an incentive to overlook problems with articles in order to get the publishing fee.

[Centurion2000]

Actually this is a good idea ... scientists just need to budget 1500.00 into their grant budgeting and then they can get some awesome peer review and feedback.

Of course posting it on the internet means that the Chinese and Russians get a crack at any really promising leads in technology as well.

[TopQuark]

The group wants to compete with established journals while slimming publishing costs and shortening peer-review cycles.

They only changed the pocket from which the money comes from: instead of the readers, the authors pay. This does not affect the costs, whether monetary or turnaround time.

A statement on the site says the Web makes it possible "to make our treasury of scientific information available to a much wider audience, including millions of students, teachers, physicians, scientists, and other potential readers who do not have access to a research library that can afford to pay for journal subscriptions." That's garbage: there are plenty of abstracts available on-line, and anyone in the U.S. can get the article through an inter-library loan.

Not surprisingly, the free distribution model seems be going over well. Isn't that premature? The fact that the readers try to consume the free good says nothing. Bread in the Soviet Russia was also cheap, and then it disappeared.

More disturbing is the fact that the author failed to ask an important question: is $1,500 publication fee not a barrier for dissemination of information? It appears to me that it does. If a scholar writes four papers a year, where is (s)he gonna get $6,000 to publish them?

[JohnSmithee]

There are dozens of peer reviewed journals freely available on the internet. I know of a number that are sponsored by established universities and have a strong academic orientation.

[Nebullis]

I don't know if this website is the solution, but there's a growing discontent with the massive publishing houses (Elsevier, Blackwell, etc.) with institutional subscription rates topping $50,000 a year. Libararies are reduced to carrying only the most "significant" journals and forgoing the multitude of others. It's a deplorable restriction on public access to scientific information.

[RightWingAtheist]

This journal couldn't have been launched at a more timely moment for me; one of my classes is currently reading a history of scientific journals from the 16th to 19th centuries. Interestingly, peer review didn't develop arise until the mid-eighteenth century, and it was largely the result of the actions of one man, named John Hill, who published a work criticizing some of the more outlandish pieces to appear in the Proceedings of the Royal Society, such as a report of a merman found washed ashore in Virginia, or "a proof of the incontestable fact that fish live in water." The Royal Society was so humbled that it henceforth set up a review committee to oversee all articles submitted for publication.

I'm doing a presentation in the class tomorrow on how grid networks are affecting scientific communication. Pace, the speed at which results are produced and disseminated, is going to be the main theme.