Bioinformatics Zen

While away in Madrid, I received two replies to my open science question to journals, from Elsevier and from BMC.

In short summary, Elsevier’s point of view, excluding Cell and Lancet, was quite positive with “watch, test and learn from examples”. BMC’s response was slightly negative, with “we only publish original research articles”. I’ve put both these emails on the nodalpoint wiki here, so that you can go and read them yourself and make up your own mind.

I’m very grateful that these two publishers replied, but I’m a bit disappointed by the lack of response from the other journals. Particularly PNAS, Nature, and PLoS which seem to be the most open science friendly. Any thoughts on this would be appreciated. I could get on the telephone and give them a call? Or bit pushy perhaps?

I still want to move forward with this open science issue special edition, I think getting it done for the September 1 edition of bio:blogs would be a good goal, since it’s been going for a while. I guess the next step would be to try and get scientists already participating in open science to write a short piece on their experiences. It would also be interesting to get funding bodies opinions on this too, since open science can generally lead to a better quality of research.