Bioinformatics Zen

Previously I wrote about journal polices towards preprint servers. Since, Dave Robertson contacted me to highlight the Romeo database, which contains a list of journals and their publishing policies. A quick 10 minute search produced this list of archiving guidelines, I’ve updated this on the Nodalpoint wiki. Each journal also has some additional conditions, follow the links to Romeo to read more.

Supports preprint and postprint

BMC
PLOS
National Academy of Sciences
Elsevier excluding Cell

Supports preprint only

OUP
Nature

Supports postprint only

Science
Elsevier - Cell

Continuing the theme of open science, I think one of the most important issues that needs clarification is the position of journals to making your research available prior to publication. One example of this is preprint servers, of which Nature has recently launched their own. Coincidently, a year ago today, Pedro discussed this issue on his blog. With the aim of including it in the next issue of the bio::blogs special edition, I repeated Pedro’s search - the results were consistent with his, except for two cases.

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Traditional science is carried out by experimentation, interpreting the results in respect to the hypothesis, and repeating this until publication. Publication is everything, and as such it’s important to keep your research secret, lest anyone publish something similar which undermines the opportunity to publish in a high impact journal.

An open science philosophy says that this closed approach slows scientific advancement. Results should be made available as soon as possible, then everyone in the field can benefit from them sooner. There is no delay for peer review and publication.

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