Three more journal responses on open science - Nature, PLoS, and BMC
August 10th, 2007
All emails have been put on the Nodalpoint wiki. Here’s a brief summary of each.
Nature’s response came from the always helpful Maxine Clarke, who regularly appears on their publishing blog. Nature encourages the discussion of work by scientists prior to publication, such as the established practices of preprint servers and presenting at conferences, but blogs and wikis are also covered under this. Nature is however very strict about discussing work with the media until the peer review process is complete.
I contacted Matt Hodgkinson at BMC, after reading about a discussion with Heather on her blog. Publishing data and figures on personal websites is considered by BMC to be similar to informal preprint circulation, and therefore does not prevent the inclusion of the data in an article submitted to the journal. Matt also has a blog where he discusses issues related to journals and publishing.
Matt Patterson replied regarding PLoS’s attitude to open notebook science. Currently PLoS have no clear policy, but they’ve had several enquiries so plan to review their stance with regards to this. Matt kindly said he would send me a follow up email when this was clearer
Bio::Blogs special edition
I’m still aiming to get this special edition finished in time for the August 1 edition of Bio::Blogs. The response from the journals has been good, and we’ve got four in total. I’m hoping to get a few more in future, but I think we need to keep the momentum going, so I’m going start lobbying for people interested in open science to contribute an opinion piece. So if you’ve got an opinion on open notebook science, you could, if you’re feeling generous, write a short piece of text then email me or post it on the Nodalpoint wiki page.
Creative Commons
The photo used in this post is taken from Today is a good day on flickr and used under a creative commons licence.