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.

I think journal policies towards preprint servers are covered by the data from the Romeo database, outlined previously. For the next stage of the open science edition of tips and tricks I think I need to include clarification of journal positions towards publication and discussion of data on blogs, wikis, and such like.

I spent a while trying to come up with a suitably clever letter, but this is the best I could do.

Dear Sirs,

I’m compiling, with the bioinformatics blogging community, a guide to open science. I believe one of the one of most important points on in this issue are journal editorial polices towards sharing and discussing research, prior to publication. The use of preprint servers is becoming accepted, however the position of journals towards the use of blogs and wikis to discuss results is less clear.

I am writing to ask for your policy regarding this. I would like to permission to include your reply in the finished guide. You can find wiki page for this at wiki.nodalpoint.org/open_science.

As you might expect, I’ve put this on a nodal point wiki page. If you’ve got any corrections or suggestions, you can leave them here in the comments or edit the letter yourself. I’ll load up them into the SPAM bot and send them out on Friday.