Open Access and the Transformation of Science——the Time is Ripe

We are experiencing a ＇ climate change＇ in science publishing and we will witness major changes in the way it is being done, resulting in more and more open access to the scientific research literature. The internet makes it all possible, and the impact on science will be phenomenal.     

Post‐publication filtering and evaluation: Faculty of 1000

Faculty of 1000 ( www.facultyof1000.com ) is a new on‐line literature awareness and assessment service of research papers, on the basis of selections by 1400 of the world's top biologists, that combines metrics with judgement. The service offers a systematic and comprehensive form of post‐publication peer review that focuses on the best papers regardless of the journal in which they are published. It is now possible to draw some conclusions about how this new form of post‐publication peer review meets the needs of scientists, and the organizations that fund them, in practice. In addition, inferences about the relative importance of journals are set out, which should also interest publishers and librarians.     

Should scholarly societies embrace open access (or is it the kiss of death)?

In assessing the role that organizations of scientists with publishing activities – such as scholarly societies – can or should play in furthering the science and practice in their chosen fields, they face a dilemma: should they primarily be fund‐raising organizations for other activities in their disciplines, using their publications to bring in the necessary money, or should they be promoters of efficient scholarly communication and use their publications more directly to that end – for instance, by embracing ‘open access‘.