[Open-access] MalariaWorld Journal

[Peter Murray-Rust]

On Fri, Feb 17, 2012 at 9:22 AM, Tom Olijhoek <tom.olijhoek at gmail.com>wrote:

> Hi,
>
> we have got fantastic news!  MalariaWorld has received funding from the
> Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research to further develop an Open
> Access 2.0 journal: the MalariaWorld Journal<http://www.malariaworld.org/mwj>.
> This followed their call for proposals to develop new Open Access journals
> and bring more scientific articles in the public domain. This journal is
> already publishing at a slow rate, but with the help of this funding it can
> develop into a full-fledged peer-reviewed scientific journal. The journal
> is absolutely @ccess compliant and reading and publishing are zero-pay. We
> can do this because MalariaWorld Journal is run under a new publication
> model with minimal costs.
> We think that this the first open access journals run by a @ccess
> community for the community. All in line with the ideas of the @ccess
> initiative on open access and open science. What do you think?
>
>
This is very good news indeed.
I'm wondering if we can emphasize the support for *authors*.  I think one
of the biggest things we can do technically is to make it as attractive as
possible for authors to create their submissions. This includes:
* taking *their* view of a manuscript rather than the publishers. For
example if a group of people use dropbox and googledocs to create
manuscripts then formal submission should simply be a pointer to the
dropbox. Permissions are easy to manage. None of the awful forms we have to
go through which are different for every publisher.
* allowing and often insisting on submission on the web of supplemental
data.
* having a permanent record of versions of manuscripts, etc. A
Malaria-World repository.

Mark MacGillivray announced yesterday at JISC Dev-8D the outline of a
"continuous integration" approach to publishing. This is heavily used in
software and means that at any stage the software always works. You can
roll back and see what was in earlier versions, etc.

The main difficulty is that it is harder if authors have to submit to more
than one journal - going down the daisy-chain. If someone knows that they
are going to submit to MW  as their first choice then it may be possible to
make the authoring process more streamlined and beneficial.

I've been involved with a few papers with zillions of authors (see
http://www.nature.com/nrd/journal/v10/n9/abs/nrd3503.html and
http://www.nature.com/nrd/journal/v10/n9/pdf/nrd3503.pdf  ). I'm a  minor
author, but if someone wrote to me asking for a legal reprint (the
pre-submission version) I couldn't find it and I've probably never seen it
(I'll have made comments which went into the final version).

These versions are valuable becuse they may well have images, tables and
references that make it through unscathed to the end. Of course this
doesn't apply here, but it's a valuable thing to have. If I wanted to quote
from my own paper I'd probably find it useful to have a word or latex
document rather than a PDF

Also - do most people now use Googledocs for communal authoring?







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-- 
Peter Murray-Rust
Reader in Molecular Informatics
Unilever Centre, Dep. Of Chemistry
University of Cambridge
CB2 1EW, UK
+44-1223-763069
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