[open-science] Inside view to the story of an high impact publication

[Susi Toma]

Dear Heather,

Thank you for the comment. Actually, I think the situation with ACS is not that clear at the moment, as there have been worrying reports on their practices very recently:

http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/information-culture/2012/09/28/a-small-college-cancels-acs-journal-subscriptions-heres-why-this-matters/
http://www.nature.com/news/chemical-society-tried-to-block-business-competitor-1.11470

However, they do publish some of the best journals in my field and I would much rather see reform than a boycott, unlike in the case of Elsevier.

I'm definitely following the situation closely and will write about it if more information becomes available.

-Toma

"Heather Morrison" <hgmorris at sfu.ca<mailto:hgmorris at sfu.ca>> kirjoitti 5.10.2012 kello 8.29:

Congratulations, Toma.

It isn't often that the open access movement recognizes the value of societies like the American Chemical Society in the creation of a open access to scholarly knowledge.

It is good to see from the ACS website that they have Congressional Briefings - one indication that a strong society like this has the ability and opportunity to speak up for science.  Their educational programs really are of value to building knowledge and scholarship. We tend to think of ACS as behaving in a similar way to for-profit commercial publishers, but despite some superficial resemblances, this really is not the case. Like other scholarly societies, their journals on a per-article basis are a fraction of the cost of those of the highest profit commercial publishers.

When the American Association for the Advancement of Science was here for their meeting in Vancouver earlier this year, it was good to see that they had a session on muzzling of Canadian government scientists. Advocating for scholars and scholarly values is just one of the important functions of scholarly societies.

A future environment for scholarly communication that is beneficial for scholars as well as open access needs these societies. What all of us need to do to transition is to address the underlying economics to help them transition to open access.

best,

Heather Morrison

On 4-Oct-12, at 9:50 PM, Susi Toma wrote:

Dear open-science readers,

You might be interested to read a longish blog post I wrote about a recent high impact research article (alas, not open access; let me know if you want to read it and don't have access) I co-authored with Jani Kotakoski. It contains some interesting statistics of the email correspondence as well as inside details of the process, somewhat along the ideals of open science.

http://mostlyphysics.wordpress.com/2012/10/04/the-story-of-an-article/

Yours sincerely,
Toma Susi

http://physics.aalto.fi/personnel/?id=322
http://mostlyphysics.wordpress.com

"Love is the only emotion that enhances our intelligence."
-Humberto Maturana

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