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Tuesday, January 02, 2007

New year's resolutions

Jonathan Eisen, My Open Access New Years Resolutions, Tree of Life, January 1, 2007.  Excerpt:

Well, 2006 is over and in terms of Open Access to Biomedical type publications, I think it was a pretty good year....But of course, more needs to be done. So I am posting here my personal list of Open Access New Years resolutions. These are things I hope to do and hope to convince others to do too (these are in no particular order).

1. Convince more collaborators to publish papers in Open Access journals.

2. Release more of my labs data in a more usable format to Open Data archives (see Bill Hooker's Open Reading Frame blog for more details about doing this).

3. Discuss Open Access to publications and data in all my scientific presentations/talks....

5. Convince some existing journals to switch to a more Open Access stance (e.g., I wish this would happen with Journal of Molecular Evolution --- I resigned my position as an Academic Editor when they would not shift but there is still hope).

6. Submit as many of my past papers that were not in Open Access journals to self-archiving repositories (see the comments on my previous blog about this - it seems that this is possible even for Nature papers).

7. Work with Pubmed Central to make self archiving possible there for more papers. Right now it is only possible to submit your own work to Pubmed Central if it was NIH or Wellcome Trust funded.

8. Discuss Open Access with more scientists. Some still have not heard about it and some do not realize what the issues are.

9. Discuss Open Access with more non scientists. To get Congress to pass more rules regarding Open Access, it will help to have more pressure from non scientists. When I have described the current publishing system to non scientists, they are usually astonished by the (1) wasted money and (2) closed nature of much scientific work.

10. Work to get researchers who publish in Open Access journals "extra credit" in promotions, tenure review and grant proposal review. These people are frequently taking risks for the betterment of the scientific community and to advance scientific knowledge. They deserve credit for taking these risks.

PS:  A very good list!  For publishing researchers, the most trusted and persuasive bearers of the OA message are other publishing researchers.  Talk to your colleagues --on campus and at conferences, in print and in hallways.  And above all, provide OA to your own work, either through OA journals or OA repositories.