...A few weeks ago BioMed Central publisher Matt Cockerill and myself were interviewed by First Author about open access publishing in general and our new endeavors in providing peer-reviewed open access research physics, mathematics and chemistry. The interview goes into some detail, so I won't repeat it all here, but rather point to the 2-way integration with arXiv, beautiful TeX templates, and the use of PACS or MCS codes for classifying articles & research. Imagine posting your article to arXiv and submitting to a journal with just one submission process....
Of course, as with BioMed Central, the full-text XML of each article is available to all for data-mining or indexing purposes (or indeed any purpose you can imagine!) under a Creative Commons license. In addition, all equations are marked-up in MathML.
One thing which I should have emphasized a little more was that while we are going to start in April by launching 3 broadly-scoped, in-house journals in physics (with several more to follow), we are very much open to suggestions for other physics journals to be run on a more independent model. Independent journals are open access journals under the editorial control of informal groups or formal societies, but using the technology platform of BMC/PMC.
But it's not all about physics. As the other part of our name suggests, we are also looking to cover mathematical sciences comprehensively as well. Again, we will be launching a series of broadly-scoped mathematics journals, but we are interested in suggestions for independent journals here too....
So this is call for action! If you want to support open access to research in physics, mathematics and computer science, mail us with your ideas for journals and we'll start the ball rolling. If you are an editor or editorial board member of a toll-access journal, you may be interested to know that we also facilitate the transfer of existing journals to an open model. So what are you waiting for? Click on one of these links below and free your research.
If you wish to support PhysMath Central as a referee - please mail us.
Posted by
Peter Suber at 2/26/2007 01:29:00 PM.
The open access movement:
Putting peer-reviewed scientific and scholarly literature
on the internet. Making it available free of charge and
free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.
Removing the barriers to serious research.
I recommend the OA tracking project (OATP) as the best way to stay on top of new OA developments. You can read the OATP feed on a blog-like web page or subscribe to it by RSS, email, or Twitter. You can also help build the feed by tagging new developments you encounter.
