... [T]he Public Library of Science is planning to launch a software section for its PLoS Computational Biology and PLoS One journals that may include a function for authors to deposit their software when they submit their papers for publication.
The section, which PLoS expects to launch some time this fall, will only accept open source software, Phil Bourne, founding editor-in-chief of PLoS Computational Biology and professor at the Skaggs School of Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences at the University of California at San Diego, told BioInform last month at the Intelligent Systems for Molecular Biology conference in Stockholm.
Bourne said that Carnegie Mellon University's Robert Murphy will be the section's editor.
"We'd like to have software deposited with the article," Bourne said, but noted that the team is ironing out details, such as whether to create a repository like SourceForge to host software that is not yet live at the time of article submission. ...
[O]ther publishers discussed ways that journals could improve the dissemination of large data sets that support a paper's findings.
Publishers often treat "data as an afterthought" and "rarely" put it in a form that is readily re-usable, BioMedCentral's publisher Matthew Cockerill said, adding that BMC is working on techniques to put data in context. BMC is also starting a new journal in this area called the Journal of Biomedical Semantics with Dietrich Rebholz-Schuhmann of the European Bioinformatics Institute and Goran Nenadic of the University of Manchester as editors.
Nature's database publisher Matthew Day agreed that publishers do a "pretty poor job" of handling data and said that large data sets tend to remain "unpublishable."
Publishers should explore ways to help manage research data such as from genome-wide screens, he said. He added that publishers could also help by annotating data or by finding ways to give credit to widely used data sets ...
Posted by
Gavin Baker at 8/19/2009 07:43:00 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.
