Monday, October 1, 2012

How open is #openaccess? A few comments

Major actors of open access publishing have taken an excellent initiative, namely establishing a grid detailing how open different publishers are.



They took into account different aspects of open access, and also asks for comments. So here are my suggestions of additional criteria to take into account for publication openess:
  • Are the peer reviews publicly available next to the article, anonymously or not?
  • Is it possible to freely comment on the publisher's website, next to the article (as in PLOS and BMC)?
  • Does the publisher have a systematic policy of embargo towards the press, conference presentations, etc?
  • When relevant, must authors provide Open Source source code? (for PLOS Computational Biology you have to, but not for OUP Bioinformatics.)
  • When relevant, must authors deposit raw data in independent reliable databanks à la GenBank?
Did I miss anything? Will they really take into account such annoying suggestions? Time will tell.

Thursday, September 27, 2012

And now for something completely the same

Those who know me, might know that I have an active blog in French. This allows me to reach out to people who are interested in science, but would not necessarily read about it in English.

But for some topics, I would like to reach out to my colleagues, irrespective of language. I.e., in English. Hence this other blog, where I will post from time to time on topics of interest to other scientists.