How Science 2.0 and Open Access Really Work
Last week, I wrote about publishing my first paper in PhD (Peripheral blood gene expression patterns discriminate among chronic inflammatory diseases and healthy controls and identify novel targets) and I said publishing in an open access journal was a real priority for us because we really wanted to get feedback from the scientific communities. So let’s see where I shared that paper:
- Scienceroll.com and also my Hungarian medical blog (MedIQ.blog.hu)
- Twitter and Friendfeed
- ResearchGATE
And let’s see what happened after that:
- The paper now is the most viewed one in the last 30 days in BMC Medical Genomics.
- It received the “Highly accessed” badge
- I received many e-mails with relevant questions and I had interesting discussions on Twitter (actually found some collegues who work in the same field)
- I got invitations for collaboration from several international labs.
Before you’d ask, yes, I think it’s because we chose an open access journal. It costs a lot but is really worth it.
What is your story?
Berci, I just wanted to say ‘thanks!’ for making Science 2.0 and open access separate ideas.
Keep up the great work. I guess you know my Science 2.0 story- coined the term almost a decade ago and then built a site to do it, or at least one aspect of it, since it seems to have grown into whatever people want it to mean (much like web 2.0, I guess)…
My pleasure, Hank, do you have an entry in which you tell the whole story?
No, but I will have a book, so I will let people know a publication date.
The problem I have with this particular platform is the cost of publication. It would be a major barrier to midwives submitting for publication because so many of us do our research on the smell of an oily rag & don’t have research funds to support this. I have at least 6 articles I wish to publish – I can’t afford to pay this sort of money to publish one, let alone 6 , cheers Sarah
You’re absolutely right, Sarah, and I see your point. I could do that because the university backed us. But when it comes tp publishing the results of my Internet in Medicine course, I cannot afford to publish it…
So how will you manage that, Bertalan? There are very few open journals that are relevant to my area – I am increasingly coming to the conclusion that if I want to publish in an open midwifery journal, I’ll have to start one up myself.
I don’t have a solution, yet…
There are >5000 OA journals listed in the Directory of Open Access Journals (http://www.doaj.org) and most do not charge for publication. Try, for example, Open Medicine (http://www.openmedicine.ca) where colleagues and I published the following article:
http://www.openmedicine.ca/article/view/298/245. Authors should choose OA journals that make no charge.
All reputable open access publishers will waive fees for those genuinely unable to pay, so that should not be a barrier.