Once upon a time, folk wisdom, and Cervantes, held that "a man's word is his bond." This evolved(?) into, "a verbal contract isn't worth the paper it's written on."
The recent Parliamentary inquiry into Open Access and STM publishing, and documented in Open Access News, had proponents on both sides of an Open Access variation on that theme -- notably, those who contended that Open Access journals/articles were of profoundly dubious quality.
As one who still believes in the value of a promise, I'd like to call attention to evidence, not just supposition, of the value and validity of, at least one, OA article.
Microarray results: how accurate are they?. Kothapalli R, Yoder SJ, Mane S, Loughran TP. BMC BIOINFORMATICS 3: art. no. 22 2002
Currently cited 23 times in Web of Science, it was designated a 'New Hot Paper' by ISI's Essential Science Indicators service. To my surprise, the topic under which it appears as a New Hot Paper is Computer Science.
New Hot Paper Comments, By Ravi Kothapalli. ESI Special Topics, May 2004
I remembered having seen a news item about the New Hot Paper designation at BioMed Central when I came across a citation in the bibliography of a current article in Plant Cell by a Caltech biologist.
P.S. Plant Cell employs a 12 month embargo. HighWire edition and PubMed Central edition versions of the article which attracted my attention will be freely available in May 2005.
Posted by
George Porter at 7/01/2004 05:32:00 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.
