Open Access News

News from the open access movement


Thursday, August 12, 2004

Don't "reinvent the wheel"

Martin C. Raff et al, Changing Scientific Publishing, Science 305(5686), 945-946 (13 August 2004). (Access restricted to subscribers.) In a reply to a letter by Wang et al (see OAN posting from 3/26/04) which argued for making the web the primary means of publication and dissemination of scientific literature and suggested that this might be enhanced by the inclusion of reviewer's comments and other editorial matter, Raff and colleagues point out that in the latter case such a service exists in the Faculty of 1000, which highlights and provides commentary on recent papers of interest in a variety of biomedical topics. (It is a subscription-based service, all the same.) As for web-focused publishing, they point to BioMedCentral and urge Wang and others to work to enhance already existing tools.