Last month the fifth congress on peer review and biomedical publication was held in Chicago. The presentations highlighted that we still have plenty of room to improve the quality of published research....Smaller journals may have to adopt other strategies to raise their impact factor. A study by Sahu and colleagues suggested that open access might be a powerful means for small journals to increase their visibility, citations, and consequently impact factor. Citations of articles published in the Journal of Postgraduate Medicine between 1990 and 1999 rose significantly after the journal went open access in 2001. Half of the articles were first cited only after open access was introduced....Apart from improving the quality of published literature, better reporting should speed up the advent of trial banks --open access electronic knowledge bases that can capture in detail aspects of trial design, execution, and results in a form that computers can understand. Decision support systems can then use these data more selectively, providing clinician friendly computer assistance for critical appraisal and evidence based practice. Sim reported that trialists found it easier to enter their data into the trial bank than to write a traditional research paper, and that readers found it easier to extract information about the trial --surely a sign that the days of journals reporting trials are numbered.
Posted by
Peter Suber at 10/07/2005 11:09:00 AM.
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.
