All UK universities have signed up to Biomed Central, meaning all staff ccan publish in their Open Access journals, such as Biomedical Engineering Online, without paying additional fees.
Read the update here.
The Scientist is reporting the launch of ARKive, a 'digital Noah's ark'.
From ARKive:
It is the Noah's Ark for the Internet era - the world's centralised digital library of films, photographs and sound recordings of species, accessible to all via the world wide web.
ARKive is leading the virtual conservation effort - finding, sorting, cataloguing and copying the key records of species, and building them into a comprehensive and enduring audio-visual record.
Apparently they're desperate for a photo of a Christmas frigatebird (Fregata andrewsi), so if anyone's got one...
The BMJ today has a report about the media (mis)handling of the MMR debate. Following a paper in the Lancet (A J Wakefield, S H Murch, A Anthony, J Linnell, D M Casson, M Malik, M Berelowitz, A P Dhillon, M A Thomson, P Harvey et al., Ileal-lymphoid-nodular hyperplasia, non-specific colitis, and pervasive developmental disorder in children, The Lancet, Volume 351, Issue 9103, 28 February 1998, Pages 637-641.) about a possible association between MMR (measles, mumps and rubella vaccine) and autism, the usual hysterical reaction of the media (not just the tabloid press, this time) led to a dangerous decline in uptake of the vaccine in some parts of Britain.
The authors stated in the Discussion of the original paper:
We did not prove an association between measles, mumps, and rubella vaccine and the syndrome described.
but even the vaguest speculation was enough to set the hacks off. Since then the debate has raged, despite the vast majority of the evidence being totally supportive of the combined MMR vaccine. The BMJ report states that:
"Although almost all scientific experts rejected the claim of a link between MMR and autism, 53% of those [the people] surveyed at the height of the media coverage of the issues assumed that because both sides of the debate received equal media coverage, there must be equal evidence for each. Only 23% of the population were aware that the bulk of evidence favoured supporters of the vaccine," says the study.
The Department of Health has extensive information on MMR, and concludes:
The latest scientific evidence shows no link between MMR and long-term problems such as autism and inflammatory bowel disease, that separate vaccines are worse for children than MMR and that MMR remains the safest way to protect children against these three potentially serious diseases.
And finally, the WHO states:
WHO stresses the importance of scientifically evaluating rumours, anecdotal reports, rumours and speculation about the safety of vaccines. The Global Advisory Committee on Vaccine Safety has recently published its guidelines for assessing causality in this context in the Weekly Epidemiology Record. WHO is not aware of any scientific evidence that meets the criteria laid out by the Committee that might substantiate an association between autism and MMR vaccines.
Read the report here.
A couple of weeks ago I posted an entry about a new model for scientific publishing, which would see the author (or funding body) paying the costs of publication but retaining copyright and allowing free access to the published article for all.
An editorial in this week's BMJ discusses this very issue. One of the major sticking points envisaged by the BMJ is the institutions' reliance on impact factors (IF) as the sole measure of the quality of a journal. This makes the transition difficult as everybody waits for the IF of a new journal to go up before publishing there. Of course, while everybody's waiting, the IF doesn't go up.
The BMJ has been exemplary on this front, having provided free access for a number of years now.
In other news, scientists are becoming increasingly dissatisfied with the scientific publishing process. We do all the work preparing manuscripts (publicly funded), we review the manuscripts of others (publicly funded), we hand over the copyright for free and when the manuscripts are finally published, we have to pay to read them (publicly funded). The publishing companies, meanwhile, sit back and rake in the cash.
The Public Library of Science, amongst others, is trying to do something about this. Their premise is that the results of publicly-funded work should be in the public domain, and that the costs of dissemination are part of the costs of the research. Thus the funding body pays for publication, but also retains the copyright. If this is done through not-for-profit organisations, it cuts out the publishing companies and will increase the efficiency, and equity, of the dissemination of publicly-funded research.
SciX is an EU-funded project aiming to demonstrate the feasibility of this approach and provide the scientific community with the tools to do it.
Biomedical Engineering Online and BMC Medical Imaging are two such journals, and claim to maintain the high quality of traditional print-based journals through the peer-review process, while providing open content and a short publication time. Abstracts are available through PubMed just as with conventional journals.
I think this is a very sound model for scientific publishing and would be interested to know what others think. Is this the way forward?