As things stand there are two principal types of written communication in science: papers and blog posts. We’ve discussed the relative merits of formally published papers and more informal publications such as blog-posts a couple of times, but perhaps never really dug into what the differences are between them. Matt and I have been discussing this offline, and at one point Matt suggested that authorial intent is one of the key differences.

The reason most of my work is in the form of journal articles is that I didn’t know there were other ways to communicate. Now that I know that there are other and in some ways demonstrably better ways (arXiv, etc.), my enthusiasm for sending stuff to journals is flagging.

Jarosław Stolarski drew my attention to an article on the Nature News blog by Jeffrey Beall: Predatory publishers are corrupting open access . I’d not seen that specific article, but the issue of “predatory open access publishers” is well known — in fact, Beall himself maintains an excellent list of such publishers and a helpful set of criteria for recognising them.

It’s been a looong time coming, but I just got this email from  Ellinor Michel, Executive Secretary of the International Commission on Zoological Nomenclature: Fantastic news.

Gah, so much interesting stuff going on and I simply have No. Time. To. Blog. But I’m making an exception for PeerJ, a new OA journal that is coming online later this year.

Incredible. We knew the tide was turning, but who saw it turning this swiftly? The full story is on the Guardian web-site. Update (an hour later) More information, and useful links to exactly what the Government said, on the Nature News blog.

A couple of news items from the last few days show encouraging signs that Wiley, unlike certain other academic publishers, is taking steps to move in an open-access direction. First, there was the announcement four days ago that they have created a new role within the company specifically to lead their open access efforts. The lucky recipient is Rachel Burley, whose previous job title was Publisher” and who is now Director of Open Access.

As you’ll know from all the recent AMNH basement (and YPM gallery) photos, Matt and I spent last week in New York (with a day-trip to New Haven). The week immediately before that, I spent in Boston with Index Data, my day-job employers. Both weeks were fantastic — lots of fun and very productive.

Just a link this time. Richard Smith was the editor of the British Medical Journal until 2004, and at one point he was chief executive of the BMJ Publishing Group. He is currently director of the United Health Group’s chronic disease initiative, and an unpaid professor at both Warwick University and Imperial College London. He’s a pretty big hitter by any standards. Does he have the access to research that he needs?

Scopus bills itself as “the largest abstract and citation database of research literature and quality web sources covering nearly 18,000 titles from more than 5,000 publishers.” Sounds useful. But it’s useless. Literally. Because it’s a subscription-only resource: Now I am an associate researcher at the University of Bristol.