Kostenlos und frei auf wissenschaftliche Texte zugreifen – das dürfte bald Standard werden. Auch wissenschaftliche Verlage versuchen den Übergang zu Open Access für sich zu nutzen, etwa mit Gebühren für Autor*innen und Datentracking. Was die Open-Access-Transformation für die Wissenschaft bedeutet und welche Gestaltungsmöglichkeiten es gibt, das analysiert Tilman Reitz. Open Access kommt langsam.

The topic of open citations was presented at the PIDapalooza conference and represents a third component in the increasing corpus of open scientific information. David Shotton gave us an update on  Citations as First Class data objects – Citation Identifiers and introduced (me) to the blog where he discusses this topic.

We have heard a lot about OA or Open Access (of journal articles) in the last five years, often in association with the APC (Article Processing Charge) model of funding such OA availability. Rather less discussed is how the model of the peer review of these articles might also evolve into an Open environment. Here I muse about two experiences I had recently.

This week the ACS announced its intention to establish a “ ChemRxiv preprint server to promote early research sharing ”. This was first tried quite a few years ago, following the example of especially the physicists. As I recollect the experiment lasted about a year, attracted few submissions and even fewer of high quality.

After last months website launch, and work progressing on our associated GigaScience database (including the addition of further datasets, such as the recently published Chinese Hamster Ovary cell-line genome) our next priority is the more traditional job of an editor: papers, papers papers.