Maybe we won’t need the other new journal announced yesterday after all.
From Slashdot.org:
“Nature’s Publishing Group is launching a new journal, Scientific Reports, announced earlier this month.
The press release makes it clear that it is molded after PLoS ONE: ‘Scientific Reports will publish original research papers of interest to specialists within a given field in the natural sciences. It will not set a threshold of perceived importance for the papers that it publishes; rather, Scientific Reports will publish all papers that are judged to be technically valid and original. To enable the community to evaluate the importance of papers post-peer review, the Scientific Reports website will include most-downloaded, most-emailed, and most-blogged lists.
All research papers will benefit from rapid peer review and publication, and will be deposited in PubMed Central.’ Perhaps readers may find it ironic that PLoS ONE, first dismissed by Nature as an ‘online database’ ‘relying on bulk, cheap publishing of lower quality papers to subsidize its handful of high-quality flagship journals’ seems to be setting the standards for ‘a new era in publishing.’
Here’s what they say on the website:
Online and open access, Scientific Reports is a brand new primary research publication from the publishers of Nature, covering all areas of the natural sciences — biology, chemistry, physics and earth sciences.
Scientific Reports exists to facilitate the rapid peer review and publication of research that is of interest to specialists within any given field in the natural sciences, without barriers to access.
Scientific Reports is:
- Fast — rapid review and publication
- Rigorous — peer review by at least one member of the academic community
- Open — articles are freely available to all and authors retain copyright
- Visible — enhanced browsing and searching to ensure your article is noticed
- Interlinked — to and from relevant articles across nature.com
- Global — housed on nature.com with worldwide media coverage
According to the Guide to Authors, it seems they will do any paper for a flat fee of $1350USD. I’m sure this will inspire somebody to do a test case for the “money talks, BS walks theory”.
===============================================================
Here’s the press release in full:
Announcing Scientific Reports, a new open access publication
PRESS RELEASE FROM NATURE PUBLISHING GROUP
6 January 2011
Contact: Grace Baynes (Corporate Public Relations)
Nature Publishing Group
T:+44 (0)20 7014 4063
Nature Publishing Group (NPG) today announces the 2011 launch of Scientific Reports. An online, open access, peer-reviewed publication, Scientific Reports will publish research covering the natural sciences – biology, chemistry, earth sciences and physics. Scientific Reports is accepting submissions from today, and will publish its first articles in June 2011. More information is available on the Scientific Reports website (www.nature.com/scientificreports).
All articles published in Scientific Reports will be open access and subject to an article-processing charge (APC). The 2011 APC rate will be US$1350/GB£890/ EURO1046 per accepted manuscript*. Authors will have a choice of two non-commercial Creative Commons (CC) licenses. NPG will make an annual donation to Creative Commons equivalent to $20 per APC paid for publication in Scientific Reports.** Authors of the research paper concerned will be eligible for complimentary membership of the Creative Commons network, an international online community of people who support open access and open educational resources.
“Creative Commons is delighted to have NPG’s support for our activities,” said Cathy Casserly, CEO of Creative Commons. “We welcome the launch of Scientific Reports, and NPG’s growing open access offering.”
Scientific Reports will publish original research papers of interest to specialists within a given field in the natural sciences. It will not set a threshold of perceived importance for the papers that it publishes; rather, Scientific Reports will publish all papers that are judged to be technically valid and original. To enable the community to evaluate the importance of papers post-peer review, the Scientific Reports website will include most-downloaded, most-emailed, and most-blogged lists. All research papers will benefit from rapid peer review and publication, and will be deposited in PubMed Central.
“Our rationale is to provide authors with a choice of where to publish,” said Jason Wilde, Business Development Director at NPG. “Scientific Reports will leverage the tools, technology and experience of NPG, bringing this knowledge and insight to a broad-based, open access publication. Through increased competition and innovation, we hope to give authors great service, functionality and visibility for their research.”
Scientific Reports will be led by a team of 15 Editorial Advisory Panel members, supported by an editorial board who will make all editorial decisions. Unlike Nature Communications, Scientific Reports will not have in-house editors, and will not offer the developmental editing associated with the Nature titles.
“This is a completely new venture for NPG,” says David Hoole, Director of Intellectual Property Policy and Licensing at NPG. “Scientific Reports adds to our growing portfolio of journals providing open access options, but until now NPG has not offered researchers an open access home for solid scientific research. We continue to see increasing commitment by research funders to cover the costs of open access, and interest from authors in this publishing route.” Scientific Reports joins more than 40 titles published by NPG offering an open access option. More information about NPG’s open access activities and policies is available in NPG’s January 2011 open access position statement (www.nature.com/press_releases/statement.html).
Editorial Advisory Panel members as of 6 January 2011
(see www.nature.com/srep/eap-ebm for more detail and Editorial Board members)
Astrophysics, Avi Loeb, Harvard University, USA
Cancer, Ronald DePinho, Harvard University, USA
Cell Biology, Suzanne Pfeffer, Stanford School of Medicine, USA
Chemical Biology, Stuart Schreiber, Harvard University, USA
Chemistry, Andrew Holmes, The University of Melbourne, Australia
Earth and Environmental Sciences, Lee Kump, Penn State University, USA
Genetics and Genomics, Aravinda Chakravarti, Johns Hopkins University, USA
Immunology, Ronald Germain, NIAID, USA
Molecular Biology, Shelley L Berger, University of Pennsylvania, USA
Molecular Biology, John Diffley, Cancer Research UK, UK
Neuroscience, Trevor Robbins, University of Cambridge, UK
Plant Cell Biology, Ueli Grossniklaus, Institute of Plant Biology, University of Zurich, Switzerland
Physics, Shik Shin, University of Tokyo, Japan
Stem Cells and Development, Fiona Watt, Cancer Research UK/Cambridge Research Institute, UK
*Scientific Reports will offer a 20% discount on the APC for manuscripts accepted for publication before 31 December 2011. From January 2012, the APC will be US$1700/GB£1112/EURO1308
** Total annual donation from NPG will be up to $100,000
-ENDS-
@teh article
> The 2011 APC rate will be US$1350/GB£890/ EURO1046 per accepted manuscript*…
I thought “open source” meant “free”. Seems like most of the “processing” would include reviewing any received manuscript, so charging only for the “accepted” papers sounds like a money-making business to me.
Having said that, I see nothing wrong with that. It’s not really a new idea, it’s a “vanity press” for scientists, who for one reason or another can’t get their ideas published.
I wish them success.
Can anyone say “Vanity publishing”?
/Mr Lynn
The older I get the less surprised I should be, however it would seem my level of cynisism just can’t keep up with this new century. So much to say but too dumfounded yo articulate it.
Plenty of room for censorship then.
Yep. Gatekeepers are waiting to “protect the integrity of climate science”.
Check out Lee Kump’s home page at PSU and sure enough:
Nature are taking no chances with the scientific consensus. None
860 quid to get a paper published? They ought to pay me 🙂
Earth and Environmental Sciences, Lee Kump, Penn State University, USA
That would be Mann’s current work place indeed his worked with him on a book
‘Mann, M. and Kump, L., 2008. Dire Predictions: Understanding Global Warming. DK Publishing, New York’
So anyone want to guess how that is going to work out?
I was about to make thirty or so posts, when I read the cost of each one.
Sorry world.
My extraordinary, novel, brilliant, important findings will just have to perish, unknown and unloved.
Ah! Woe is me!
Back to square one.
Journal of Universal Rejection (JofUR)
http://www.math.pacificu.edu/~emmons/JofUR/
Man,
That One reviewer must be a master in ALL sciences!
Sounds like top quality science to me!
NOT!!!!
John A says:
January 26, 2011 at 3:58 am
“Nature are taking no chances with the scientific consensus. None.”
Yup. The
good buddypeer review system lives on…This matches the post modern idea that research is best seen as advertising.
John Day
I thought “open source” meant “free”. Seems like most of the “processing” would include reviewing any received manuscript, so charging only for the “accepted” papers sounds like a money-making business to me.
Actually, open source (usually applied to software) doesn’t mean free, it means the source is freely available, and can be modified, customized, and redistributed as long as you follow the terms of the license. Most people still pay for open source because they want the software support.
MikeEE
Gosh Michael Mann’s sidekick gets to vet earth and environmental science reports! What a coincidence! I wonder how that could have come about?
Just as well all of those jolly thorough inquiries cleared all the nice climate scientists from any wrongdoing, like gate-keeping and corrupting the peer review process, for instance, or some people might have jumped to bad conclusions.
US$1350 is steep unless you write it into the grant. What’s so costly that the article processing charge has to be so high? It looks like Nature is trying to subsidize its other operations by selling quick publication. And if the authors retain copyright, why can’t some entrepreneur emulate the effort at lower cost? What value do they add besides some name recognition?
*Rigorous — peer review by at least one member of the academic community
(One academic who, in his best interest, surprisingly agrees with the author)
Looks like a fast-track, backdoor way to keep the AGW crapola express at full speed.
Anyone see a Statistics “expert”?
Isn’t that a back-door way to validate all the gray literature they need for IPCC AR5?
I much prefer the peer-review system here.
Major flaws spotted in that Open-Source lookalike mighty fast.
I don´t like PLoS one.
First, submitting a paper is costly. Only rich labs can afford.
Second, some papers have dubious quality. I recall reading a couple of papers from PLoS about models that predict extinction of species in like 50-100 years due to global warming. No empirical data was shown, obviously. It was feeding a computer model with the output of another computer model. The negation of science as an experimental discipline.
I think one of those PLoS papers made an article at WUWT not long ago.
I once read a paper by a total QUACK… called, “On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies”. Published in some obscure journal. Made a bunch of radical claims.
The MORON didn’t cite any references, and it was published because the EDITOR of the “Journal” thought it had merit!
I’m having a hard time remembering the name of that QUACK, but I recall his theories. Pretty radical. He said you gained weight if you were moving. Any clue as to the author???
Max
Huckleberry Finn never gave away his “huckster” secrets . . . that took Mark Twain who had to use a pen name to do it.
You can’t pay to publish in the best journals. If its not up to it, it doesn’t get in.
So this is bottom fishing for funds.
Just because there’s a book in all of us doesn’t make any of them worth reading.
Peer review by experts in the field or by anon?
I predict a barrage of trivia and small mindedness.
Have they learned nothing from Wikipedia?
“I once read a paper by a total QUACK… called, “On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies”. Published in some obscure journal. Made a bunch of radical claims.
The MORON didn’t cite any references, and it was published because the EDITOR of the “Journal” thought it had merit!
I’m having a hard time remembering the name of that QUACK, but I recall his theories. Pretty radical. He said you gained weight if you were moving. Any clue as to the author???
Max”
Come on, Einstein, I’m not buying that story. You sound like a Planck, Max.
😉
Oh goodie, now Nature is advertising that science is for sale. Gee, I wonder if the people who pay this bribe (esp. repeatedly) will be fast-tracked for publication in Nature too?