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Scholarly publishing

The Commons and the Peers

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Who's on first?

authorder.jpg Determining the order of authors on a scholarly publication can be problematic, especially among interdisciplinary groups. However, there are existing protocols that determine who should be credited as an author on a publication.

Number and quality

nature.jpgGroup of Eight institutions contributed more articles, letters and reviews to Nature and Nature monthly research journals in the last 12 months than other Australian research bodies.

USA libraries abandon big journal packages

Jennifer Howard reports in The Chronicle of Higher Education, of the University of Oregon's cancellation of two big subscription deals with Elsevier and Wiley. She also describes how the Southern Illinois University Library at Carbondale is scaling back on large publisher journal packages. Mr. Nabe said of the response at Southern Illinois.

Nature tracker

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Top Cell Biologist First Editor of New Open Access Journal

The Howard Hughes Medical Institute News reports that Randy W. Schekman, a distinguished cell biologist and the 14th editor of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, has been named the first editor of a new journal that the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, the Max Planck Society, and the Wellcome Trust aim to launch next year.

That's a lot of eyeballs

The figures confirm what researchers already know: it's good to appear in Nature. Articles published in Nature received more than 500,000 citations in 2010, making it the most highly cited journal in Thomson Reuters' Journal Citation Report.

Enough already?

The Journal of Experimental Medicine editorialised on 4 July against authors 'dumping' data on them, stating that, effective immediately, the journal will now only accept "essential supporting information".

Latest model

Scholarly publications are now funded in a number of ways: the subscription model (where libraries and others pay for access), the advertising model (where advertising and sponsorship fund the costs of publishing), and the "source-pays" model (authors or sponsors pay to publish, usually alongside some guarantee of open access to the work). There's more than money at play when you compare these models.

Does open access trump everything?

PLoS One, published by the Public Library of Science, was launched in 2006. Last year, it became the largest scientific journal in the world, publishing nearly 7,000 articles. Foir impact, it is now ranked 12th in biology journals, not bad going for a journal less than 5 years old. PLoS One's success has led other players in the field think about launching open access journals.