“publishers should attempt to equate traditional publishing models with peer review” Eric...

The PLoS combination of quality and quantity

Ginny Barbour Managing Editor PLoS Medicine

BioMed Central Colloquium

Thursday 8th February 2007, The Royal College of Physicians, London, UK

• “publishers should attempt to equate traditional publishing models with peer review”

• Eric Dezenhall, PR Consultant to Jeffrey Skilling, former Enron chief, ExxonMobil and, in 2006, to the Association of American Publishers

• “Media massaging is not the same as intellectual debate.”

“…the rigor of peer review is independent of the price, medium, and funding model of a journal.  Open Access may threaten the profits and market position of some publishers, but it does not threaten the quality of published science.”

Peter Suber, http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/fosblog.html

Actually, OA improves quality

• We don’t have to stick with the old models of publishing peer reviewed papers

• Right now, quality control ends when a paper is published, and interaction between authors and readers is rare

• The internet is a revolutionary technology and Web 2.0 can make the process of scientific publishing better by “harnessing collective intelligence”

• -Tim O'Reilly, 2006,Web 2.0 Compact Definition: Trying Again

Oct 2003Oct 2004

Open access 2.0

The Next

Generation

2005: Community Journals

Open access

•• Inclusive:

all of science and medicine• Objective pre-publication peer-

review: focusing on scientific rigor• Post-publication commentary:

interactive, dynamic, openCollaborative:

In Beta - open source software site being developed with input from users

• New ways of assessing quality:eg, user annotations

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•The literature is vast

•Machines can be used to discover previously unknown information

•Open access facilitates this discovery process

Why quality is so important:text mining and open access

Text mining

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Jensen, Saric and Bork Nature Reviews Genetics

Feb 2006

OA will improve the quality of the scientific record

• Makes papers more available for scrutiny

• Contributes more efficiently to the wider literature

• Web 2.0 has the potential to encourage active criticism and correction