Nature slips further from pole position

Nature, for long the top dog of scientific journals, has slipped down the ratings as judged by impact factor Richard Gallagher reports in his blog at The Scientist.

In 2004 it was the top journal with an impact factor of 31.9, then slipped marginally behind Science and Cell in 2005. But the latest figures, for 2006, show a further slip: Science comes in at 30.0, Cell at 29.2 and Nature at 26.7.

The numbers are calculated as the total number of citations in the year 2006 to papers published in the years 2004 and 2005, divided by the number of papers published in 2004 and 2005. That's three-and-a-half fewer citations on average for a Nature paper versus a Science paper.

The usual government health warning about impact factors applies: if they tell you what you already know then they're probably correct; if they contradict what you expect then feel free to ignore them.

Expect to see more review articles in Nature in the next couple of years - review articles attract disproportionately higher numbers of citation than research articles so they are a simple way to bump up a journal's impact factor.

Elsevier's prices - 2008

Frank Vrancken Peeters, Global Sales Director for Elsevier, recently sent out a message to customers. It contains the usual soft soap about how "Elsevier is committed to delivering value for customers by continually improving our customer service and product functionality in addition to supporting ongoing growth in the number of articles published and rapidly expanding online usage", and the fact that "in our most recent survey, customers ranked Elsevier higher than other publishers in 8 out of 10 categories, an improvement over last year".

We then learn that

"For decades, the number of research articles published each year has grown by around 3-4% annually. Last year was no exception and in fact, growth of
Elsevier-published articles increased above this long-term rate. Online
usage of Elsevier-published articles on ScienceDirect continues to increase
by more than 20%: ScienceDirect recently passed the milestone of 1 billion
articles downloaded".

and that

"Downloads onto the desktops of over 16 million researchers, clinicians, and students around the globe now continue at a rate exceeding on average over 700 articles per minute, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week."

Finally we get to the news we were looking for:

"Elsevier is targeting a price increase of just below six percent on average across our journals in 2008. ... Elsevier's price increase has placed us in the lowest quartile of the industry for the past six years, and we hope that this year's increase will enable us to remain in this range. As a point of reference, the 2007 average increase across all STM publishers was 7.89% in Europe and 8.73% in the U.S."

More customer-speak follows, to make us feel loved and valued.

Word 2007 causes problems for journal submissions

Both Science and Nature have recently updated their publication guidelines and note that native Microsoft Office 2007 file format documents will not be accepted for initial review or revision. While users can obviously save documents in the legacy versions, the Science instructions for authors go on to state that the equation editor supplied with Word 2007 causes them problems too.

See ZDNet blog posting for further information.

Elsevier abandons arms trade

Elsevier intends to stop organizing weapons exhibitions by the end of 2007, the publishing giant announced last week. After a long campaign by scientists and medics (reported here in March and April) Elsevier have decided that "the defence shows are no longer compatible with Reed Elsevier's position as a leading publisher of scientific, medical, legal and business content."

Chemical structure and gene ontology information in RSS

RSS feeds from Royal Society of Chemistry journals will also display ontology terms and compound details, including the 2D image. Users will be able to see at a glance whether the paper is relevant to their research. In addition, hidden coding within the RSS feed allows the metadata to be read by machine.

This is a part of the RSC's Project Prospect - aimed at enhancing the chemical and biochemical information available in RSC journal articles.

How to speed up peer review?

Correspondence in PLoS Biology suggests a way to give peer reviewers an incentive to review manuscripts more speedily.

Whenever a reviewer sends in a review, the date is logged... Next to the date the editor enters a positive or negative value that indicates the relative timeliness of the review: negative values for reviews arriving before the deadline, and positive values for those arriving afterwards. Reviewers that turn in their reviews late are punished, whereas those that arrive on time are rewarded: for every day since receipt of the manuscript for review plus the number of days past the deadline, the reviewer's next personal submission to the journal will be held in editorial limbo for twice as long before it is sent for review. Journals reward timely reviewers by sending their manuscripts out for review as soon as they come in, and if accepted, by pushing their papers high up into the publication queue.

This is certainly a thought-provoking idea! The authors recognise some of the possible pitfalls and address these in their letter. They argue that their propsed solution is based on "the logic of economic incentives and the evolutionary origins of human nature".

There are some readers' responses to the suggestion, and also some further feedback on the new EMBO blog.

Elsevier petitioned over arms trade involvement

More than 1,300 scientists, academics, and health care professionals have now signed a petition that calls for publishing giant Reed Elsevier to abandon its involvement in international arms exhibitions, which it organizes through its subsidiary, Reed Exhibitions.

The Scientist reports on two online petitions that have been signed by a wide range of people, including Michael Atiyah, former president of the Royal Society.

Today's work is tomorrow's history

A letter in Nature from Sydney Brenner and Richard Roberts, urges scientists to take an interest in future history. Referring to recent advances in molecular biology, they say

Where are the original notes, and the patent and manuscript drafts that accompanied these stupendous advances? Nowadays, these are recorded in ephemeral electronic media that are far too easily lost with the push of a button or the failure of a hard drive. Yet historians need all forms of data about the workings of scientists so that they can document the development of today's innovations and inspire future generations to pursue similar lofty goals inscience.

Royal Society science books prize longlist

The longlist for this year's Royal Society Prizes for Science Books General Prize the world's most prestigious awards for science writing has been announced. This year's entries were a diverse range touching on all aspects of science. The judges have narrowed the books down to just 12 from a set of 85. Two that may be of interest are:

• Francis Crick, Discoverer of the Genetic Code by Matt Ridley (Harper Press)
• In Search of Memory by Eric R. Kandel (WW Norton & Co)

Retractions

The Scientist has interesting article on the muddy waters of language used for retractions and expressions of concern about papers. This includes a "Glossary of retractions".

Lancet, Elsevier and the arms trade

The Lancet has a proud tradition as a medical journal of record dating back to 1823. The medical library world was shocked when in 1991 the title was purchased by Elsevier, a major commercial publisher. However, Lancet has continued to thrive under its new owners and has benefitted from its inclusion on Elsevier's very reliable ScienceDirect online journal platform and their investment in digitising all issues back to the very first 1823 issue.

Since 2005 a fresh controversy has been rumbling on and now seems to have come to a head. Elsevier is not just the world's biggest scientific publisher, but also part of a larger commercial group, Reed-Elsevier. In their business publishing arm sits Reed Exhibitions - a leading organiser of business exhibitions and trade shows, including arms trade exhibitions. This sits rather uneasily with Elsevier's medical journal publishing activity.

Back in 2005 The Lancet's editorial board called on Reed-Elsevier "to divest itself of all business interests that threaten human, and especially civilian, health and well-being". This has not happened. As a leading opinion former in the medical world the editors of The Lancet are in an uncomfortable position, as the BMJ noted last week. In today's issue there are three pages of letters protesting this link between medicine and the arms trade, and the editors set out their position.

The issue is also featured in today's Guardian.

Impact factors

A feature article in this week's BMJ - How impact factors changed medical publishing—and science - examines the history, uses and abuses of the journal impact factor (IF). There are a number of quotes from Eugene Garfield, the creator of the IF, who notes that whilst IFs do have some value

It is the mindless use of citation data and impact factors that gets people
upset

A number of editorials and associated articles in the same issue argue the cases for and against impact factors.

Arguing against them, Gareth Williams' points out that

It is patently absurd to believe that the intrinsic value of a piece of research
is increased just because the editor of a "good" journal takes a shine to it.

Arguing in their favour, Richard Hobbs suggests

rather than just discarding impact factors we should consider solutions to the
problems.

Cell Host and Microbe

Elsevier have started to publish yet another new title in their stable of Cell titles - Cell Host and Microbe. The new title is designed to "capture the emerging excitement as a new era in the study of host-microbe interactions unfolds". It will serve as "a home for studies of broad general interest that inform the interaction of microbes—whether they be bacteria, fungi, parasites, or viruses—with their hosts, which could be vertebrate or invertebrate, unicellular, or multicellular".

For the first three months access is complimentary. We do expect to add it to our list of subs following that period.

Ben Goldacre writes in support of Open Access

Ben Goldacre, the Guardian's Bad Science columnist, gave a brief talk last week at a Colloquium on Open Access organised by BioMedCentral. He contrasted the way scientists think about science with the way the media present it. Scientists take an article as a collection of methods, data and conclusions. The conclusions cannot be separated from the methods and data, and are only credible if the methods and data are credible and support the conclusions. Journalists (and hence the public at large) see science as a series of didactic, authoritative statements and newspapers report these statements, ignoring boring old data or methods. It therefore becomes difficult to interpret science stories in the media.

Ben Goldacre suggested that with Open Access it will be far easier to view the original research (if only journalists would include links in their stories).

He wrote persuasively about Open Access in his Guardian column on 10th Feb:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/life/badscience/story/0,,2010036,00.html?gusrc=rss&feed=18

Journals becoming smarter

Journals published by the Royal Society of Chemistry are to be enhanced so that their data can be read, indexed and intelligently searched by machine, a first step towards the “semantic web”. Readers will be able to click on named compounds and scientific concepts in an electronic journal article to download structures, understand topics, or link through to electronic databases; compounds and ontology terms will be published as RSS feeds enabling automated discovery of relevant research. This initiative, called "Project Prospect" commenced 1st Feb 2007.

http://www.rsc.org/Publishing/Journals/News/launch.asp

Publishers to spread misinformation about Open Access

Nature News reports that a group of major commercial publishers have been taking advice from a leading PR consultant, to help them fight the Open Access movement.

Noting that "Media messaging is not the same as intellectual debate" (in other words, it doesn't matter if you lie!), they suggest that the publishers will try to falsely equate open access with government censorship and lack of peer review.

"PR's 'pit bull' takes on open access"
http://www.nature.com/news/2007/070122/full/445347a.html

The EU and Open Access

European Union institutions are putting their weight behind Open Access.

The Scientific Council of the European Research Council has issued a Statement on Open Access:

it is the firm intention of the ERC Scientific Council to issue specific
guidelines for the mandatory deposit in open access repositories of research
results – that is, publications, data and primary materials – obtained thanks to
ERC grants, as soon as pertinent repositories become operational.

Peter Suber's OA blog has the full text of the statement.

The European Research Advisory Board has also recommended an OA mandate for EU-funded research:

The European Commission should consider mandating all researchers funded
under the Seventh Framework Programme (FP7) to publish the results of their
research in an open access repository within six months of initial publication,
according to the European Research Advisory Board (EURAB).

Peter Suber's blog again has the full statement.

Microfluidics OA journal

The American Institute of Physics (AIP) has recently launched its first open-access journal, Biomicrofluidics. They say "Open access is good for interdisciplinary titles such as this one. Being open access enables anyone to look at the full text. If this was a subscription title it might not be high on the list of priorities for subject-specific librarians because only a few researchers from their disciplines might be involved in this area." The journal will also have an associated blog.

http://bmf.aip.org/

New journals in systems biology and in signalling

BioMedCentral have launched a couple of new journals:

• BMC Systems Biology (see also press release)
• Journal of Molecular Signalling

Articles published online in these journals are free to read.

ERC supports Open Access

The Scientific Council of the European Research Council issued a Statement on Open Access (pdf) in December 2006. They say

"it is the firm intention of the ERC Scientific Council to issue specific
guidelines for the mandatory deposit in open access repositories of research
results – that is, publications, data and primary materials – obtained thanks to
ERC grants, as soon as pertinent repositories become operational. "

Peter Suber's report and comments on this statement are on his OA Blog:

http://tinyurl.com/vjxt5