Biology E-Journals

Open Access Issues

Open access and the "scholarly communication crisis"

Scholarly Communication: Issues and Resources

W.U. Libraries page of information on this topic.

Create Change

Resource for faculty and librarian action to reclaim scholarly communication; co-sponsored by: Association of Research Libraries, Association of College and Research Libraries, and SPARC with support from the Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation

5 things you can do to improve access to scientific information [ppt file or pdf file]

Poster from Plant Retreat, 2003, by Ruth Lewis and Maribeth Slebodnik.

Budapest Open Access Initiative

The first couple of paragraphs on this page give the vision of open access

Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge in the Sciences and Humanities

October, 2003.

Bethesda Statement on Open Access Publishing

June, 2003

Open Access: Restoring Scientific Communication to It's Rightful Owners [pdf]

Policy brief from the European Science Foundation, published April 2003.

Washington DC Principles for Free Access to Science; a statement for the non-profit publisher

March, 16, 2004

Advantages of Open Access

On library workstations, this link only works with IE browser; it doesn't work with the older version of Netscape which we have in the library.

SPARC Open Access Newsletter

About Open Access Publishing from PubMed Central

Open Access Now

BioMed Central newsletter

Impact of Open Access Journals [pdf], a citation study from Thomson ISI (2004)

April 27, 2004 article about this study: Open Access Journals Rank Well

Whose Copy? Whose Rights?, from PLoS Biology, July 2004.

Basic Open Access Links (page from Univ. of Conn. Library)

Institutional Self-Archiving Policy Registry

Wonder how much a particular journal costs? Ask in the library or consult Ulrichsweb

Provides bibliographic information and list price information on most journals and magazines. Institutional journal costs are actually pretty complex, but this will give you a fairly good estimate. More info.

If you want to publish in "open access" journals, here are some titles and lists of titles to consider:

An alternative, when you choose to publish in a more traditional journal, is to make your articles available freely from your own website or from an institutional archive site. Can you link fulltext of your published articles from your web site? Yes often you can make your own publications "open-access" to the world by linking them to your web site; it depends on the publisher and/or what rights you signed over to the publisher. In some cases you may only post the pre-refereed version or the post-refereed version; in some cases both are allowed. Journal Policies - Self-Archiving Policy By Journal; Publisher copyright policies & self-archiving (originally Project Romeo). Publishers that allow self-archiving (includes journal titles with each publisher). OAKList (database of information about publishing agreements and publishers' open access policies from Queensland Univ. of Technology).

Journal Info - designed as aid for the researcher in the selection of journal for publication. In addition to basic information, it includes information about reader availability, cost and publication fees.

Scholar's Copyright Project - Providing standard, responsible copyright agreements ensuring the right of scholars to archive their work on the public Internet

If you publish in a journal that offers to distribute content free if authors pay a fee, please consider paying this. The library is very interested in supporting this. For example, any WU author may publish in BMC journals with reduced or waived author processing charges because Becker Medical Library has already paid for all of WU. If grant or departmental funds are not available, please ask for library to help pay these author fees.

DOAJ Directory of Open Access Journals

Browsable and searchable list of free, full text, quality controlled scientific and scholarly journals in all languages and all subjects.

Open J-Gate - links to over 3000 open access journals

Lists of Journals offering Free Full Text

BioMed Central

BMC is an interesting model. Publishing expenses for WU authors have been prepaid or reduced by library institutional membership and journal content is freely available and quickly indexed in PubMed.

Journal of Biology

edited by Martin Raff, striving to select important articles, sort of in the class of Cell or Science

BMC Cell Biology

BMC Ecology

BMC Evolutionary Biology

BMC Plant Biology

Directed and Applied Evolution

and many more

Cell Biology Education

freely available from American Society for Cell Biology

Limnology and Oceanography

Authors may purchase ability to have their articles available as Free Access Publication for the same cost as 100 hard copy reprints. Many articles v.44+ have been unlocked for all users in this manner.

Nucleic Acids Research, plans to move to open access publishing gradually beginning with the annual database issue, January, 2004. Oxford Open - other Oxford Univ. Press journals where articles are open access if authors pay fee, e.g., $1500 per article if WU subscribes

Plant Physiology articles written by ASPB members will be open access Jan., 2007+. Non-members at WU can purchase open access status for their articles for $500, since WU subscribes to the journal. RT-Plant Physiology: Full Open Access Publishing at No Charge to ASPB Members. Note: all articles are freely availalbe 12 months after publication on PubMed Central.

Oxford University Press inaugurated a change in their article charge paradigm for those wanting to publish in the Journal of Experimental Botany: The article charge fee for publishing in an open access mode is now waived for authors who are at institutions that subscribe to the journal -- such as Washington University. All primary papers published after April 1, 2007 whose corresponding author’s institution subscribes to the Journal of Experimental Botany will be published Open Access. Read more:http://www.oxfordjournals.org/exbotj/openaccess.html

Public Library of Science

PLoS Biology
PLoS Medicine
PLoS Genetics
PLoS Computational Biology

PubMed Central

Archive of life sciences journals; sometimes current content is not archived here; these titles are indexed in major databases and/or have at least 3 members on their editorial board who currently are principal investigators on research grants from major funding agencies.

SPARC Partner Journal titles

A few of these are freely available; most are established as alternatives and competitors to high-priced journals.

Journal titles with "open access" back volumes:

While not entirely free, most societies' journals are available freely after a certain time period. This makes research more widely accessible, which is, after all, one of the primary reasons to publish. This is NOT a complete list; there are many other examples.

American Society for Microbiology Journals

Freely available 6 months (primary-research journals) or 1 year (review journals) after publication.

Company of Biologists journals

Development, Journal of Cell Science, and Journal of Experimental Biology; back volumes available freely; each January the previous calendar year is made available freely. NEW: The Company of Biologists announces that - from January 2004 - its journals - Development, Journal of Cell Science and The Journal of Experimental Biology - will be offering authors the option of "open access."

Free Online Fulltext Articles (Highwire Press)

Usually this is articles older than a certain point, generally freely available within 6 months-2 years after publication; included many important society's journals, e.g., American Physiological Society, American Society of Plant Biologists, American Society for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, National Academy of Sciences, etc.

World Scientific Journals now allow purchase of open access at $2,500/article. More info.

Free Full-Text Journals in Chemistry

Preprint and virtual archiving sites - very limited contents so far:

arXiv.org e-Print archive

Los Alamos National Laboratory site; mostly Physics, Computer Science, etc.; includes a section on Biological Physics.

Quantitative Biology (q-bio) Archive

part of arXiv.org; begun in Sept. 2003; will include preprints in quantitative biology (including but not limited to biological physics, computational biology, neural science, systems biology, bioinformatics, mathematical biology, and theoretical biology).

Nature Precedings

a place for researchers to share pre-publication research, unpublished manuscripts, presentations, posters, white papers, technical papers, supplementary findings, and other scientific documents. Submissions are screened by our professional curation team for relevance and quality, but are not subjected to peer review. High-quality contributions from biology, medicine (except clinical trials), chemistry and the earth sciences are welcome.

Behavioral and Brain Sciences "target article" preprints

"target articles" in psychology, neuroscience, behavioral biology, cognitive science, artificial intelligence, linguistics and philosophy. Note: the full text of the journal Behavioral and Brain Sciences is also available for WU users.

Chemistry / Computer Science / Mathematics Preprint Server

No-charge individual registration required.

Cogprints Electronic Archive

Searchable archive for fulltext preprints or reprints (from many journals, conferences, etc.) in any area of Psychology, Neuroscience, and Linguistics, and many areas of Computer Science Philosophy , Biology.

HUM-MOLGEN abstracts

Part of the HUM-MOLGEN site.

NetPrints: Clinical Medicine and Health Research

British Medical Journal/Stanford University Self-Archiving Initiative.

PhilSci Archives

Electronic archive for preprints in the philosophy of science, searchable and browseable; sponsored by Philosophy of Science Association Center for Philosophy of Science, University of Pittsburgh, University Library System, University of Pittsburgh.

Virtual Technical Reports Center, EPrints, Preprints, & Technical Reports on the Web

List of metasites maintained at University of Maryland Libraries.

Non-US publishing initiatives, fyi:

J-STAGE

Japan Science and Technology Information Aggregator, Electronic; developed to disseminate Japanese research quickly and worldwide.

SCIELO

Scientific Electronic Library Online in Brazil, Chile, Cuba, and in development in Costa Rica, Spain and Venezuela. Like J-STAGE, aims to "make locally generated scientific information readily available, which will ultimately contribute to increase the usage..."

Free Medical Journals

Most of the titles included, which are not listed on above lists, are non-US titles.This is not a very selective list; some of these titles are not indexed or peer reviewed.