Open Science

Your guide to Open Access publishing and Open Science

Tag: popularization

‘The great idea for an app’ – interview with the creator of PubChase

Matthew Davis is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at The University of Texas at Austin. His research interests includes proteomics, genomics, and bioinformatics. And he is the inventor of PubChase. WK: What is PubChase? Matthew Davis: PubChase is a web and mobile application designed to save scientific researchers time. Researchers want to know what they need to read in order to stay up to date with the literature, and PubChase uses statistical modeling and data mining to generate article recommendations customized for each user. I have talked with a lot of people over the last few years about how much time […]

Few thoughts about DOAJ and its new application process

The Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) is a website started in 2002 which lists more than 9 000 Open Access journals. DOAJ aims to index only high quality publications that are fully Open Access, which means the whole content is free to read, share and use. Due to its relatively long history it is a well-known database, thus being listed in DOAJ significantly increase a journal’s visibility. On the other hand, the adequacy of DOAJ standards was questioned when John Bohannon claimed that 64 journals listed in this database accepted his bogus article on cancer biology. Following this affair […]

Open Access increases Impact Factor? – interview with Gregor Serša

Today we present an interview with prof. Gregor Serša, the editor-in-chief of Radiology and Oncology, the Journal of Association of Radiology and Oncology, published by De Gruyter Open, with an Impact Factor of 1.602 in 2012. Professor Serša is also a researcher at the Institute of Oncology Ljubljana. His main fields of interest are electroporation in targeted delivery of cytostatics into tumors (the research has already reached the clinical phase), and recently, electrogene therapy (a research field that has great prospects to be translated into clinical practice). First of all, please tell me a little about the Radiology and Oncology […]

Quality Open Access Market – in search for Open Access publishing standards

Problem of content quality is essential for scientific publishing. John Bohanon’s and Jeffrey Beal’s work have exposed bottom tier of Open Access (OA) publishers, without showing how good the best of them can be. Quality of the bottom tier is much more present in discussions on Open Access which remains in contrast to discourse on traditional journals, which is usually focused on the best ones of them. Majority of Open Access journals are relatively new and have not been able to elaborate significant Impact Factor (IF) yet (although OA journals with high IF do exists also). But, despite what some […]

How to get indexed by Google Scholar?

I previously wrote a bit about finding open access, scientific content, which is important for scientists during their entire research process. Nevertheless, when researchers are ready to publish their work, they take particular interest in what steps should be taken to get their work discovered by others. Applying Search Engine Optimization techniques is the first thing recommended, but other and more basic problems surround the process of getting indexed by popular databases and search engines. The solution is not obvious since there are a significant number of searching services that are popular among researchers. Tools designed to provide easy to […]

Why and how should you optimize academic articles for search engines?

As an author of a blog on contemporary scientific publishing, I am forced to stress frequently two important facts. Firstly, a growing number of researchers use the internet in their work to search for literature and to communicate with other researchers, and secondly, the internet is getting crowded. That is why some people are starting to consider the ways of making their research more visible on the net. This is a controversial issue and it can be interpreted as cheating or unfair competition, but in fact good Search Engine Optimization (SEO) practices is nothing of the kind. As you will […]