Mohamed El Naschie is suing Nature ’cause they accused him of abusing editor privileges (pdf) to self-publish poor quality papers.
Well, if the papers were reviewed by peers, it shouldn’t be a problem to prove that, and the the case has merits, but otherwise there really isn’t any case at all.
The number of self-publications in the journal, though, would make me bet that Nature is right on this one, though…
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And then we heard the magic words: “And the winner is…PLoS ONE.” We hurried up onto the stage to collect our award
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I guess I am morally obliged to point you to EveryONE, PLoSONE’s new blog, seeing as I just joined the editorial board there.
Why a blog and why now? As of March 2009, PLoS ONE, the peer-reviewed open-access journal for all scientific and medical research, has published over 5,000 articles, representing the work of over 30,000 authors and co-authors, and receives over 160,000 unique visitors per month. That’s a good sized online community and we thought it was about time that you had a blog to call your own. This blog is for authors who have published with us and for users who haven’t and it contains something for everyone.
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Now this is good news: LaTeX submissions now accepted at PLoS ONE.
For any paper with more than the most trivial amount of math, LaTeX is really what you need. Using an equation editor in Word or similar is just too tedious, and the result is rarely as beautiful as LaTeX setup math.
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I’ve been invited to join the editorial board of PLoS One (invited by Jason Stajich, thanks!).
The philosophy behind PLoS One is to publish everything that is sound research, and then open up for discussions through blogging and similar. This is similar to BMC Research Notes (where I’m already on the editorial board).
I think it is important to have a place where “less interesting” papers can get published. Negative results and such. It is important research, even if there are no exciting results.
We spend a lot of time working on ideas that turn out not to work out the way we hoped. And the same ideas are probably worked on several times if they look good but are dead ends. Simply because there is no way to learn from other people’s experience when it comes to negative results.
We need those published!
Another cool thing is the open discussion that PLoS One aims at. They want blog-like discussion of the papers. I don’t know how well that works yet, but I look forward to find out.
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