Open-Access Computational Biology Journal Launches

FleaPlus writes "The Public Library of Science and International Society for Computational Biology have published the inaugural issue of PLoS Computational Biology, an open-access journal dedicated to studies which 'further our understanding of living systems at all scales through the application of computational methods.' All works published in the journal are to be released under a Creative Commons Attribution License. The founding editors have some comments on the launch."

Directory of Open Access Journals

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Hear hear!

Hopefully this is the beginning of reinventing the openness and availability of scientific knowledge and discourse.

What I really want to see is "transparent peer review" (a part of F/OSS methology these Open Access journals haven't implemented so far afaik). By that I mean that journals are willing to stick their neck out and publish the reviews they do in preparation for accepting or declining papers/articles (just like internal arguments in F/OSS projects can often be vieved by visiting the dev's mailing list/forum etc.). This would not only be a quality assurance measure but also educational on its own. It doesn't need to be long nor on the front page but it should be somewhere.

For those interested there are a lot of other open journals as well to be found at http://www.doaj.org/ [doaj.org]

academic acceptance

[v1x]

I would love to send my next paper to this journal, and I did run it by my graduate committee: however, the unanimous recommendation was that I should try one of the more established journals, and should not bother with PLoS until it is more 'mature.' I wonder how long it takes before PLoS gains wider acceptance in academic circles.