Have you recently built a bioinformatics web application useful to the wider community that you’d like to tell the world about? Are you also looking to score brownie points for a rigourously peer-reviewed publication that stands a reasonable chance of being well cited? If that’s you, then you have one month from today (December 1st) to sort your code out, and get your abstract in, for the fifth annual Nucleic Acids Research (NAR) Web Server issue published by Oxford University Press (OUP) in 2007. All articles in this issue are published under an open access model.
As regular visitors to nodalpoint will already know, every year NAR publishes two special issues: one on databases (annually in January since 1993) and the other on web servers (annually in July since 2003). Authors interested in pre-submitting abstracts for the 2007 Web Server Issue should read the Instructions to Authors for Web Server papers in NAR and send an abstract to Gary Benson at Boston University before December 31st 2006. The deadline for final submission of full articles is January 31st 2007. Gary Benson has taken over this year from previous web server issue editor, Nobel laureate and Ignobel participant, Richard Roberts [1].
One advantage of publishing your application paper in NAR, instead of alternative open access journals like Source Code for Biology and Medicine (SCFBM), is a listing in the bioinformatics links directory [2] and a bigger impact factor [3] of 7.6, if you care about these things. There are of course, disadvantages of publishing with OUP in NAR, like the expensive open access publishing fees of $1185 to $2370 per article which are debateable value-for-money. If you’re living in a ‘List A’ developing country these charges are waived, which makes it tempting to set up a laboratory in Malawi to evade payment…
Anyway, does anyone out there know how OUP prices compare with the complicated Biomed Central membership fees which are presumably required for publication in SCFBM? Another leading open access publisher, the Public Library of Science (PLOS) currently charges from $2000 to $2500 for open access publication. Maybe I’m missing something, but aren’t these charges a lot of money to pay an administrator to shuffle a few bits of paper around and run a web server? Don’t let that put you off submitting your paper though, because in Science and academia you will either publish or perish. This is where the web is your friend because free online web availability substantially increases a paper’s impact.
On a lighter note, and now that the festive season is upon us, I’ll hand over to the Christmas crooner Perry Como to sign off:
♫ Sleigh bells ring, are you listening? In the lane, snow is glistening. A beautiful sight, We’re happy tonight, Walking in a webby wonderland. ♫
References
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O'Really? 