The Impact of Electronic Publishing
“It has always been a characteristic of our planet that, besides eating and sleeping and squabbling and reproducing, we are also producing knowledge,” writes Stevan Harnad, a scientist at Université du Québec à Montréal (Canada), who has been a vocal advocate in changing how we go about publishing all that knowledge. Electron-borne information is clearly transforming academic publishing; not just affecting how journals and books are assembled and distributed, but stirring up the culture that surrounds the creating and sharing of new knowledge.
Some of these new manifestations look like hot-rodded versions of things we knew in the past (online journals, eBooks); while others (like research repositories, wikis, RSS feeds) are novel variants that may ultimately live or die, but meanwhile are teaching us lessons about how our research community really works.
Along those lines, a publishing milestone occurred this year. In a world where the top scientific journals can cost subscribers over $10,000 per year, an online science journal with a subscription price of $0 won a 13.9 impact-factor rating from the prestigious Thomson Scientific (formerly Thomson ISI) citation-counting service (Institute for Scientific Information), which acts as the Nielsen ratings of science publishing. That rating placed PLoS (Public Library of Science) Biology among the top journals in its category, although it was only two years old.
Read on at: http://www.campus-technology.com/article.asp?id=17723
[Campus Technology, Jan 4, 2005]
