Nov 28, 2007

Open Access Scientific Publishing

Posted in Chemspy at 3:10 pm by chemspy -- 2 Comments; add your comment

Imperial College’s Bob MacCallum runs an interesting site called Compare Stuff, which I’ve reviewed on various occasions elsewhere. Recently, he started blogging about some of the interesting results that emerge when you compare search engine hit rates for different terms against each other. One of the most interesting comparisons was run using the terms “open access” versus “journal”.

The results produce an intriguing chart in which there appear to be far more mentions of bioinformatics in the context of the term journal and open access compared with, say, maths, astronomy, or psychology. As MacCallum is bioinformaticist he says that this makes sense as many of the leading figures in the open access movement come from this field. However, physicists and computer scientists have been enormously active, if less vocal, about OA, so it is odd that those two fields do not show up quite so sharpy. What about open access chemistry, you say? Hmmmm.

Give MacCallum’s Compare Stuff site a try, it’s quite amazing what charts you can make. I just tried Organic versus Inorganic in the context of “emotions”. It looks like organic and inorganic are equally stressful but leave few people anxious, scared, lonely, happy, jealous, angry or sad.

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