Duking Out OA at Harvard.
There was a debate/discussion recently at Harvard, about the future of academic publishing. In this corner, in purple trunks, Dr. Howard Varmus, Editor in Chief of the Public Library of Science (PLoS), and in that corner, his worthy opponent, Dr. Emilie Marcus, editor of the biggie bio journal Cell, I wasn’t there, but I don’t think either party convinced the other. I’m relying on a report from the PLoS blog for some basic information in this post, and PLoS is an OA publisher and Varmus a hot critic of established publishing practices in scientific journals. There, that should satisfy all the disclosure gods. You can use the link to get the blogger’s take on what happened at the session, and draw your own conclusions. Some of the embedded links are interesting. The other part of the program was devoted to developments that may bring some of the theoretical advantages of network publication closer to implementation. Discussants related experience with post-publication comments in Nature Precedings and PLoS One and so far, that traffic is quite modest. Other capabilities, such as video demos of how experiments were done, may turn out to be more useful. Nobody knows which way the frog will jump. Maybe he’ll just sit there a while and think about it.
Harvard
