Lexicillin QD

Nature: prepublications now available online

Joho the Blog: Nature goes open preprint!

David Weinberger has a post today reporting on the new Nature magazine site, Precedings.

Here's the blurb from the Nature site:

Nature Precedings is a place for researchers to share pre-publication research, unpublished manuscripts, presentations, posters, white papers, technical papers, supplementary findings, and other scientific documents. Submissions are screened by our professional curation team for relevance and quality, but are not subjected to peer review. We welcome high-quality contributions from biology, medicine (except clinical trials), chemistry and the earth sciences. More details.

David also notes "that arXiv has done this for physics and other disciplines."

Technorati Tags: David Weinberger, Nature magazine, Precedings, prepublications, arXiv, science journals,

AMA Manual of Style, 10th Ed.

I should be receiving this book tomorrow. I ordered it directly from the Oxford University Press US Web site. Not exactly, though. I found the process of ordering online a little disappointing (I guess I'm spoiled from Amazon.com), so I called their office directly and was able to get the information about shipping that I needed.

Here's a clip from their Web site pointing out how this edition is different:

What’s new in this edition? Below is a short response to a question that can only be answered fully through frequent use.

    * A new chapter on medical indexes.
    * A completely updated Nomenclature chapter, with 4 new subsections (molecular medicine, ophthalmology, psychiatry, and radiology), the latest nomenclature in many fields (eg, virology, chromosomes), molecular medicine subsections added to many fields (eg, cardiology, neurology), more material on complementary and alternative medicine, and a more international approach to drug nomenclature.
    * Expanded, and now separate, chapters on manuscript preparation, visual display of data, and references. The References chapter includes almost all new examples, with about 50 examples of electronic references alone.
    * A change in the policy for table footnotes from using superscript symbols to using superscript lowercase letters.
    * A greatly expanded chapter on ethical and legal considerations, including just some of the following:
          o New responsibilities for authors, including identifying contributions of all authors as well as substantial contributions of nonauthors.
          o New policies on group authorship.
          o Updates on conflict of interest, including requirements for complete financial disclosure, transparency of the role of the sponsor, and independent statistical analysis for industry-supported studies.
          o New information on editorial freedom in the wake of the firings of the editors of JAMA and other general medical journals.
          o New policies and procedures for journal editors, including correspondence columns, corrections, and the role of editorial boards.
          o Updated definition of scientific misconduct, procedures for handling allegations of fabrication, falsification, and plagiarism and publishing retractions.
          o New information on data sharing and open access.
          o Updates on copyright and trademark, especially as they affect online publishing.
          o New privacy concerns for patients in scientific publication.
          o New case law on libel and suggestions for minimizing risk of libel.
          o Revised guidelines on advertising, including online advertising.
          o Updated information on author and editor relations with the news media and early release of information to the public.
    * New subsection in the Grammar chapter, to include homonyms, idioms, colloquialisms, slang, euphemisms, and cliches.
    * A decision to drop the commas previously used to set off “Jr” and “Sr.”
    * Inclusion of guidelines for capitalization of computer terms and intercapped compounds.
    * Addition of many new terms to the Correct and Preferred Usage and to the Study Design and Statistics glossaries.
    * New policy on abbreviation or expansion of state names.
    * Revised policy on SI units and updated conversion table.
    * New material in the statistics chapter on cost-effectiveness analysis and survey studies and requirement of clinical trial registration.
    * Information on online editing and coding, with samples of a marked-up and coded page.
    * Expanded typography chapter, with emphasis on improving readability.
    * Updated and expanded publishing glossary and resources chapters.
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Google's Unbound conference

"Advancing Book Publishing in a Digital World," is the tag line. This is Cory Doctorow talking about how he's disseminating his work under a Creative Commons license.

Cory jumped right into the story how 4 years ago he offered his first book, the novel "Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom," online with a Creative Commons license. Within the first 24 hours, 30,000 copies were downloaded, and then eventually this progressed to 3/4 of a million.

This first release had the most restrictive terms for the licensing only allowing redistribution. The 2nd book of short stories, "A Place So Foreign and Eight More," allowed any type of use but only to those in countries considered not a high income nation by the World Bank. The only caveat was that they couldn't export any version they worked with back into the developed world.

He talked about appreciating those who approached his work as readers and not consumers in the sense of commoditizing your work to make it marketable in the traditional sense. (more to come...)

He spoke about several issues involving the use of paper versus electronic publishing. He said that people will always be "pervy about paper."

This is the Celeste Bartos Forum at the Main Branch of the New York Public Library.

This panel of authors comprised  memoirist Josh Purcell, mystery writer J.A. Konrath, Freakonomics co-author Stephen Dubner, and Cory.