Archive by category | Publishing

The impact of online publishing

“I haven’t browsed a table of content in ages; I find all my papers by Pubmed searches anyway”. We have probably all heard this remark, which reflects a general trend as how online publishing has changed the way we retrieve scientific publications. In a study published today in Science, Evans (“Electronic Publication and the Narrowing of Science and Scholarship”, Evans, 2008) presents data on citations patterns showing that the appearance of electronic publications has been accompanied by a decrease in the number of citations and a progressive restriction of citations to recent papers:  … Read more

2007 Impact Factor

2007 Impact Factor

The 2007 Impact Factors were published yesterday by Thompson Reuters. The Impact Factor of Molecular Systems Biology for 2007 is 9.954 This represents a substantial increase over last year’s Impact Factor (see chart) and we would like to warmly thank all our authors and reviewers who have contributed to this success. We will continue to work very hard to maintain the high standards of the journal and promote innovative and insightful research in systems biology. The significance of Impact Factors suffers from intrinsic limitations (see Ian’s post) and interpretation of this metric is subject to much discussion (Rossner et al  … Read more

A new skin for Molecular Systems Biology

A new skin for Molecular Systems Biology

Following adoption of a new publication licence (see below) we have now also updated our instructions to authors to clarify our guidelines on the availability of published material, data and software, and, last but not least, redesigned the look & feel of our website to make it visually more attractive, to integrate the blog directly in our home page and to provide a retrospective look of the top PDF downloads of papers published in Molecular Systems Biology.  Read more

Open Access: Derivs or No Derivs? It’s your call!

Open Access: Derivs or No Derivs? It's your call!

The text below is an adaptation of a Correspondence submitted to PLoS Biology on October 22 and published October 31 as a “”https://biology.plosjournals.org/perlserv/?request=read-response&doi=10.1371/journal.pbio.0050285#r1918″>Reader Response” linked to the Editorial “When Is Open Access Not Open Access?”, (MacCallum, 2007)  … Read more

Openings for two Editors at EMBO

Openings for two Editors at EMBO

EMBO publishes The EMBO Journal, EMBO Reports and is co-owner with Nature Publishing Group of Molecular Systems Biology. In view of the great success of these three journals (and the associated increasing workload…), the editorial team at EMBO will be expanded. Two positions as full time scientific editor are open. From the ad (read full job description): Candidates should have a strong scientific background, a PhD and preferably some post-doctoral experience. They should have a broad interest in diverse areas of the life sciences, with a thorough knowledge of molecular biology. For Molecular Systems Biology, experience or strong interest in  … Read more

Publishing DReaMs

Publishing DReaMs

Nature Genetics publishes this month an Editorial (“”https://dx.doi.org/10.1038/ng0807-931″>Compete, collaborate, compel”) on how to provide incentives and credit to authors who deposit data in public repositories—so called procedures for “microattribution”. The idea is to include at the end of papers a complete list of accession codes identifying all the data used in the study. To provide incentive to data producers, a ranking of the most used accessions could be published, generating a measure of the impact of cited database records. Clearly, such an initiative would require “heroic structural solution at the journal level”.  Read more