Science at Collins

Welcome to day one of Open Access Week!

It seemed fitting to begin this week’s highlighted open access resources with PLoS Biology, the first PLoS journal. The goal of the peer-reviewed PLoS Biology is to feature ‘works of exceptional significance, originality, and relevance in all areas of biological science, from molecules to ecosystems, including works at the interface of other disciplines, such as chemistry, medicine, and mathematics.’

Not only does PLoS Biology make new, scientific work freely available, but all material is published under a Creative Commons attribution license, meaning that it’s easy to use material for teaching or further research.

ArXiv just announced a new opt-in service for authors, a public author identifier, that will make it easier to find your work.

What does this mean?

A public author identifier is a unique string of characters that makes it it possible to disambiguate authors from each other (letting you be certain that J. A. Smith is a different author than J. Smith) and to search comprehensively for everything written by an author (letting you be certain you’ve found all of J.A. Smith’s papers, including those signed with different forms of the name, like  J. Smith,  or published under an earlier name, like J. Brown).

Right now, ArXiv uses authority records to link authors together in most of these situations, which helps keep authorship in order. However, it is a strictly in-house system. It can’t communicate easily with other services, unlike the public author identifier.

The public author identifier is a URI, or unique string of characters. It will ultimately be linkable to resources not in ArXiv, so that papers in another database could be found, if not accessed, by an author search in ArXiv. This will make it easier for interested readers to find everything you’ve written, upping exposure and citation possibilities.

What else does it do that’s new?

In addition to making publications more obvious, the public author identifier has a few other nifty advantages.  The public author identifier makes it possible to:

• Enter the URI into a browser and automatically have it resolve it into an HTML web page listing all your ArXive deposited publications, as in this example.
• Follow an author or be followed as an author via RSS feed.
• Automatically and dynamically include a complete list of your publications on your own web page using a widget called myarticle. Once the code is inserted in your page, every time an article of yours is deposited in ArXiv, the list on your web page will be updated with no further effort from you.
• Automatically list your articles on your Facebook profile and comment on or discuss ArXiv articles with other authors using the app myarxiv.

How do I use it?

Contact an ArXiv administrator to opt in if this sounds interesting as an author. Then try out any of the new services, or just rest assured that your publications are easier to find.

As a reader, keep an eye out for others using the system, so you can more efficiently keep track of work!

 

Physics, an open-access publication recently debuted by the American Physical Society, aims to provide broadly readable highlights of recent research in the Physical Review journal series.

Three types of articles are published, including:

Viewpoints: Weekly essays of approximately 1000–1500 words that focus on a single Physical Review paper or PRL letter and put the work into broader context.

Trends: Monthly concise review articles (3000–4000 words in length) that survey a particular area and look for interesting developments in the field.

Synopses: (200 words) are staff-written distillations of interesting and important papers each week

What’s so important about this resource?

• It contextualizes recent research and explains its importance, making it easier for students to get into the physical literature.
• It makes it easy for researchers to learn about developments across fields and cross-pollinate ideas.