This is a big deal for me: my first ever article in New Scientist – a magazine that I read in the library in Ballymena as a teenager. Pardon me for preening a little.
What’s it about? You guessed it: open access.
My thanks to Simon Singh for suggesting that I pitch it to them.
Well done you. 🙂
Nice article, too.
Belated thanks!
Congratulations on your PLoS ONE article. One of the fringe benefits of OA publishing is that you are free to deposit the preprint on arXiv.org. In fact one could argue that you could have written the New Scientist article back on March 28th and substituted PLoS ONE with arXiv.org and impact factor with h5-index and made much the same point!
I could have but I was also at the mercy of the editor. As it turns out, synchronising with the week in which the Finch report appeared wasn’t a bad idea.
What a great piece, Stephen – congratulations.
This was my favorite bit:
“The model is seen as disruptive to publishers; I hope it might also be disruptive to scientists.”
I have finally convinced my new department that it’s actually not a sin to abandon the passive voice and overly pompous word choice beloved of medics, and everyone is happy with the result. The text suddenly becomes lucid and immediate almost by magic.
That sounds like a miraculous (and worthy) conversion.
The passive voice from our cold, dead hands shall be prised.
This will have been seen by you, no doubt… 😉
I used to know a girl called Ruby Con.
Was she a gem of a girl?
(Can’t believe I wrote that…)
Everyone unearths a diamond now and then, Stephen.
Emma Rald, too.
Congratulations, Stephen! I too read New Scientist in the school library as a teenager, although I had to reluctantly cancel the subscription I bought a few years ago because they piled up faster than I could read them! I’m still working through the stacks from two years ago 🙂