We have been beating the drum about open access here at ECS for some time. This taken from Interface magazine over one year ago:

Commercial publishers have learned that the subscription-based model could be played to their enormous benefit, placing a further cost on the scholarly publishing system. There has been a proliferation of new journals being added to subscription packages, burdening library budgets with additional journals and without providing reciprocal scientific value. This has been coupled with the excessively high prices being charged by many scientific publishers for the dissemination of technical knowledge, and collectively the money now being extracted from the process is stifling scientific advancement. (Read the rest.)

(We noted when Tesla was getting it right, too.)

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This is from ECS President Paul A. Kohl.

One of the joys of being President of ECS is contacting ECS contributors about good news. I am especially excited about ECS journals and the direction they are taking. I believe they are the quite simply The Best Place to publish electrochemical and solid state papers – especially now they are also enabling Open Access (OA). In short, ECS journals (JES, JSS, EEL, SSL) are:

• well-established–we have been publishing since 1902
• high quality–our peer-review is excellent and we publish one of the most-cited journals
• fast–submission to first decision regularly takes less than a month; and once the paper is accepted it usually takes ten days or fewer for the Version of Record to be published online–faster than any other journal in our field
• open access–authors now have the choice of publishing as Open Access, which enables the widest possible distribution because there is no subscription or barrier for readers to access your paper
• FREE open access for many of our authors: publishing OA is free to ECS members, ECS meeting attendees, and authors coming from subscribing institutions

No other journal offers this combination of quality, speed, and full open access at no cost to the author.

By publishing your research in our highly respected journals–and choosing to make your papers Open Access–you’re helping us make OA widespread and sharing the outputs of your important research with scientists around the world. I did (see my latest article) and will be doing so in the future.

Yours,

Paul

Paul A. Kohl
ECS President

PS: Find out how to publish your manuscript.

Easy-to-search, high-tech platform ensuring a progressive atmosphere for the exchange of knowledge and ideas.

As of today, 205 Open Access papers have been submitted to ECS journals of which 87 were published to the ECS Digital Library. Here are the three latest:

• Effect of Relative Humidity on Corrosion of Steel under Sea Salt Aerosol Proxies I. NaCl – This paper is the first of two that examine the relationship between relative humidity, the hygroscopic behavior of sea salt aerosol proxies, and the atmospheric corrosion of mild steel contaminated with them.
• Effect of Relative Humidity on Corrosion of Steel under Sea Salt Aerosol Proxies II. MgCl2, Artificial Seawater – This paper is the second of two that examines between the hygroscopic behavior of sea salt aerosol proxies and the atmospheric corrosion of mild steel contaminated with them.
• Corrosion Inhibition of Zinc by Aqueous Vanadate Species – This study presents a characterization of the degree and mechanism of corrosion inhibition of Zn by vanadate inhibitors.

What is clear is that an important part of the future is the increasing adoption of Open Access.

This piece, by ECS Executive Director, Roque Calvo, appeared in Interface, Spring 2014 issue. This is the heart of where we are headed as an organization. (The new Interface is out soon. Watch your mailboxes. Find out how to subscribe to our journals.)

Since the dawn of modern science, the key to scientific advancement has been the exchange of knowledge in publications, meetings, and through other collaborations; and in the past decade we have experienced a significant change in the way this scientific exchange occurs. Digital information and the Internet have dramatically improved our ability to disseminate science on a worldwide scale and should lead to global advances at a pace never considered before. But there are obstacles because these technological advancements in the digital age have come at a high cost to scholarly publishing; not for producing scientific content but for the cost of dissemination incurred by users of the research and their institutions.

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SAGE Publications retracts 60 papers.

Peer review of our journals is one of the things we are most proud of here at The Electrochemical Society. Even as we move to Open Access for our publications, our peer review process is going to remain as rigorous as ever. Amazing the lengths people will go to beat the system though. This from RetractionWatch.com:

SAGE Publishers is retracting 60 articles from the Journal of Vibration and Control after an investigation revealed a “peer review and citation ring” involving a professor in Taiwan.

Here’s another piece I found interesting background reading, it’s about a year old, about how easy it is to get fake papers published because of the lack of good peer review.

PS: If you want to publish in a nice, no drama atmosphere, think of ECS.