ECS believes that the key to sustainability is the ability to adapt. For over 115 years, ECS has been committed to publishing high quality, peer-reviewed research at the cutting edge of innovation.

But the demands of the research arena are always changing. As the scientific community develops new needs out in the field, so must ECS—as a leading nonprofit publisher—develop new avenues and more inclusive platforms for publication and dissemination.

To best accommodate the needs of contemporary scientific research, ECS’s journals, the Journal of The Electrochemical Society and the ECS Journal of Solid State Science and Technology, are open to article submission types beyond that of the standard-issue research paper. As of 2017, ECS accepts journal submissions of five different types.

Whether you’re an author, an editor, or a reader of ECS publications, it’s beneficial to be familiar with the five ECS journal article types.

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“The unique and longer-term part of our OA plan is to “Free the Science™“: to provide all ECS content at no cost to anyone—no fees for authors, readers, and libraries.”

Published in the latest issue of Interface.

The models of scientific communication and publication—which have served us all so well for so long—are no longer fully meeting the spirit of the ECS mission, may not be financially viable, and are hurting the dissemination of the results of scientific research.

The future of Open Access (OA) can change not only scholarly publishing, but can change the nature of scientific communication itself. OA has the power to more “evenly distribute” the advantages currently given to those who can easily access the outputs of scientific research.

ECS has long been concerned with facilitating that access, and our mission has been to disseminate the content from within our technical domain, as broadly as possible, and with as few barriers as possible. To accomplish this, we have maintained a robust, high-quality, high-impact publishing program for over 100 years.

Several years ago, ECS started taking a serious look at the challenges facing us in fulfilling our mission, specifically with respect to our publishing program. The challenges—faced by others in publishing, to a greater or lesser degree—are many and have become increasingly sever.

When a commercial scientific publisher is taking a 35% net profit out of the system, compared with under 2% by ECS, something is not only wrong, but it is clear that some publishers will do anything and everything they can to keep maintaining that level of profit. For many, journal publishing has indeed become a business.

Read the rest.

The band of researches at Karolinska Institutet have been partaking in a 17-year contest to see who can quote Bob Dylan the most in scientific articles before going into retirement.
Credit: Karolinska Institutet

A group of Swedish-based academics have been in a heated competition for the past 17 years – a competition over who can sneak the most Bob Dylan lyrics into articles, that is.

A group of five scientist from the Karolinska Institutet have revealed their long-running race to quote Dylan as many times as possible before retirement. The victor is to be awarded a free lunch at a local restaurant.

The competition began in 1997 after John Lundberg and Eddie Weitzberg published “Nitric Oxide and Inflammation: The Answer Is Blowing In the Wind” in Nature.

“We both really like Bob Dylan so when we set about writing an article concerning the measurement of nitric oxide gas in both the respiratory tracts and intestine, with the purpose of detecting inflammation, the title came up and it fitted there perfect,” says Weitzberg.

A few years later, the two saw an articles titled, “Blood on the Tracks: A Simple Twist of Fate,” by Jonas Frisen and Konstantinos Meletis. With this double Dylan reference, Lundberg and Weitzberg could not resist the competition. Shortly after, the two introduced “The times they are a-changin’” into an article and the battle was on.

This from The Guardian:

Word spread quickly through Stockholm’s Karolinska Institute, where all four men work, and before long there was a fifth competitor: Kenneth Chien, a professor of cardiovascular research, who is also keen to win a free lunch. By the time he met the others, he already had one Dylan paper to his name – Tangled Up in Blue: Molecular Cardiology in the Postmolecular Era, published in 1998. With five competing rivals, the pace of Dylan references accelerated. Lundberg and Weitzberg’s The Biological Role of Nitrate and Nitrite: The Times They Are a-Changin’, in 2009; Eph Receptors Tangled Up in Two in 2010; Dietary Nitrate – A Slow Train Coming, in 2011.

Read the full article here.

Weitzberg explained in an interview with The Local that they didn’t quote Dylan with strict scientific papers, only articles wrote about research by others, book introductions, and editorials.

Take a listen to the playlist we’ve compiled of some of the Dylan tracks that inspired these scientists.