NASA recently announced that all research funded by the space agency will be accessible to anyone looking to access the data at absolutely no cost.

The new public web portal, called PubSpace, was established in response to NASA’s new policy, which requires that all research funded by NASA and published in peer-reviewed journals must be open to the public within one year of its initial publication.

“At NASA, we are celebrating this opportunity to extend access to our extensive portfolio and scientific and technical publications,” NASA Deputy Administrator Dava Newman said in a press release. “Through open access and innovation we invite the global community to join us in exploring Earth, air, and space.”

However, the entire body of NASA-funded research will not be accessible in PubSpace. Materials and patents governed by personal privacy, proprietary, or security laws will not be housed in the new database.

NASA’s new policy and PubSpace is a direct response to a request from the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy for federal funding agencies to make papers and data more easily accessible to other researchers and the public.

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A large-scale study on the impact of open access has recently been released, finding that OA papers have a 50 percent greater citation advantage than papers published in subscription-based journals.

The analysis of more than three million papers determined that a journal’s move toward open access publishing is necessary to retain relevance in the field. Additionally, further results point to the face that traditional subscription-based journals will lose their relevance for researchers and governments if they continue to block access to research via paywalls.

(READ: “For-science of For-profit?“)

This from Digital Journal:

The new research also shows that the widely held belief that open access papers have a greater impact due to them being available earlier than their commercially published versions is not consistent with the large-scale data collected by 1science. In fact, based on a tie series comprising more than 17.4 million papers published between 2000 and 2015, it is clear that open access still suffers from the effect of embargoes enforced by traditional publishers who maintain that they require that delay to keep the subscription model alive.

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Here at ECS we are already preparing for Open Access Week 2016 (October 24-30). This year’s theme is “Open in Action”.

We are taking action with our Free the Science initiative – and we hope you will take action too by sharing your Open Access story with us! We want to know how Open Access is affecting you – what has OA helped you to accomplish? How is OA making a difference to you personally?

Submit your brief essay (200-400 words) for a chance to win a cash prize, and (if applicable) additional funding for your student chapter. These funds could be used to send chapter members to an ECS meeting, other conferences, invite speakers to campus, or to host any number of extra events for your chapter. Any funds not spent this year will be rolled over to the next. (more…)

Overcoming barriers in scholarly publishing

In 1995, Forbes published an article entitled, “The Internet’s first victim?” In the article, author John Hayes predicted the world of commercial, for-profit scholarly publishing would suffer under the thumb of the internet and begin the slow process of fizzling out for lack of ability to turn a profit.

Turns out he was wrong.

Commercial scientific publishing has adapted to the times, becoming a multi-billion dollar industry; a $25.2 billion industry to be exact.

The rise of the for-profits

According to CBC News, the top for-profit scientific publishers report profit margins of nearly 40 percent, making some of those margins even higher than that of companies like Apple and Google.

The divide between ECS publications and that of top commercial publishers has deep roots. In the early days of scientific publishing, most journals came out of nonprofit scientific societies like ECS. However, the digital age changed things. It did not stifle the commercial publisher as Hayes thought, instead it hurt the scientific societies. Because the cost to make the switch from print to digital was so high, many societies sold their journals to large, for-profit publishers.

The top five largest, for-profit, academic publishers now publish 53 percent of all scientific papers in natural and medical sciences, but ECS still remains as one of the last independent scientific society publishers, and is still committed to the initial vision of the journals: to disseminate scientific research to the broadest possible audience with the fewest barriers.

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We talk about open access a lot here at ECS, but how much do you really know about OA?

Test your knowledge by taking the Cognet OA quiz below!

Image: Wikimedia Commons

U.S. Vice President Joe Biden is making his voice heard in the quest for open access of vital scientific research.

After losing his son to cancer in May of 2015, Biden has been on a mission to accelerate cancer research in search of a cure. In order to make those leaps and bounds in prevention, diagnosis, and treatment, Biden is now pushing for an open access database to gain better understanding of the disease and advance innovation.

According to The Washington Post, Biden stated that the path toward breakthroughs relies upon increasing the number of researchers who can access data.

While the scope of ECS’s science may be different, our mission to accelerate innovation and open access to our research is the same.

ECS’s Free the Science initiative aims to make all of the research in our Digital Library free to publish and free to read – freeing the science for everyone.

Instead of putting money into the publishing industry, Free the Science is investing in research – allowing scientists to share their work with readers around the world and attracting more minds to think about how to solve some of our planet’s most pressing problems.

Learn more about Free the Science.

When eLife emerged in 2012, the biomedical journal aimed to be on-par with such competitors as Nature and Cell as far as content goes, but publish those papers at no cost to the author or reader.

After 1,800 papers four years of a complete open access model, eLife will get another boost from its funders to allow the journal to continue down its path of high standards and openness.

“eLife’s status in the field is rising quite quickly,” eLife editor Sjors Scheres told Nature News. “I liked the idea behind it — to make a high-impact journal completely driven by scientists, and open.”

ECS’s Free the Science initiative draws many parallels to eLife’s publication model. Much like eLife, ECS looks to maintain our rigorous peer-review process as we move toward making the ECS Digital Library completely open access.

Free the Science is an initiative that seeks to remove all fees associate with publishing and accessing our scientific content so scientists can share their research with readers around the world, allowing more minds to think about and solve problems.

Learn more about Free the Science and watch our video explaining why it has never been more important to advance our technical domain.

New for the 229th ECS Meeting: Stop by the ECS Publication Booth for a chance to win 1 of 4 Open Access Credits! These credits may be used to publish your paper as OA in either JES or JSS.

Please stop by the ECS Publications Booth, located on the Sapphire Level (Fourth Floor) of the Hilton Bayfront any time during Registration Hours and drop off your business card to enter the raffle. ECS will be raffling off 4 Open Access credits during the 229th ECS meeting (each credit is worth $800)!

Questions? Please email oa@electrochem.org and we’ll see you in San Diego!

As part of our continued commitment to Open Access publishing, ECS is in the process of ensuring an increasingly robust management of article credits, APCs, and APC discounts. ECS is pleased to announce we are partnering with CCC RightsLink, which is a sophisticated self-service system that allows authors to pay the appropriate fee or select the article credit for their articles. CCC RightsLink will help ECS to future-proof its Open Access activities in a sustainable way.

As of May 12, 2016 CCC RightsLink will be fully integrated with our article submission process. Authors will be able to pay color charges, supplemental material fees, and claim Open Access article credits through RightsLink’s self-service portal. (more…)