The Materials Project
February 6, 2012 § Leave a Comment
The Genome project coming to materials science, a resource developed by the MIT and LBNL.
Computational materials science is now powerful enough that it can predict many properties of materials before those materials are ever synthesized in the lab. By scaling materials computations over supercomputing clusters, we have computed some properties of over 80,000 materials and screened 25,000 of these for Li-ion batteries.
An interesting initiative. You could also hire 2000 students to make the compounds.
By providing materials researchers with the information they need to design better, the Materials Project aims to accelerate innovation in materials research.
I guess they have plans to develop beyond Li-ion batteries.
Mendeley/PLoS Binary Battle results out
November 2, 2011 § Leave a Comment
Some interesting stuff. Check it out here and there. My favorites are Vyzkumap and PLoS Impact explorer. Two more parts to come.
Economics of open-access publishing
October 24, 2011 § Leave a Comment
Elsevier alone takes out of academia — not its turnover but its profits, which are given to shareholders who have nothing to do with scholarly work — is enough to fund every research article in every field in the world as open access at PLoS ONE’s rate.
A must read, here too. Via Hacker News.
ERC and open access
September 21, 2011 § Leave a Comment
Specific recommendations from the ERC
The ERC requires that all peer-reviewed publications from ERC-funded research projects be deposited on publication into an appropriate research repository where available, such as PubMed Central, ArXiv or an institutional repository, and subsequently made Open Access within 6 months of publication.
Just like the NIH. The move is coming to Europe, and that’s good.
Open Access experience
August 24, 2011 § Leave a Comment
I just submitted my first paper to PLoS One. I’m curious to see how it goes. It turns out that we have some very intriguing results, which could be of interest for many and disparate scientific communities. Combined with my rising interest for open access journals, PLoS One seems to be a perfect fit. There are extremely few (I could not find one, actually) materials science papers in PLoS One, although they are open to any domains of science. This could be the first one, that might be fun. Let’s see.
Open access comes of age
June 24, 2011 § Leave a Comment
A confirmation that authors are tired of paying to publishers. The whole article is nevertheless about the increase of open access journals, which I am not sure is a good sign. My personal experience is that I received maybe 15 invitations to publish in new, open access journals, during the past year only. The publishing fee is always the same, in the 500-1000$ range. And curiously, half of these new journals are published by the same publisher. So I tend to agree with one of the comments at the end of the article:
Unfortunately now too many open access journals are mushrooming & publishing low standard papers just by taking money
Also:
Because nearly all the must-have journals still charge subscription fees, the rise of the author-pays model actually imposes an extra expense on research funders
If you publish 5 to 10 papers a year in such journals, you clearly need to allocate some funding for it.
