Some good news from my institution
Last night I was having a discussion with Mrs. PA. She was worried that a paper she was writing (yes, it’s a two scientist household) was a bit long for publication. I told her “Hey, I bet you can find an OA journal, such as PLoS One, that will not bind you to arbitrary page limits”. I then launched into my (new and unpolished) sales pitch on why publishing in an Open Access journal would be better overall for the paper, and showed her some other papers in her field that have been published in PLoS One. Then I came to the hard part - the increased page charges that she would have to sell her advisor on. I mentioned that for PLoS One these come to $1250, which probably isn’t that much more than they would end up paying anyway to the closed-access journal they were thinking of publishing in. Then I noticed a line on the PLoS site which stated that Institutional Members got a discount on top of this. Not hoping for much, I went to the list of members, and lo and behold, our school was on it! I’m really excited about this, because I think it will make convincing faculty to publish (in at least this particular OA journal) much easier.
I also learned that the University has put in place a support system for graduate students who lose their adviser. If you read my 3-part post on misconduct, you’ll realize that this is very important to me. I’m checking into it for more details, which I’ll probably write about later. Unfortunately, the current policy on research misconduct investigations (dated 9/07) fails to mention students once, and is still chock full of the secrecy and careful political maneuvering that caused problems in the situation I was involved in.
April 25th, 2008 at 2:34 am
You should also know that PLoS has a fee waiver - see here
http://www.plosone.org/static/policies.action
“To provide open access, PLoS journals use a business model in which our expenses—including those of peer review, journal production, and online hosting and archiving—are recovered in part by charging a publication fee to the authors or research sponsors for each article they publish. For PLoS ONE the publication fee is US$1250. Authors who are affiliated with one of our Institutional Members are eligible for a discount on this fee.
We offer a complete or partial fee waiver for authors who do not have funds to cover publication fees. Editors and reviewers have no access to payment information, and hence inability to pay will not influence the decision to publish a paper.”