The title of this post comes straight from a post on a blog called Mish Mash ... etc. I was intrigued by this suggestion, only to discover that they don't mean the Public Library of Science. Read on, fans of useless information. In embroidery, PLOS can mean "Personal Library of Stitches". The similarity in name is striking, but apparently entirely coincidental.
A previous handling editor of BMC Ear, Nose and Throat Disorders affectionately (?) referred to the journal as BMC Wax, Snot and Phlegm, and rumour has it that our independent journal Cough was almost called Cough and Phlegm. A blog going by the name wax, boogers, and phlegm actually exists.
The Public Library of Science (PLoS) is known by editors at the Lancet as SLoP, and I'm sure that the nicknames Evil Empire and Elseviley need no introduction. In the Pipeline lists the colloquial ways of referring to several journals in the field of organic chemistry, including the Journal of the American Chemical Society, known as "Jacks".
If anyone knows of more pejorative or affectionate names for publishers or journals, I'd be interested in hearing them.
p.s. A play with an anagram tool reveals that BioMed Central becomes melodic banter, metabolic nerd, atomic blender, dental microbe, clambered into, and mint or debacle.
The Creative Commons Attribution License under which open access articles are made available by both BioMed Central and PLoS allows others to create sites that incorporate the content of these articles, so long as the original source is clearly acknowledged.
Two ways to do this are mashups and mirrors. According to Wikipedia, a mashup is a site that "combines content from more than one source into an integrated experience". A mirror is an exact copy of a website.
BioMed Central officially has four mirrors to which we feed content, at INIST in France, University of Potsdam in Germany, PubMed Central at the NIH, and the National Library of the Netherlands' e-Depot. I've come across some unofficial mirrors in specific areas like genomics and bioinformatics in the past.
PLoS ONE already has its own unofficial mirror, created by the people behind HubMed: PLoS Too. Rather than displaying the articles as they appear on the publisher's site, this is a pared-down view of the articles and it has a couple of good new features - auto-generated tags for each article, and a very quick live search box.
On the mashup side, Free Biomedical Images has made open access images available in a searchable database, mainly (entirely?) taken from BioMed Central articles, and fully attributed. Users can comment on the images, rate them, email them to a friend and jump to the published article.
A key feature of open access is that we don't hide away the full text of our articles. The entire 'corpus' of our open access research articles is available on our data mining page for anyone to download. Gerry Rubin has said that "the most important reason for Open Access is data mining".
The idea of mashups, scripts and extensions is just beginning to reach the bioinformatics community. A bioinformatics mashup by Alfonso Valencia is iHOP (Information Hyperlinked over Proteins), which links information about genes and proteins to text from PubMed. Not satisfied with just a mashup, Mark Wilkinson has created a Greasemonkey userscript called iHOPerator that enhances the iHOP website with tag clouds. You can read about in his BMC Bioinformatics article. Two other Greasemonkey userscripts link PubMed to social bookmarking sites, one to CiteULike, the other to Connotea. A third links Google Scholar to CiteULike. The iSpecies search engine pulls together information about any species you enter from disparate sources, including scores of biomedical databases and even Yahoo! Image search.
Mashups, mirrors and mining are definitely the future of science publishing.
Picture, if you will, Darth Vader. Big, black armour. Heavy breathing. Imagine that, tired of being right hand man to the Emperor, Darth Vader has decided to venture into scientific publishing. Imagine what his publishing house would be like.
Elsevier has a reputation as "evil" (as seen here, here, here , here, here, here, here and here, but not here or here). This is mainly due to making massive profits (total revenues for 2005 were £1.4 billion) while restricting access to scientific research. They have also been noted for an involvement in the arms trade, and the censorship of published work.
Open access has been a thorn in Elsevier's side, much as the Rebel Alliance were to the Imperials in Star Wars. Open access threatens the ability of publishers like Elsevier to maintain their hold over library budgets, which is why Elsevier has repeatedly criticised OA (several society publishers have joined in too as they perceive OA to be a threat to their society's income, drafting the Washington DC Principles).
However, Elsevier recently announced a Sponsored Article option on some of their journals. Their hand was effectively forced by CERN, doing in effect what PLoS' boycott failed to do. Elsevier refuse to call it open access, and authors do not retain copyright. They even allowed authors to post preprints, allowing self-archiving. It might have been thought that Elsevier had laid to rest their hostility to open access.
We'd have been wrong. In a brilliant piece of investigative journalism, Nature have revealed a fruitful relationship that Elsevier, Wiley and the American Chemical Society have with a PR guru, advising them on how to take on the open access movement. Not just any guru, but the same one who represented Enron and ExxonMobil. A director at Wiley is quoted as saying that "Media messaging is not the same as intellectual debate". This explains some of the outrageous spin we've seen about open access ("government censorship"; "no peer review").
The blogosphere is beginning to react. The IWR blog understates it somewhat when they say that this will "do little for the reputations of the publishers involved". Chris Leonard predicts that "they won't be able to use these arguments even if they wanted to", while Jonathan Eisen has confidently exclaimed that "Their ship is sinking and they are grabbing at the last little pieces of wood they can find".
Hopefully, this news thoroughly discredits the smears of these publishers against open access. Was this their open exhaust port?
