Regarding if BioMed Central will continue to be open access:

Those in the open access movement had watched BioMed Central with keen interest. Founded in 2000, it was the first for-profit open access publisher and advocates feared that when the company was sold, its approach might change. But Cockerill assured editors that a BMC board of trustees “will continue to safeguard BioMed Central’s open access policy in the future.” Springer “has been notable…for its willingness to experiment with open access publishing,” Cockerill said in a release circulated with the email to editors.

No information yet as to how much this acquisition cost.

What do you think about this? Will Springer just “experiment” with open access publishing for a while and then close the gates? Or is this a genuine attempt to join the OA movement?

JoVE was founded in late 2006 as the first video-publication for biological research. With an editorial board including 20 scientists from leading academic institutions such as Harvard and Princeton. The online journal has grown to include over 200 video-protocols in fields such as immunology, neuroscience, microbiology and many others.

The National Library of Medicine (NLM) advisory board decided to include what is now the first and only video-publication in their large publication database and by doing so demonstrates openness to new and innovative ways of sharing science.

Moshe Pritsker, Ph.D., co-founder of JoVE in an email sent to us states:

“Inclusion in PubMed/MEDLINE is a big milestone for JoVE, and for the scientific publishing in general. It demonstrates the official acceptance of new approaches to science communication, such as video online, by the scientific community. Overall, it will increase the interest of the scientists to communicate their findings in video, making biological sciences more transparent and efficient.”

Johnathan Eisen from The Tree of Life was the first (that I noticed) to responde to the article and then many others followed along the same line.

Shortly after, Timo Hannay posted a “take two” at Nature’s Nascent that seemed to settle things down.

What I find to be the most notorious aspect in this whole string of events is that there is quite a large community of science bloggers that are ready to offer their “peer-review” in situations such as these. Is this a good thing? I would like to believe so…

Anyhow, I’ve only mentioned a few of the reactions. You can find plenty more reactions over at Bora’s Blog Around the Clock.

The SC has been talking about how OWW can be used as a repository for Supplementary Material - click [here](http://blog.openwetware.org/programmablecells/2008/04/14/openwetware-and-supplementary-material/) for a recent experiment on how this might work.


_OpenWetWare publication badges are a way to notify the community that an OWW page has appeared in a journal or at a conference. Pages that have these badges are in a state suitable for publication, and can also be actively maintained with minor changes._

Did you ever wonder if your favorite OWW page has appeared somewhere else, say in a journal or at a conference? Or did you ever wonder if the OWW page you are looking at is finished, or if it is still being actively edited? I certainly have, which is why I have been playing around with OWW publication badges lately.

Recently I wrote a paper on OWW entitled [Python - All A Scientist Needs](http://openwetware.org/wiki/Julius_B._Lucks/Projects/Python_All_A_Scientist_Needs). When the paper was done, I decided to submit it to the [arXiv](http://arxiv.org). I wanted to notify the community that the article was in a final form, and to create a cite-able version that was in an easy-to-read and downloadable PDF format. In other words, I wanted to turn my OWW article into something similar to a journal article. The reason why I chose the arXiv was that it provided me with the facilities that I wanted (arXiv ID for citation, PDF downloads, an established community of readers, free), without all the hassles of a traditional journal, none of which would have taken this article in the first place.

So now I have an OWW paper, and an arXiv paper, but how do I let the community know that they are linked? Here is where the OWW publication badges come in. I simply inserted a line into my OWW article that looks like

{{publishbox_arxiv | your_arxiv_id | list_of_author_names}}

and voila!, a link is created on the page to my original arXiv post (see above image of the publication box). If you visit the [arXiv page for the article](http://arxiv.org/abs/0803.1838), you will notice in the comments section below the abstract that this article is ‘Regularly maintained at this http URL’ (where the ‘http URL’ is a link to the OWW page.) That is put there to let everyone finding the article on the arXiv know that if they want to see the latest version, they should check out the original OWW article.

But why stop at articles, why not include conference presentations as well? The beauty of these badges is that they are completely extensible. I’ve already created a badge for letting everyone know that you have presented this work, and to use it, just put this at the top of your page

{{presentationbox| link_to_the_conference | link_to_the_slides }}

Publication badges are easy to use, and a great way to let people know that all that hard work of yours is being appreciated through publications and presentations.

Got any more ideas about how to use publication badges, leave a comment, or go out and use them!