Sunday, January 14, 2007

Bio::Blogs# 7 and some quick links

The bioinformatics blog journal Bio::Blogs will have it's 7th edition on the 1st of February. We skipped the January edition because of the holidays. It will be hosted by Paras Chopra on BioHacking blog. Anyone can submit the link to their posts on paras1987 {at} gmail or bioblogs {at} gmail until the end of this month.

Some quick links:
Paras released the source code of a Python program for protein structure prediction.

(via Gerstein' blog) Yale university has a podcast. I wish I could convince EMBL's press office to start blogging and/or a podcast.

(via Deepak) The Science Commons blog announced that the three journals published by EMBO and NPG (EMBO reports, EMBO journal and Molecular Systems Biolgoy) will soon start publishing with a creative commons license. More information on the subject can be found in the EMBO site. In the case of Molecular Systems Biology all articles are published in open access but for EMBO Journal and EMBO reports it looks like the author will decide if they wish to pay an extra fee (2000 euros) to publish in open access. Only the articles published in open access will be published with the creative commons license. Adopting the creative commons license will make re-using their papers much easier, hopefully increasing the usefulness of their content.
(disclaimer: I am currently working for Molecular Systems Biology. All opinions expressed in this blog are my own)

Speaking of re-using content. Alf has set up a mirror site for PLoS One. He called it PLoS Too :) and he is using it to try out some ideas on layout, microformats and features like rating. This is one funny thing about the creative commons license. As long as you give credit to the source you are free to re-use the content. Nothing stops a group of people from setting up a new journal, based on those that are published in creative commons, with a different editorial line. For this particular license you can even try to make some money from re-using the content :).