New JoVE helps old Wiley to publish video articles on Current Protocols

A partnership between the Journal of Visualized Experiments and big science publisher Wiley-Blackwell: the JoVE guys will give the technology, the art of making video experiments and Wiley provides the established network, audience on its Current Protocols site.

I wonder what will be the access status of those videos: current JoVE videos are freely available, while Current Protocols has pricey subscription rates (see screenshot).

Links: Alla Katsnelson, The Scientist: Online methods videos go mainstream:

“Rumors of JoVE’s deal with Wiley-Blackwell and other mainstream science publishers have been circulating in the blogosphere since late January. Moshe Pritsker, CEO of JoVE, told The Scientist this week that he had also signed similar deals with Annual Reviews and Springer Protocols.“

Visual journal partners with Wiley

Update from Moshe Pritsker, JoVE chief: The protocols will be co-published, that is freely available on JoVE.

Thanks, Moshe, that’s good news.

‘The horror of closed-access publishing’ according to Jonathan Eisen

Jonathan Eisen is the new Academic Editor-in-Chief of PLoS Biology and wants to build a world in which Open Access and “top tier” can go hand-in-hand:

So I accepted the invitation and became an Academic Editor. But I confess that I was not yet a true convert to OA or to PLoS Biology. So I decided to do what any good scientist should do in such a situation—I planned a publishing experiment. I’d had many papers in Science and Nature before. And so I convinced my collaborators on a high-profile paper to submit it to PLoS Biology, to see how this new high-profile OA journal would compare.

But then, while finalizing the paper, a two-month-long medical nightmare ensued that eventually ended in the stillbirth of my first child. While my wife and I struggled with medical mistakes and negligence, we felt the need to take charge and figure out for ourselves what the right medical care should be. And this is when I experienced the horror of closed-access publishing. For unlike my colleagues at major research universities that have subscriptions to all journals, I worked at a 300-person nonprofit research institute with a small library. So there I was—a scientist and a taxpayer—desperate to read the results of work that I helped pay for and work that might give me more knowledge than possessed by our doctors.

Understanding Aging Conference in L.A.: de Grey, Conboy, Wagers and many others…

Looks like the scientist coalition behind healthy life extension is widening. In line with that the question Why was life extension ruled out of the 14 Grand Engineering Challenges? is fading away.

Here is an Aubrey de Grey message from my mailbox:

All details, including forms for abstract submission and
online registration, are at the conference website:

http://www.mfoundation.org/UABBA/

The preliminary program already has over two dozen confirmed
speakers, all of them world leaders in their field. As for previous
conferences I have [co-]organised, the emphasis of this meeting is on
“applied biogerontology” — the design and implementation of
biomedical interventions that may, jointly, constitute a
comprehensive panel of rejuvenation therapies, sufficient to restore
middle-aged or older laboratory animals (and, in due course, humans)
to a youthful degree of physiological robustness. The list of
scientific sessions and confirmed speakers is as follows:

DNA damage, telomeres, cancer
Adam Arkin, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory; Jan Vijg, Buck
Institute for Age Research; Jerry Shay, U. Texas Southwestern;
Claudia Gravekamp, Pacific Medical Center Research Institute; Zheng
Cui, Wake Forest University School of Medicine; Rita Effros, UCLA

The cell niche
Irina Conboy, U. California Berkeley; Judith Campisi, Lawrence
Berkeley National Laboratory and Buck Institute; Leanne Jones, Salk
Institute; Ken Muneoka, Tulane University; Kevin Healy, Stanford
University