Weekly digest: the latest news on topics important to Open Pharma

Tim Ellison

Featuring an introduction to Open Research Central, a new way to submit preprints and the potential of open access data to accelerate drug discovery

An introduction to Open Research Central via F1000 blog

Open Research Central – ORC for short – is a portal through which research in any field can be submitted for publication on an open research publishing platform. Will this free researchers from the “prisons of academic journals”?

Major German universities cancel Elsevier subscriptions via The Scientist

A look at the recent decision by 13 German academic institutions to join around 60 others in not renewing their subcriptions to Elsevier, with a view to negotiating a new nationwide licensing agreement that would support fair pricing and open access to publications.

Pharma and the Structural Genomics Consortium collaborate to crowdsource a cure for Huntington’s disease via Wired

The Structural Genomics Consortium is partnering with nine pharma companies and six university laboratories to share resources and outputs – including experimental samples and results in open access journals – with the aim of accelerating drug discovery.

A new way to submit preprints directly ‘with one-click’ via Authorea

Authorea, a collaborative document editor, has partnered with bioRxiv, the leading preprint server for biological research. This will enable direct submission of preprints to bioRxiv for faster and easier sharing of work.

Open science may play a role in tenure and promotion review in academia via Center for Open Science

Brian Nosek, a Professor of Psychology at the University of Virginia, USA, who co-founded the Center for Open Science, gives an insider’s viewpoint: universities appear to be incorporating open science into tenure and promotion considerations.

Computational analyses of open access data are assisting with drug discovery via the UCSF website

A research group at the University of California San Francisco has developed a computational method to analyse open access data to identify compounds that target specific diseases.

An investigation into the peer review process via Times Higher Education

Dr Martin Eve, Professor of Literature, Technology and Publishing, at Birkbeck, University of London, argues that many researchers overlook the pitfalls of the current peer review model. The Andrew W Mellon Foundation has awarded a US$99 000 research grant to the Birkbeck group to investigate the advantages and disadvantages of the peer review process of PLOS One.