For those involved in the Building an Online, Commercial Science Magazine thread, you will have known the struggle of building Science Works Magazine. It is just starting to be successful. To really push the barrow of science journalism and online science though, I know that this won't be enough by itself, its just a first experiment. So Science Works and Fraxion Payments have been out and about getting universities and science communicators involved.

The first fruits of our labour can be seen at New Science Journalism, a science site that has converted to Wordpress just so that it can use the Fraxion Payments system.

The law of networks should begin to start taking hold soon, as readers of either site realise they can go between the two and still use their account to access the articles. Several universities have shown an interest in creating house journals for their science and science communications departments. As they come online they will add to the network and benefit from the existing network. We have also done a little advertising at Freethought blogs and hope to build up a marketing budget to bring more and more readers in to discover real science.

Of course there is always the following danger:


To avoid that Science Works is going to need more authors and editors that really know what they are talking about.

Here are some interesting thoughts about this, more a publishing nature.

http://thecostofknowledge.com/

http://breast-cancer-research.com/content/12/S4/S13

http://audsandens.blogspot.com/2012/01/ ... ating.html

http://www.genomesunzipped.org/2011/07/ ... urnals.php

Seems there are a lot of unhappy customers (science authors) with the current state of journal publishing.

Any thoughts? Responses?

And for those scientists out there who have some issues with the current academic publishing industry; you are not alone.

Not long ago a boycott of Elsevier was started. The list of who is joining is getting longer and longer. Last week this was at about 1,500. Now it's over 3,000. Ouch. Seems there a lot of very pissed off researchers out there.

www.thecostofknowledge.com.

Another magazine joins the ranks. This one is the product of the Sheffield University Science Communications course. Checking it out the articles seem to be about 1 fraxion per 50 words which I personally think is a bit high. On the other hand I did buy the article about Super Skin.