A collaborative community for planetary sciences.

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Elsevier, Inc., the publisher for Icarus rolled out a new Guide for Authors in February without consulting the Icarus Editor or the Icarus Editorial Board (upon which I currently sit). These guidelines are clearly the result of Elsevier, Inc., wanting to standardize their Author Guidelines across all of their many journals. However, the guidelines as written are confusing. It is not clear what is required versus what is optional, and some things simply don't apply to Icarus. Furthermore, these guidelines change some long-standing traditions in Icarus. The Icarus Editor and Editorial Board are currently pushing back against these changes. Until these issues get cleared up, I would suggest continuing to follow the Icarus-Board-approved Guide for Authors.

Today NASA launched their Open Government Web page:

As part of the Open Government Directive, each agency will release an Open Government Plan. The plan is intended to outline concrete steps NASA can take to be more transparent, participatory, and collaborative. NASA is seeking input on the creation of this plan from its employees and the public. The mechanism for collecting and sorting these inputs is a Web site where users may submit, vote and comment on ideas. This Web site is available at: http://www.nasa.gov/open/ideas.html

I submitted an idea to Implement an Open Access Policy similar to the NIH which is not a new idea, but there you go. Submit your own, vote for (or against—yes, there are some ideas with negative scores) the Open Access Policy idea, vote for others, but do it all before March 19!

I'm late on repeating this, but the AIP had an article about a 'Roundtable forum of key stakeholders' convened by the House Science and Technology Committee and their report which offers consensus recommendations on 'Expanding Public Access to Scholarly Articles.'

At LPSC, I was introduced to planetaryGIS.org. This site seems to have the sames goals as Orrery.us, but for the more narrow planetary GIS community. Although the ISIS Support Center's Planetary GIS Discussions section actually does a rather robust job of this already, and certainly sees more traffic. It seems like a secondary goal of planetaryGIS.org is to facilitate the landing site selection process for ESA's ExoMars, so perhaps once that process starts ramping up, this resource will only get better.

Orrery appears to have attracted link spammers, who use open access blogs and wikis to increase the Google PageRank of their sleazy marketing pages. The first one I noticed is bublik2010, who is pretty blatant - s/he seems to post the same set of viagra/cialis/herbal remedy links to every single discussion thread. The rest of this site seems legit prima facie -- generating this post was the easiest way to draw it to your attention.

If you can see past the buzzword doublespeak in the title, Google is trying to implement a true peer-review system that functions without a central reviewing authority. The idea is that you publish your work first, and get the reviews later. Your work's importance will then be gauged by how the reviews of your work come out as a function of time. For now this idea would complement journals, but it could eventually render them obsolete. At the least, it could make editing new online journals really easy!

Harvard's science faculty have voted to require that all papers published by faculty in the college be available to the public free-of-charge. As I understand it they are not required to publish in open access journals, but are required to be able publish in journals that allow Harvard to place a version on its website for free. Can Harvardians no longer publish in Elsevier journals like Icarus?

Wouldn't you know it, now there's a second open astronomy journal: Advances in Astronomy. This one is European, and charges 400 Euros to publish. The publisher is based in Egypt, though (!).