Reporters: Aviva Lev-Ari, PhD, RN & Pnina G. Abir-Am, PhD
- Time from Lab/Desk to Publication on the Internet and Search engines is reduced to seconds
- comments by other scientists are equally valuable to peer review
- collaboration with other scientist around the globe is fostered on WWW
- the platform is of collaborative authoring, we have 60 categories of research in one site
- interdisciplinary work can be published in one site the over arching domain in our case is Life Sciences, Pharmaceutical and Healthcare
Harvard President Drew Faust said, “edX gives Harvard and MIT an unprecedented opportunity to dramatically extend our collective reach by conducting groundbreaking research into effective education and by extending online access to quality higher education.”
“Harvard and MIT will use these new technologies and the research they will make possible to lead the direction of online learning in a way that benefits our students, our peers, and people across the nation and the globe,” Faust continued.
Princeton, Stanford, Michigan and the University of Pennsylvania announced that they would offer free Web-based courses through a for-profit company called Coursera that was founded by two Stanford computer science professors. One of those professors, Andrew Ng, taught a free online course in machine learning this past fall with an enrollment of more than 100,000 students.
There’s also Udacity, co-founded by a former Stanford professor, andKhan Academy, which boasts 3,100 free educational videos across a variety of subjects.
MIT and Harvard said that they hope to eventually partner with other universities to expand the offerings on the edX platform.

BioTechniques
Open Access, But Same Impact
07/19/2012
By comparing two-year impact factors for journals from the four countries that publish the most scientific literature, researchers have found that OA journals have about the same scientific impact as their subscription-based counterparts. Source: BMC Medicine.
“The newer open access published within the last 10 years, particularly those journals funded by article processing fees, had basically the same impact as subscription journals within the same category,” said Solomon. “I think that that is the key finding.”
The initial higher citation rate for subscription journals was the result of a higher percentage of older OA journals from countries that are not major publishing countries. “A lot of them are from South America or other developing countries, and they tend to have lower impact factors,” said Solomon. “When you compare apples to apples and start looking within subgroups, particularly journals launched after 2000 in biomedicine for example, the differences fall away.”
However, the authors identified a sector of low quality, OA publishers that are looking to capitalize on the article processing charge model rather than contribute to the advancement of science. Solomon said that this could partly be to blame for negative perceptions about the integrity of OA publishing as a whole and its impact on the peer review system. But most researchers are aware of these low-quality publishers and prefer to publish in more reputable OA journals.
In the end, Bjork and Solomon are hopeful that the study’s findings may help dispel some of the misconceptions in the debate over OA publishing. “Open access journals still have the reputation of being second class in the minds of some people. So, we think that this is important because this is objective data verifying that at least the open access journals published in the last 10 years by professional publishers are on par with subscription journals.”
References
- Bjork, B. C., and D. Solomon. 2012. Open access versus subscription journals: a comparison of scientific impact. BMC Medicine. 10(1):73+.