Dear All,

I would like to address some questions that have come up regarding the partnership with the GSA and access to WormBook in the journal GENETICS.

As I said in a quote to the GSA blog, “WormBook in GENETICS will continue a great community tradition and will strengthen our longstanding association with GENETICS, which began with the publication in 1974 of Sydney Brenner’s landmark paper.   That association has grown, which is apparent in the many papers that appear every year in GENETICS and G3, as well as in the GSA’s sponsorship of the C. elegans meetings.”

GSA provides a sustainable platform for publishing WormBook, as well as the editorial and production resources of GENETICS.  However, because the GSA will be fully funding publication of new WormBook content, WormBook chapters will adhere to the journal’s current access policies, unless authors or institutions choose to subsidize immediate open access, including a Creative Commons license.

In practice, the journal’s access policy will not make much difference for most members of the community, who will continue to have immediate access to GENETICS content through their libraries and GSA memberships–which includes very low cost membership categories.  Furthermore, anyone who cannot pay may request individual article PDFs from the GENETICS Editorial Office.

The access issue was the subject of much discussion before we finalized the relationship.  But it is important to understand that there are costs to publishing, even on the web, and full open-access of WormBook at Caltech was possible only while they had sufficient funds to support it.  However, available funding, including some from WormBase, has been reduced to the point that WormBook was no longer sustainable.  Thus, the choice was to freeze WormBook in its current form altogether or find another way forward.

Several options were considered, and this association with the GSA emerged as the best option to finance and produce WormBook going forward.  Whether this arrangement should continue can be evaluated in 4-5 years.  For now, we have a fantastic opportunity, and the Section Editors are already commissioning great chapters.

It is too complicated to respond to questions about the economics of open access versus subscription publishing here–and I’m not an expert, though I know from having served as an editor of Development during the rise of the web and now, as an editor of PNAS and member of the PNAS Publications Committee, that it is very expensive to publish papers.*  Different journals have different business models, but the current access model used by GENETICS (and PNAS) is one way to keep costs down for authors, readers, and libraries.

So, thank you for your interest in, and continued support for, WormBook.

Best regards,

Iva

* It may interest some of you to see this report about the true cost of publishing a paper, where they calculate the cost in eLife as $14,000, and Nature itself estimates the cost of publishing in its own journal of $10,000!  (See http://scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/2014/08/18/how-much-does-it-cost-elife-to-publish-an-article/)

The Textpresso project serves the biomedical research community by providing full text searches of the C. elegans published literature, as well as other model organism literatures.  Recently Textpresso for Online Mendelian Inheritance in Man (OMIM), was developed, this contains approximately 25,000 entries from OMIM. The entries are separated into their various fields: eg., clinical synopsis (CS), number (NO), references (RF), creation date (CD), etc. One can use Textpresso search capabilities to search for various diseases, genes, etc. within OMIM entries.  An intersection of these searches can be created with various categories that are integrated as part of Textpresso, for a more refined targeted search.  Those categories are: gene ontology (GO), sequence ontology (SO), human anatomy (UBERON) and human phenotype ontology (HPO). Entries are downloaded from the OMIM website and updated for Textpresso weekly.