Nature:
To facilitate publication of scientific research, a new
platform called the Episciences Project is scheduled to be
launched this April. The brainchild of Jean-Pierre Demailly, a
mathematician at the University of Grenoble in France, the
project will consist of a series of free, open-access journals,
whose articles will be culled from the arXiv preprint server.
Each journal will have its own editor and editorial board,
which will select the content and organize peer review of the
articles. The Episciences platform will be maintained by the
Center for Direct Scientific Communication, based in France.
The project has the seal of approval of Tim Gowers, a Fields
Medal winner and mathematician at the University of Cambridge
who last year initiated
a
boycott of the world's largest scientific journal
publisher, Elsevier, in an effort to reform research
publishing.
