I’ve been wondering if anyone would be interested in reviving the journal club. There have been quite a few interesting papers on hydrogen-oxidising bacteria lately, and I’d love to discuss them with others!
I was thinking we could start with this recent paper from Guo’s group that compares in-situ and ex-situ electrolysis: https://doi.org/10.1002/aic.70004
If you’re interested (and would like to be added to our Zotero group), please let me know! Would 9 pm UK time on Mondays still work best for everyone? Perhaps we could meet once a month instead of every two weeks, so it’s a bit more manageable.
I am very interested in a journal club and discussing papers on bioreactor design like this one. Monday at 9PM UK works for me and I would be happy to do every two weeks, but I can adjust to whatever works for everyone else.
Nice! I think if we can get three or four people interested, we can have a good discussion. How about it @Martin , @danwchan and @CamDavidsonPilon ? Anyone else?
Definitely up for it. 9pm on Mondays wouldn’t be my top choice as I have an early set meeting on Tuesdays, but if 9pm’s what works best for everyone else, I’ll be there.
Thanks for thinking of me. Yes I can do 17:00 (EDT) on every other Monday. How long do you think we’ll meet for? And please add me to the shared Zotero group. I’m danwchan there. Excited there is some energy to meet up and chat about papers!
I can’t figure out a way to synchronise my local Zotero library (including attachments shared by authors that wouldn’t be legal to publish online) with a shared Zotero group. I have however created & invited you to a shared Zotero group: Zotero | AMYBO Journal Club and I have shared my personal favourite Subcollection here.
Thanks Martin. I connected your Zotero group through your invitation. The papers that were already discussed looked interesting, so I will take a look at those.
I didn’t see a copy of the paper: https://doi.org/10.1002/aic.70004 Gerrit recommended and I couldn’t find a free copy. Should I buy one?
@Martin I tried adding the paper to the new shared Zotero group, but it seems there are some permission restrictions that prevent me from just sharing papers from my own collections, and if I manually create a new entry in the shared group I can’t add file attachments to it?
Did anyone have any luck uploading the paper? I tried emailing the author last week for a preprint, but got no response. I just signed up for DeepDyve’s free trial and I can read it online but they charge more for a PDF download than the original journal. I guess I will read online with DeepDyve for now. Any other suggestions?
There’s a bit of a philosophical issue here. I’m very much against closed access journals, as I think that all publicly funded research should be published in publicly accessible journals. As such, going forward, I think we should boycot discussing non-open access papers in the Journal Club.
An additional problem with sharing copies of papers online is that the copyright owners (that’s the multinational journal publishers, not the authors [who generally sign over copyright ownership when they publish them]) could legally sue us for doing so. If we only have open access papers in our AMYBO Journal Club Zotero, that won’t be a problem, as we can easily share links through it that everyone can access.
I strongly agree about closed access journals and publically funded research. I am OK in cases where academics feel they need to publish in specific closed access journals for prestige reasons, as long as they also make a preprint available publicly or on request. How do other people feel?
I completely agree that closed-access journals are problematic, especially when research is publicly funded. I sympathise with why academics sometimes feel forced to publish in them, and truthfully, that was a part of why I left academia.
I’m not sure that an AMYBO boycott of closed-access publishers would shift the needle, though I support the sentiment. That said, I don’t feel strongly either way about restricting ourselves to only open-access papers.
For a private journal club, I don’t think we should let publishers like Elsevier dictate what we can or can’t read together. As long as we’re not distributing papers publicly, discussing them privately seems reasonable.
That said, IANAL, and I absolutely see the appeal of being able to share everything - papers, notes, discussions - out in the open. Working only with open-access material would make that much simpler and avoid any grey areas, so I’m very open to that approach as well.
Do we end up with consensus on what we want to do? I guess we can privately distribute the paywalled paper or pick another paper? I am OK either way. I emailed the author for a preprint a few weeks ago and never heard back.
For this specific paper I did manage to read it and take some notes using my trial subscription to DeepDyver, so I am OK discussing this paper which had lots of interesting stuff. Unfortunately, I can’t recommend DeepDyver as a solution because it is expensive and you use a super locked down viewer (like no cut and paste) which was hard to use to read papers.
I agree that for public research, publishing closed access is an insult and a scam. Even when open access is implemented via APC’s it often directs funding to journals that don’t add much value to the publication and puts undue pressure on researchers and research institutions with tight budgets.
But I don’t really feel like we should take on the system via a boycott. I think we should probably follow folks interests to pick a paper that might helps advance our understanding of elements of projects we’re engaged in. I’m in agreement with Handfield and Gerrit on this, either a privately distributed closed access paper or a publicly distributed open-access is fine with me.
One interesting other option we could do if an interesting and recent preprint crosses our path us is to hold a PREreview club where we all co-author a review to help folks that publish their work as a preprint get feedback on their work.
Anyways happy to check out the paper in the original post and chat about it on Dec 22nd or in the new year if folks are still up for it!
Good point regarding open access APCs being absolutely ridiculous. I also like the idea of a PREreview club, I didn’t even know that was a thing!
Okay, sounds like going forward we should prioritise open access papers, with preprints as an alternative, and not completely exclude closed access papers if everyone has a legal way of obtaining them. On that point: If I go to my local university and connect to their visitor WiFi I can download most papers legally - is this an option for others too?
Dec 22nd works for me, but I’m also happy to start in the new year if folks would rather wait until after the holiday period.
I also had never heard of PREreview clubs and agree that would be cool.
For this particular article I was able to read it on DeepDyver before I canceled. I am also OK with Dec 22 or after the holidays.
I did try going to to the libraries of two local research universities, but here they have locked everything down so you must have a university account to access any computer or wifi in the library. They both have options for non-student access to their collections, but explicitly exclude online journal access. On top of everything else, it looks like these libraries have eliminated getting hard copies of most major journals so you can’t even physically read articles from the past 10 years or so.
PREreview sounds like an excellent idea - I’m very happy with that. Even more so if it was papers that will remain open access once peer reviewed and published.
I tried accessing some hard-to-find papers at Imperial College and had to sign to say it was for personal, non-commercial use only. Some of us may struggle to sign such a form honestly.
Glasgow’s public library has a hard copy of Nature, so I got to read one of the earliest HOB papers there, but I couldn’t find any more recent closed access in-culture electrolysis HOB papers.
I can ask Glasgow University what their policy is on non alumni library access, but in all honesty it’s a pain to reach. I’m avoiding the 38 mile journey on Wednesday by guest-lecturing via Google Meet.
Our National Library is brilliant, but even further.
So I think it will be hard to legally get everyone a copy of closed access journals. I am totally happy with everyone individually requesting a copy from the author. That may encourage them to go open more than hearing that we refused to read their paper would .
But seriously, I wouldn’t want to unnecessarily increase the citation count of a closed access journal/paper by citing them. And I’m more likely to cite papers that I’ve read. It may be a drop in the ocean, but most tipping points start with a drop.
I also wouldn’t want to exclude any potential future members of our club who were uncomfortable obtaining/receiving a copy in breach of copyright.
Sounds like we all can make 22 December. @Martin , would you like to cancel the existing standing invite and send out a new one for the four of us to discuss the paper on in-situ and ex-situ electrolysis? Of course anyone else is welcome to join us as well!
Hi @gerrit I don’t believe I have a standing invite to cancel, there’s nothing in my diary for future Journal Clubs. I’ll try to go back and delete anything I can find. I am of course happy to send an invite as soon as I can link an openly readable document in it.
@Handfield can you direct message me or email hello@amybo.org with permission to include your email address in the invite. I assume from before I already have that from @danwchan .
I thought @Handfield had requested that closed access paper from the author and received no response. That pretty much rules it out of consideration in my opinion. While it would be great if someone could legally share the pertinent points for us, I don’t think that would be the basis of a full Journal Club discussion think we need to find another paper to consider.
Of late Sydow et al, 2017 has been the most-read paper by myself and the Imperial & Edinburgh project - I should really invite them also. While it’s not fully open, it is at least apparently free for all to read. So if we need a paper fast, that would be my choice.
Alternatively, if anyone can find a relevant PREreview, that would be great. We should probably start reaching out to researchers in the field asking if anyone has anything in the pipeline for a PREreview and encouraging them to go fully open access when choosing their journal.
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