Thursday, May 9, 2013

Frontiers in Theoretical and Computational Chemistry

I was recently invited to be a "Review Editor" for Frontiers in Theoretical and Computational Chemistry.  One of the commendable features of FTCC is that the reviews are done by a board review editors and the names of these reviewers are displayed on the published manuscript.  I sign all my reviews already, so I think that's an excellent idea.  In fact I think they should publish the reviews too.

FTCC is also open access, publishes under the CC-BY license, arXiv-friendly and "significance" is not a review criterion.  So what's not to like?  Well, the publishing fee is a bit steep: €1600 (though it may be possible to get a fee waiver).  Considering the considerably lower fees at PeerJ or even PLoS ONE the size of this fee is a result either of inefficiency or avarice (FTCC is owned by the Nature Publishing Group).  But as the fees appear to have been set before NPG took over, it looks like it's just inefficiency.

So I have decided to accept and I might even submit a paper there if I can get a partial fee waiver or land a big grant.

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