User:Jason R. Kelly/A journal worth reading

When was the last time you paged through an actual journal (other than science or nature)? Most interaction with the scientific literature today is via web searches leading to individual articles. In light of this, the purpose of binding a particular set of articles together on a periodic basis needs to be revisited. It seems that publishing all the articles that completed peer-review that month in a volume is pretty arbitrary - they can simply be published individually when each one gets finished. So what does a monthly collection of articles that has value greater than the sum of its parts look like? What other material would be useful to be included outside the usual fare?

Random Thoughts (feel free to add)

• Topic specific editions
  • Would be great if these could republish important old articles along with the new publications. The magazine could then sit on the shelf as an actual, useful reference source - imagine that.
• Requests from the community
  • Maybe this is just an engineering thing, but there are approximately 10 million things I'd like to see done in support of engineering biology and 99.9% of them I don't want to do myself. Would be great to have a dedicated area to specify some of these, could cull them from community voting, etc. For example, Standard E. coli Strain for BioBricks.

OWW Journal of Synthetic Biology

To provide a more concrete example, how would we implement a journal on OWW?

1. Use PLoS One to take care of peer review / formatting
   • We would basically be a stamp of merit on top of the (lower) bar for getting into PLoS One.
2. Have an editorial board responsible for culling a collection of articles each month from the OA literature.
3. Allow the community at large to vote up articles on syntheticbiology.org
4. 'publish' videos of a talk or two a month