One of the frustrating aspects of covering an emerging interdisciplinary technology like nanotechnology on a low budget is that some of the most interesting research is sequestered behind a pay wall. Press releases and abstracts usually do not provide enough depth to really appreciate what was done. Some authors make their papers available on their own web sites, and in many cases emailing a request to the corresponding author will result in receipt of a complementary PDF. Another great help in keeping abreast is the growing list of Open Access journals. How to find them? This recently from Sally Roy:
I’m a researcher with an academic resource site for college students. I recently visited your site — foresight.org — while working on a guide to open access journals, and thought you might be interested in checking it out. The guide includes a curated list of free, peer reviewed journals and journal databases from a number of disciplines.
We put this together knowing that people like the convenience of online research even though it can return questionable results. Our hope is to let students and professionals know that there’s actually a lot of good information out there, it’s just a matter of knowing where to find it. …
The guide to open access journals was recently published here: http://www.onlineschools.org/open-access-journals/
I’m confident you’ll find value in this resource, so please feel free to include a link to it on your site – I’d love to hear what you and your readers think!
Thanks,
Sally
In an initial exploration of this resource, I looked at just the first of the approximately 30 collections that are listed: the Directory of Open Access Journals, primarily because this collection has an extensive search engine that provides searches for journals on a specific topic or for specific articles.
A search for journals on ‘nanotechnology’ yielded 39 open access nanotechnology journals, one of which was the Institute of Physics journal Advances in Natural Sciences: Nanoscience and Nanotechnology. A list on the home page of the journal of the ten most read papers of the last 30 days included two papers that caught my eye as topics that could be featured here on Nanodot. “Inkjet printing technology and conductive inks synthesis for microfabrication techniques” is a nice study that furthers the evidence that 3D printing is becoming increasingly sophisticated, confirming my suspicions that it might provide a useful path toward nanofactories for atomically precise manufacturing. “Preparation and anti-cancer activity of polymer-encapsulated curcumin nanoparticles” compares a variety of nanoparticles with respect to delivery and uptake of curcumin, a promising but very difficult to solubilize antitumor agent. A search for articles on ‘molecular machine’ brought up a number of articles on machine learning, but also this succinct and useful review article “Advances Towards Synthetic Machines at the Molecular and Nanoscale Level“.
In even this very brief exploration, this resource turned up useful articles and is a worthy addition to the toolkit for finding relevant results. I’m sure I will be returning to it.
—James Lewis, PhD
