http://thecostofknowledge.com/

If research projects are funded by public money, shouldn't their
results be available to the public at a reasonable price? or even free
of charge?
To prevent the monopolization of the scholarly record, read, think, and, hopefuly, support this cause. It is all I ask.

In many fields there are excellent choices for publishing open access (even without costing all that much). For computational mechanics that doesn't seem to be the case.

Looking through DOAJ I could mostly only find rather small and obscure journals. What I would like is at least something that gets listed on ScienceDirect (and other common places such as Google Scholar and such). I would write more requirements, but I dont think I am in a position to be picky here. A decent homepage, ability to comment, automatic statistics, online versions, creative commons licensing, decent ranking, etc. would also be on my requirements if I could wish.

Dear Colleagues,

Springer is providing free access to the International Journal of Fracture until the end of this year. I hope you take advantage of this opportunity and browse through the journal content. You may access the journal at the following link: http://www.springer.com/materials/characterization+%26+evaluation/journal/10704?changeHeader.

Ravi

A new journal published by the Institution of Civil Engineers (UK) is available: Géotechnique Letters.

Average time to first peer review decision: 32.5 consecutive days.

First papers are available for free at the ICE Virtual Library: http://www.icevirtuallibrary.com/content/serial/geolett/fasttrack

Have a look!

Hi all,

1. In the past, we have had quite some discussion regarding both open-access and open-access journals. However the slant in this blog post is different. I am not concerned here much about open-access journals per say.

Here, I am concerned about the policies that the prominent commercial journals keep regarding posting preprints on the Internet before these articles are submitted to them. I would like to know about policies kept in this regard by the commercial journals in the fields of physics, mechanics, and engineering (including software engineering, computational science and engineering, etc.).

This is a premiere: my first contribution to the new ESIS' blog announced in January. Why comment on papers in a scientific journal after they have passed the review process already? Not to question their quality, of course, but animating a vital virtue of science again, namely discussion. The pressure to publish has increased so much that one may doubt whether there is enough time left to read scientific papers. This impression is substantiated by my experience as a referee. Some submitted manuscripts have to be rejected just because they treat a subject, which conclusively has been dealt years before - and the authors just don’t realise.
So much to my and Stefano’s intention and motivation to start this project.

Here is my first “object of preference”:

Ehsan Barati, Younes Alizadeh, Jamshid Aghazadeh Mohandesi, "J-integral evaluation of austenitic-martensitic functionally graded steel in plates weakened by U-notches", Engineering Fracture Mechanics, Vol. 77, Issue 16, 2010, pp. 3341-3358.

The aim of ESIS is not only to develop and
extend knowledge in all aspects of structural integrity, but also to disseminate this knowledge world-wide by means of scientific publications and to educate young engineers and scientists.
For these purposes, three Elsevier journals - Engineering Fracture Mechanics , Engineering Failure Analysis and
International Journal of Fatigue - are published in affiliation with ESIS.

Promoting and intensifying this aim is what we want to achieve through a new blog that ESIS will manage here for discussing some of the papers which appear in Engineering Fracture Mechanics. Its editors, Profs. Karl-Heinz Schwalbe and Tony Ingraffea,fully support this initiative.

After some conversation with Roozbeh which are "irritatingly useful" :) I found that this site has done already all the calculations we need http://www.scimagojr.com/  except the list of highlycited papers which remains for me the most interesting aspect and which we seem to need to do manually as we did yesterday with IJSS and JMPS at Most cited papers and H-factor of some mechanics journals -- IJSS

Some results are attached as a big PDF file.

Hello imechanica users: I launch a few ideas. Can we improve imechanica stealing ideas from successful web systems like google, amazon, wikipedia, myspace, youtube? Taking the best of the various worlds to improve our imechanica?

JOM is a monthly publication of TMS--The minerals, metals, and materials society. It covers a wide range of materials topics. I expecially like the overview articles, which, in four or five pages pack lots of information. Further, the historical articles about metallurgy and materials in ancient civilizations will interest those of you who like to read about history in general, and science history, in particular.

Springer - in an attempt to get customers I suppose - are offering free access to the journal Computational Mechanics, but only for March 2007.

You can access all articles in Computational Mechanics back to vol 1/1, e.g. the first article

E. Reissner
Some aspects of the variational principles problem in elasticity
Volume 1, Issue - 1, First Page - 3, Last Page - 9
DOI - 10.1007/BF00298634
Link - http://www.springerlink.com/content/t52w761088542m68

To get the free access (for the rest of March) go to
http://scientific-direct.net/c.asp?id=650015&c=7fbfc8d9b40ac978&l=31

Writers write, readers read. But the world is not that simple: it has e-walls between writers and readers. We have all helped to build the walls, so we should not complain. One day we might come to our senses to tear down these walls. Before that happens, we'll just have to cope.