at ScienceInsider: “Do you have a great idea for a study that you want to share with the world? A new journal will gladly publish it. Research Ideas and Outcomes(RIO) will also publish papers on your methods, workflows, data, reports, and software—in short, “all outputs of the research cycle.” RIO, an open-access (OA) journal, was officially launched today and will start accepting submissions in November.
“We’re interested in making the full process of science open,” says RIO founding editor Ross Mounce, a researcher at the Natural History Museum in London. Many good research proposals fall by the wayside because funding agencies have limited budgets, Mounce says; RIO is a way to give them another chance. Mounce hopes that funders will use the journal to spot interesting new projects.
Publishing proposals can also help create links between research teams, Mounce says. “Let’s say you’re going to Madagascar for 6 months to sample turtle DNA,” he suggests. ”If you can let other researchers know ahead of time, you can agree to do things together.”
RIO‘s idea to publish research proposals is “exactly what we need if we really want to have open science,” says Iryna Kuchma, the OA program manager at the nonprofit organization Electronic Information for Libraries in Rome. Pensoft, the publishing company behind RIO, is a “strong open-access publishing venue” that has proven its worth with more than a dozen journals in the biodiversity field, Kuchma says.
The big question is, of course: Will researchers want to share promising ideas, at the risk that rivals run with them?…(More)”