On Wed, Sep 5, 2012 at 8:57 AM, Bas Wijnen <[email protected]> wrote:
> Hello, > > For biophysical research (measuring butterfly wings and eyes), I have > developed several device drivers[0] (among others for a camera and for a > spectrometer). In our group we normally publish in biological journals, > like the Proceedings of the Royal Society A. In this case, I would like > to write an article for a technical journal, describing the device > drivers and the setup in general, with less focus on the measurements. > > However, I do not know which journal would be appropriate. Does anyone > here know such a journal? I'm looking for something scientific, which > means peer reviewed. I can adapt the article to be more technical or > more about the measurements, depending on the target journal, but the > focus should mostly be on the setup, not on the measurements. > > Thanks a lot, > Bas Wijnen > > [0] The drivers I wrote are free software and are or will soon be in > Debian. Unfortunately the driver for the camera requires a non-free > library from the manufacturer, so that will go into contrib. > > I would recommend PLOS ONE as an appropriate open-access journal for this work. They are known for a relatively quick peer-review and publication process, extremely broad scope (not just limited to biological sciences), and very permissive licensing of published articles -- Creative Commons Attribution, CC-BY. There are also no limitations on article length or accompanying supplementary files. http://www.plosone.org/static/authors.action If journal prestige is very important for this article, PLOS Computational Biology would be a good alternative. But PLOS ONE is certainly a legitimate venue, and potentially less of a hassle as they will not reject an article based on scope alone. The BMC stable is also good; they have a similar reputation, though their journals are typically more focused and researcher articles are released under a Creative Commons non-commercial attribution license (CC-BY-NC). Since you're also releasing the driver software independently of the published article, the license difference probably won't mean much in practice. All the best, Eric
