How to make a free journal

This page will be edited as this journal improves. Feel free to leave comments and suggestions. We hope that the readers will be inspired to start their own free journal. A free journal can be hosted by an individual, a lab, a group of scientists. Please send us the link to your free journal by replying to the last issue.

Here is how this journal is made technically:

  • The journal uses WordPress (theme Twenty Eleven).
  • Each issue is a post. We then get an RSS feed directly (add /feed at the end the journal’s URL).
  • Email alerts are generated automatically for each new issue using the Email Subcribers WordPress plugin.
  • The home page displays all posts starting from the most recent, i.e., the current issue.
  • The top menu is inspired by traditional journal websites.
  • The archive is just a list of posts. I use a WordPress plugin that lists all posts of a given category, so I do not have to do this manually.
  • Each post consists of an editorial followed by a commented list of articles.
  • Each article links to the freely accessible full text of the paper.
  • Each article links to the corresponding PubPeer page. The link is obtained by typing the DOI of the article in PubPeer search engine.
  • To make a longer comment on an article, the comment is written in either PubPeer or Pubmed Commons. The list of all comments is then accessible (see there for Pubmed Commons).

The choice of this free journal is to make a monthly selection. This allows thematic special issues and generally some consistence in the editorial selection. Of course other choices are possible. In general: every week, the editor selects a couple of papers and possibly writes a comment on a post-publication review website (PubPeer or Pubmed Commons); every month the selection is collected and an editorial is written.