Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
From Freepedia
| Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences | |||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Discipline | All sciences | ||||
| Language | English | ||||
| Abbreviated title | PNAS | ||||
| Publisher (country) | National Academy of Sciences (USA) | ||||
| Publication history | |||||
| Website | http://www.pnas.org/ | ||||
| ISSN | |||||
The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (USA), usually referred to as PNAS, is the official publication of the United States National Academy of Sciences. It is an important scientific journal, which started out with its first issue in 1914 and continues to publish cutting-edge research reports, commentaries, reviews, perspectives, colloquium papers, and actions of the Academy. Coverage in PNAS spans the biological, physical, and social sciences - although it is to the former of the three that most of the space in the journal is devoted to. PNAS is published weekly in print, and daily online in PNAS Early Edition.
Members of the National Academy, all of whom have distinguished themselves as scientists, may publish research reports in PNAS without the conventional anonymity of peer review: Instead, members solicit reviews from scientists of their own choosing. They also select the reviewers of reports by other scientists, which as members they may sponsor or "communicate" to the journal. These review policies have provoked criticism by scientists, not least from Academy members. Critics objected to the policy both in principle (as more vulnerable to favoritism and cronyism) and because it had led, they argued, to a lending of the Academy imprimatur to weak or faulty studies, which did not deserve publication in a premier journal. In the past, communicated articles were not identified as such, but the journal, sometime within the past decade, began to do so.
It should be noted that PNAS (abbreviated Proc Natl Acad Sci USA for referencing purposes) also publishes many articles that neither have been authored nor sponsored by Academy members. These independently submitted manuscripts are peer reviewed as they would be at other scientific journals.
Impact
The journal is widely read by research scientists involved in basic sciences around the world. It is notable for its policy of making the full text of the articles freely available online to everyone, 6 months after the original publication date, conforming with the "open access" policy proposed by the Public Library of Science. Immediate full-text access (without the 6-month delay) is available in more than 130 developing countries. The same model is followed by other high-impact journals like the New England Journal of Medicine and Annals of Internal Medicine.
However, the journal does charge the authors to cover the costs of peer-review its access model and authors also pay additional costs in order to avail immediate open access to their articles without a six month delay (such articles are identified as open access article by the journal itself). Very few other research journals, notably the Journal of Clinical Investigation and the CMAJ, neither restrict an immediate 'open access', nor charge the authors to cover the peer-reviewing and publishing costs either.
The journal's impact factor for 2004 was 10.5. PNAS is abstracted and/or indexed in: Index Medicus, PubMed Central, Current Contents, Medline, SPIN, JSTOR, ISI Web of Science, and BIOSIS.
