Living Journal of Computational Molecular Science: Announcements

Blog Post: Why LiveCoMS matters

Living Journal of Computational Molecular Science — 2024-02-19

As more mainstream journals have started to adopt some of the practices followed by LiveCoMS, such as publishing tutorials or best practices articles, we have asked ourselves how our journal still stands out among the many choices authors have. There are really quite a few answers!

True open access - for readers and authors. Plenty of journals now offer open access, but most often this requires an exorbitant fee. In the early days of LiveCoMS, we charged simply our own costs, $100 USD per article. Now having obtained some external support for publishing, there is zero cost. We are platinum open access.
A truly independent, community-run journal. We’re an all-volunteer run journal, which is why our costs have been low from the beginning. No external interests dictate our decisions or policies.
Tutorials, and so much more. Yes, we publish tutorials, which we pointed out early on are key for our field so developers can earn academic credit and users have reliable documentation. But we also publish more pedagogical Training articles, Best Practices, Lessons Learned, Software Analyses, and Perpetual Reviews.
Updateability. Any article geared to using software or cutting-edge methods is bound to become at least somewhat outdated, often within months of publication. LiveCoMS lets authors update their work without having to worry about having copyright infringement with previously published articles that have been signed over to journals, and significant updates get refereed as new publications.
The articles get attention. Citations and viewing statistics show that our articles, indexed in Google Scholar, have real impact.
A journal for the whole community. Every article is peer-reviewed by a student or early-career scientist to ensure the widest possible impact.

Blog Post: Promote your emerging software

Living Journal of Computational Molecular Science — 2021-12-17

Many of us not only use software, but develop tools as well, often with the broader community in mind. But how to get your work noticed and tried out by colleagues around the world? A user base is important to drive improvements, bug fixes, and impact.

LiveCoMS wants to help! We plan to devote occasional blog posts (with social media advertising) to emerging software descriptions provided by developers. See guidelines below. These listings will create a marketplace for new tools that can serve developers and users.

Guidelines for Software Listings

Your entire listing is limited to 1500 characters
We may edit listings for length, format, and/or content (e.g., to improve clarity or avoid non-factual statements)
Your listing should explain where to obtain the software, the capabilities, and known limitations. Note who the developers are.
Note open-source status and availability to academics. Software not freely available to academics will not be listed at the present time.
Indicate the best practices employed in code development/deployment:

Github or similar code repository.
Documentation type
Availability of tutorials
Degree of test coverage
Is there a support/user group?
Is the software containerized?

If you have software you want to promote, send a listing addressing these issues to managing@livecomsjournal.org.

Blog Post: Editorial board opportunities at LiveCoMS

Living Journal of Computational Molecular Science — 2021-12-14

We are looking for additional people to contribute to this innovative, community-run journal beyond writing an article or acting as referee. As the journal expands coverage in additional areas of computation, including machine learning and quantum mechanical calculations, we need further expertise on our Editorial Board.

Is this for you? The time commitment is not very significant, but we can use the help of energetic creative researchers to help guide the journal as well as recruit and evaluate new articles. There is also a role to play as the journal’s Recording Secretary who, besides being an Editorial Board member, is a leadership role on the board that entails ensuring procedures are followed according to our by-laws; the role require only a moderate time investment for an organized individual but represents a notable national service role. Applicants for the Editorial Board or Recording Secretary should have permanent positions (as faculty, in industry, at national labs, or equivalent) in fields relating to computational molecular science. We are also looking to expand the diversity of our Editorial Board both geographically and demographically.

If you’re interested in joining the Editorial board, or have any questions, please contact the managing editors at managing@livecomsjournal.org If you know of someone who may not not see this post or not on Twitter follow-ups, but appreciates what LiveCoMS is doing, please let them know about this opportunity!

Blog Post: Issues logging in? Resolving one issue we have found

Living Journal of Computational Molecular Science — 2021-11-17

Update: It appears this problem has now been resolved. Please let us know (manging@livecomsjournal.org) if you consistently have problems logging in using Chrome with the error described below.

Most users should not need to register to the web site - only authors and reviewers. However, those people DO need to log in and some people are having issues with the login process. The symptom is that after clicking "Login", the login fails and then the "Username" and "Password" fields are blanked out. This is different than if the password or username is wrong, which which case an error message will be displayed.

This is a known issue, and we are still working on a resolution (the IT people are having a hard time reproducing it . . . ). It appears that some people have a hard time logging in with Chrome - it varies from person to person, but is mostly consistent per Chrome installation (i.e. there are no consistent ways to fix it if it is failing. Right now, the only fix is to use a different browser. Safari seems to work relatively consistently, as does Microsoft Edge. We'll keep working on addressing this!

Blog Post: LiveCoMS launches its new website!

Living Journal of Computational Molecular Science — 2021-07-23

We are happy to announce the new, improved LiveCOMS website, for both published journal articles and new submissions. Some nice features of the new site:

Perhaps most importantly, submissions will now have no article charges, making LiveCoMS a “diamond open access” journal, meaning it is completely free for both authors and readers! (reminder, articles submitted without an approved presubmission letter will be rejected)
Direct links to the GitHub repositories and supporting information on individual article websites
Autogenerated citations
Better Google Scholar indexing

There will likely be a few kinks to work through as we transition the websites, so if you see anything off, let us know at managing@livecomsjournal.org.

Many thanks to the University of Colorado Boulder for hosting the journal in its new configuration!