An Open Letter to ASM
Dear American Society for Microbiology:
I am definitely a devotee. I’m a long time member of your society, I attend your meetings, and I’m a regular reader and contributor to your many excellent journals.
But here is the thing. Lately, my affection for you and your journals has been dimmed by my rising esteem for journals like PLOS Pathogens, and BMC Microbiology. Why? Because in addition to good content, these fine publications have RSS feeds that are easy to identify and set up in my google reader, so once a week I can scan the content of all of the journals with feeds all at once. RSS feeds are handy, they don’t crowd up my email account, which, FYI, is just overwhelmed every single day of the week, causing me to spend endless hours sorting/deleting/and replying.
Oh, yes I know I can get your content freely available online, and I know I can set up a periodic dump of your new content into my email account (but do you really want your awesome content to get buried in my 200 other emails?). But I can’t find RSS feeds for your great journals like Infection & Immunity…. Journal of Bacteriology…. and ….. even…. Microbe…. and if you don’t do RSS feeds… I must ask …WHY the heck not?
So please ASM, hear my plea… add RSS feeds for your journals, and I promise I’ll visit every new issue!
Sincerely,
DrDrA
I second! Another annoying thing–the ASM journal I most often read and submit to is now charging $190 for submitting supplemental materials and a whopping $2000 for optional open access. This is all in addition to their usual page charges!
and another thing! could you please lower your single day rates for the general meeting? a 4 day student pass costs the same as a single day.
I have this complaint about so many journals! Even though they are actually in the Computer Science field… you would think they would know better!
Just set up a separate email account for your NCBI automated search results.
Amen!
I’ve become a bit disillusioned with ASM journals ever since I received a peer review stating that my manuscript submitted to Applied and Environmental Microbiology was too much applied science and did not employ enough classical microbiology. Ergo, I should send the manuscript to a journal which focused more on applied microbiology instead.
WTF?
Try setting up feeds through http://www.scifeeds.com/.