What's new about our journal? JOSF is a new model of online journal; a free and peer-rated journal open to all submissions. We think that traditional limited-access, expensive and, yes, peer-reviewed publications are premised on the concept of the expense of printing on paper. Internet publishing eliminates the costs, and thus the reason to restrict the number of papers by peer-review or price. Quality-control and selection can easily come after publication, democratizing science and maximizing efficiency in many ways.

The traditional hardcopy subscription-based science publishing is undergoing rapid re-evaluation and change. As distribution, publishing, and page-setting become essentially free on the internet, erstwhile mechanisms to restrict volume, length, and cost become obsolete.

Several models of online publishing are emerging:

• the rapid subscription-based (optional fee for open access) journal, so far limited to Zootaxa

• the commercial hybrid paid-subscription or expensive-to-open access journals, e.g. Bentham journals

• the open access non-profit (but fee-for-publish) set of PLoS journals. PLoS ONE, has extended the model further, facilitating peer-ratings after publication. They do apply a form of peer-review by the peer-editor to assure some selectivity.

Although they are cherished, journal editing and selectivity are simply pre-publication assessments of quality. If the costs of publication are low, selectivity can be applied post-publication with all the benefits of transparency (editorial and peer-evaluation), timeliness, interactivity, and broad participation. In addition, the quality of any single contribution is no longer assessed indirectly by the relative exclusivity of a journal, but directly by the ratings of the scientific community.

Peer-ratings (evaluations and discussion after the fact) are standard on most commercial websites (eBay, Amazon) where the cost of publishing approaches zero and unlimited interaction is possible. Furthermore, the moment of judgement is not frozen in time at the date of publication, but a continuing process.

Given these benefits, and the inevitable progress to free online dissemination of information, the journal just becomes a public sounding-board rather than an object in a library. Decentralization is unavoidable and the release of research by individuals cannot be controlled and regulated. The role of the journal becomes a channel to the information and a location for ratings, nothing more. The Journal of the Ocean Science Foundation simply provides this forum for marine biologists.

Managing Editors

Fernando Rivera

Benjamin Victor

Michael Arvedlund