Biophysical Society Bulletin | May 2020

Publications

not feasible for small Society publishers to negotiate such agreements and one result of the open access movement is more Society journals are being driven to partner with larger or commercial publishers. In addition to the matter of open or subscription access, Plan S signatory funding bodies may dictate where and how authors publish, and there are very specific requirements that publishers and repositories must meet. Richard Horton , Editor-in-Chief of The Lancet , has been quoted as saying, “The debate about Plan S is actually a debate about the very future of scientific publication, and we should be much clearer about that.” Executive Order In fall 2019, rumors circulated that the White House would be issuing an Executive Order requiring US government-funded research to be immediately open and available to the world. This would represent a significant change from current US policy, which allows papers that report the results of federally

funded studies to be published behind a paywall for up to one year. By December 2019, more than 125 scientific societies responded to the rumors in three separate letters, acknowl- edging general support for the concept of open access but arguing that such a move would be costly, could bankrupt many scientific societies that rely on income from journal subscriptions, and would harm the scientific enterprise. On January 30, 2020, the Office for Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) tweeted about their first stakeholder meeting and by late February released a Request for Information. The administration let it be known they were meeting with representatives of academic institutions, libraries, commer- cial publishers, non-profit publishers, and research funders. Throughout, OSTP has been very circumspect about any details of a policy and say the comment period was prompted by the letters commenting on the rumored Executive Order. Although originally scheduled to end in March, the comment period was extended to May 6. By the time you read this, we hope to know more.

In the last five years there has been an explosion of interest in phase separation as an organizing principle in signal transduction, nuclear organization, and chromatin structure. Phase separation and generalizations thereof are governed by multivalence of interaction motifs and/or domains within protein and nucleic acids, especially RNA molecules. We are inviting contributions that treat any aspect of the relevance of phase separation to biology. These could include new experimental results, critical reviews of the state of the field, guides to the design and interpretation of experiments, explorations of the basic principles underlying phase separation, qualitative and quantitative explorations of the consequences of phase separation for biology, or historical perspectives on the development of current models. Special Issue: Phase Separation in Nucleic Acid Biochemistry and Signal Transduction Biophysical Journal Editors: Jason Kahn, University of Maryland, College Park Rohit Pappu, Washington University in St. Louis Edward Lemke, Johannes Gutenberg University and Institute of Molecular Biology Mainz Call for Papers

Deadline for submission: August 31, 2020

To submit, visit biophysj.msubmit.net

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