This summer, California's $3 billion stem cell agency is scheduled to launch a state-subsidized open-access research journal. With a $600,000 taxpayer-backed starting fund, the publication is intended as a forum for translational scientists and regulators geared toward moving stem cell–based therapies to the clinic. But with more than a dozen stem cell–focused journals already crowding library shelves and a limited agency budget, many critics wonder whether this is the best use of government research dollars.

“They need to demonstrate a need, and I don't think they have done that,” says John Simpson, stem cell project director of Consumer Watchdog, an advocacy group based in Santa Monica, California.

Agency staff first approved funding for the online scientific publication last June, citing the lack of a suitable journal in which to publish translational successes and failures in the stem cell field. “Some of this work gets published, but it's in variable places,” says Alan Trounson, president of the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine (CIRM), based in San Francisco, “and very little if any of the negative work that doesn't result in success moving forward is published.”

A government-funded research journal is not entirely an unprecedented move. In the US, the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences publishes Environmental Health Perspectives, a monthly open-access journal with the second-highest impact factor among environmental sciences publications, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention puts out the Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report. Other countries have similar arrangements. In Australia, for instance, the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation publishes close to 30 titles, spanning reproductive biology to wildlife research, all based on a subscription model.

Yet CIRM's proposed journal, tentatively slated to launch by the end of the summer, will be different. Instead of acting as the publisher, the stem cell agency plans to provide only start-up support. The company or society selected to run the journal is expected to become self-sustaining within three years. According to CIRM spokesperson Don Gibbons, the agency chose the journal's publisher on 24 January, but, as Nature Medicine went to press, had yet to make the deal public owing to ongoing contractual negotiations. Contenders included two private companies—Elsevier, which publishes Cell Stem Cell and Stem Cell Research, and AlphaMed Press, which publishes Stem Cells—and the nonprofit International Society for Stem Cell Research.

Arnold Kriegstein, director of the Eli and Edythe Broad Center of Regeneration Medicine and Stem Cell Research at the University of California–San Francisco, applauds the move. He says that what sets this new stem cell journal apart is that it provides researchers an outlet to publish what doesn't work, saving researchers time and saving taxpayers money. “What I find most novel is the idea that there would be negative results published here,” he says. “I think that's the big attraction and the big element that seems to be missing for what's out there currently.”

But Martin Frank, executive director of the American Physiological Society, which publishes 14 journals, argues that government research dollars are better spent at the bench. “We are not flush with money today,” he says.