Do you remember the RWA? It was a no-brainer already back then that the 40k that Elsevier spent was well-invested: for months, Open Access activists were busy derailing this legislation, leading a virtual standstill on all other fronts. now, just […] ↓ Read the rest of this entry…
Archive for science
Even the most thorough peer-review at the ‘best’ journals not up to snuff?
In: science politicsTalk about egg on face! Nature “the world’s best science” Magazine sets out to publish back-to-back papers on – of all topics – stem cell science. The same field that brought Science Magazine Who-Suk Hwang and Elsevier’s Cell Mitalipov’s ‘errors’. […] ↓ Read the rest of this entry…
tl;dr: So far, I can’t see any principal difference between our three kinds of intellectual output: software, data and texts. I admit I’m somewhat surprised that there appears to be a need to write this post in 2014. After […] ↓ Read the rest of this entry…
In what area of scholarship are repeated replications of always the same experiment every time published and then received with surprise, only to immediately be completely ignored until the next study? Point in case from an area that ought to […] ↓ Read the rest of this entry…
At this year’s Winter Conference on Animal Learning and Behavior, I was invited to give the keynote presentation on the relationship between classical and operant conditioning. Using the slides below, I argued that Skinner already had identified a weakness in […] ↓ Read the rest of this entry…
“Standing on the shoulders of giants” is what scientists say to acknowledge the work they are building on. It is a statement of humility and mostly accompanied by citations to the primary literature preceding the current work. In today’s competitive […] ↓ Read the rest of this entry…
The recent call for a GlamMag boycott by Nobel laureate Randy Shekman made a lot of headlines, but will likely have no effect whatsoever. For one, the call for boycott isn’t even close in scale to “the cost of knowledge” […] ↓ Read the rest of this entry…
The other day I was alerted to an interesting evaluation of international citation data. The author, Curt Rice, mentions a particular aspect of the data: In 2000, 25% of Norwegian articles remained uncited in their first four years of life. […] ↓ Read the rest of this entry…
UPDATE: I’m still not completely sure I understood Churchland accurately, but there are comments suggesting I may just have completely misunderstood her replies to the interviewer. Read the interview and judge for yourself! I really like Patricia Churchland. I’ve read […] ↓ Read the rest of this entry…
Luckily, there are many roads to open access to publicly funded research. Currently, none of them are really sustainable by themselves, but in cooperation, they keep pushing for more open access and very successfully so. In a hypothetical forced choice […] ↓ Read the rest of this entry…