These days, many academic publishers can be considered mere Pinos: ‘Publishers in name only’. Instead of making scholarly work, commonly paid for by the public, public, as the moniker ‘publisher’ would imply, in about 80% of the cases, they put […] ↓ Read the rest of this entry…
Academic publishers in general and Elsevier in particular have a reputation for their ruthless profiteering, using professional negotiators pitting hapless librarians against their own faculty during journal subscription negotiations. Consequently, these companies boast profit margins of over 40%, when the […] ↓ Read the rest of this entry…
After almost 25 years since Stevan Harnad’s “subversive proposal“, now, finally, scholars and the public have a range of avenues at their disposal to access nearly every scholarly article. Public access, while not the default, has finally arrived. Granted, while […] ↓ Read the rest of this entry…
As a regular user of the scholarly literature since before the internet (I started reading primary scientific literature for a high-school project around 1989), I have closely followed its digitization. I find it rather frustrating that some of the most […] ↓ Read the rest of this entry…
Our lab is looking for a PhD student interested in the molecular mechanisms of operant self-learning, a form of motor learning. The work will mainly revolve around the FoxP gene – the Drosophila orthologue of the language-associated gene FOXP2 in […] ↓ Read the rest of this entry…
There have been repeated online discussions about my suggestion to libraries that now would be an excellent time to start cancelling subscriptions. Prime counter-argument is that librarians risked their jobs or at least face faculty backlash if they did that. […] ↓ Read the rest of this entry…
Below, I’ve taken the liberty to “peer-review” recent proposals to ‘flip’ subscription journals to open access The applicants have provided an interesting proposal of how to ‘flip’ the current subscription journals to an article processing charges (APC)-based ‘gold’ open access […] ↓ Read the rest of this entry…
There can be little doubt that the defunding of public academic institutions is a main staple of populist movements today. Whether it is Trump’s budget director directly asking if one really needs publicly funded science at all, or the planned […] ↓ Read the rest of this entry…
For the last few years, we have been working on the development of new Drosophila flight simulators. Now, finally, we are reaching a stage where we are starting to think about how to store the data we’ll be capturing both […] ↓ Read the rest of this entry…
Starting this year, I will stop traveling to any speaking engagements on open science (or, more generally, infrastructure reform), as long as these events do not entail a clear goal for action. I have several reasons for this decision, most […] ↓ Read the rest of this entry…
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