This year we have two posters at the SfN meeting in sunny San Diego, Ca. The first poster is on Sunday morning, Nov. 4, poster number 152.09, board QQ7, entitled “Neurobiological mechanisms of spontaneous behavior and operant feedback in Drosophila“. […] ↓ Read the rest of this entry…
Archive for science
On the occasion of the first “BigDataDay” at our university, I have summarized on the below poster our two main efforts to automate the publication of our tiny raw data. On the left is our project automating Buridan data deposition […] ↓ Read the rest of this entry…
The recent publication of the “Ten Principles of Plan S” has sparked numerous discussions among which one of several recurring themes was academic freedom. The cause for these discussions is the insistence of the funders supporting Plan S that their […] ↓ Read the rest of this entry…
It’s now been 24 years since Stevan Harnad sparked the open access movement by suggesting in his “subversive proposal” in 1994 that scholars ought to just publish their scholarly articles on the internet: If every esoteric author in the world […] ↓ Read the rest of this entry…
Notwithstanding the barrage of criticisms and warnings from every corner of the scholarly community, various initiatives, mainly in the Netherlands, Finland, Germany, France and the UK, continue their efforts for a smooth transition from subscriptions to open access without any […] ↓ Read the rest of this entry…
In his fantastic Peters Memorial Lecture on occasion of receiving CNI‘s Paul Evan Peters award, Herbert Van de Sompel of Los Alamos National Laboratory described my calls to drop subscriptions as “radical” and “extremist” (starting at about minute 58): Regardless […] ↓ Read the rest of this entry…
Current estimates for the cost of subscription articles converge around US$5,000 per article. This number is reached by dividing the estimated US$10b spent on subscriptions annually world-wide by the two million published articles every year. Current initiatives aiming for a […] ↓ Read the rest of this entry…
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…