By now, everybody reading this obscure blog knows about the so-called sting operation by John Bohannon in Science Magazine last week. As virtually everybody has pointed out, the outcome of this stunt is entirely meaningless. Here are a few analogies […] ↓ Read the rest of this entry…
Archive for science politics
Yesterday, Science Magazine published a news story (not a peer-reviewed paper) by Gonzo-Scientist John Bohannon on a sting operation in which a journalist submitted a bogus manuscript to 304 open access journals (observe that no toll access control group was […] ↓ Read the rest of this entry…
Recently, a statement of librarian Rick Anderson has made the rounds: if I know that a publisher allows green deposit of all articles without embargo, then the likelihood that we’ll maintain a paid subscription drops dramatically Of course, when you […] ↓ Read the rest of this entry…
Sven Fund, CEO of the German publishing house de Gruyter was recently interviewed by Richard Poynder in his widely read interview series on open access. In the interview, he first avoided answering the question if de Gruyter had ever lobbied […] ↓ Read the rest of this entry…
This year marks the 12th anniversary of the publication of this legendary letter to the editor in the Journal of systems and Software: A letter from the frustrated author of a journal paper R. L. Glass Computing Trends, 1416 Sare […] ↓ Read the rest of this entry…
This post was originally published on the London School of Economics “Impact of Social Sciences” blog, on July 30, 2013: In various fields of scholarship, scholars accrue reputation via the proxy of the containers they publish their articles in. In […] ↓ Read the rest of this entry…
You’d be forgiven if after reading the title of this post, you thought scholars have started to revolt against journal rank. Unfortunately, while there is DORA and of course the evidence that journal rank is like homeopathy, most researchers are […] ↓ Read the rest of this entry…
This is a slightly edited (amended, essentially) version of my article published today at The Conversation. In cases where a problem within a community is detected and collective action is required to address the problem. one needs to strike a […] ↓ Read the rest of this entry…
This morning I was reminded of the age of some of the technology we’re using. Hyperlinks were developed at Stanford University and first demonstrated by their inventor Douglas Engelbart (using the first mouse) in 1968: On Tuesday, Douglas Engelbart died, […] ↓ Read the rest of this entry…
This anecdote made my day today. On a Drosophila researcher mailinglist, someone asked if anybody on the list had access to the Landes Bioscience journal ‘Fly‘. I replied by wondering that if #icanhazpdf on Twitter didn’t work, the days of […] ↓ Read the rest of this entry…