Physicists, 1991: Hey, look, there is this cool online thing where you can publish papers for nearly free and everyone can read them (arxiv). Libraries: Yay, we can pay for big subscription deals! Publishers: Crickets (counting money) Scholars, 1999: We […] ↓ Read the rest of this entry…
Although a case can be made for rewarding scientists for risky, novel science rather than for incremental, reliable science, novelty without reliability ceases to be science. The currently available evidence suggests that the most prestigious journals are no better at […] ↓ Read the rest of this entry…
In which journal a scientist publishes is considered one of the most crucial factors determining their career. The underlying common assumption is that only the best scientists manage to publish in a highly selective tier of the most prestigious journals. […] ↓ Read the rest of this entry…
For a number of years now, publishers who expect losing revenue in a transition to Open Access have been spreading fear about journals which claim to perform peer-review on submitted manuscripts, but then collect the publishing fee of a few […] ↓ Read the rest of this entry…
Around the globe, there are initiatives and organizations devoted to bring “Open Access” to the world, i.e., the public availability of scholarly research works, free of charge. However, the current debate seems to largely miss the point that human readers […] ↓ Read the rest of this entry…
By now, it is public knowledge that subscription prices for scholarly journals have been rising beyond inflation for decades (i.e., the serials crisis): A superficially very similar graph was recently published for APC price increases: When not paying too much […] ↓ 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…
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…
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