Academia is under attack from two angles, which seems to suggest that we may not have decades to get our house in order. The first and older of this two-pronged attack comes from politics. Around the world, anti-science movements seek […] ↓ Read the rest of this entry…
Archive for science
or: how journals are like 1930s Rolls Royce Phantom IIs Recently, the “German Science and Humanities Council” (Wissenschaftsrat) has issued their “Recommendations on the Transformation of Academic Publishing: Towards Open Access“. On page 33 they write that increasing the competition […] ↓ Read the rest of this entry…
tl;dr: Evidence suggests that the prestige signal in our current journals is noisy, expensive and flags unreliable science. There is a lack of evidence that the supposed filter function of prestigious journals is not just a biased random selection of […] ↓ Read the rest of this entry…
Sometimes, only small changes are required for potentially huge downstream effects. Last September, ten international experts have identified two key decisions that may help academia to break out of the decades-long lock-in with academic publishers: Regulators no longer granting academic […] ↓ Read the rest of this entry…
Last week’s podium on the commodification of open science entitled “If you are not paying for the product, you are the product?” was surprisingly unanimous on the need to radically modernize academic publishing and abolish the current publishing system relying […] ↓ Read the rest of this entry…
The debate over how publishers use the large “non-publication costs” (Fig. 1) that they incur and academic libraries, mainly, are funding has been going on for some time now. Above and beyond the cost items we discuss in our paper […] ↓ Read the rest of this entry…
More and more experts are calling for the broken and destructive academic journal system to be replaced with modern solutions. This post summarizes why and how this task can now be accomplished. It was first published in German on the […] ↓ Read the rest of this entry…
According to a recent study, employee surveillance is rampant in today’s corporate work environment. This study documents how, often under the pretense of cybersecurity or risk analysis (sort of like academic publishers, actually), companies analyze the behavioral data they collect […] ↓ Read the rest of this entry…
A recent OASPA guest post reminded me of something I have been wondering about for several years now. What sinister time travel device is keeping some sections of the scholarly ecosystem from leaving the past and coming back to the […] ↓ Read the rest of this entry…
Most academics would agree that the way scholarship is done today, in the broadest, most general terms, is in dire need of modernization. Problems abound from counter-productive incentives, inefficiencies, lack of reproducibility, to an overemphasis on competition at the expense […] ↓ Read the rest of this entry…