For 14 years, the main research funding agency in Germany, the German Research Foundation (DFG) has stated in its guidelines that submitted grant proposals will be assessed primarily on the basis of their content, rather than counting the applicants’ previous […] ↓ Read the rest of this entry…
Archive for science politics
121 results.
A few years ago, I came across a cartoon that seemed to capture a particular aspect of scholarly journal publishing quite well: The academic journal publishing system sure feels all too often a bit like a sinking boat. There are […] ↓ Read the rest of this entry…
You may have seen a neutered version of this post over at the LSE blog. This post below, however, puts the tiger in the tank, as it was enhanced by CatGPT: Maybe scholarly societies have taken “the instruction”follow the money!” […] ↓ Read the rest of this entry…
Posted on December 1, 2023
at 11:50
Comments Off on Scholarly societies: like a cat chasing the laser dot
The DFG is a very progressive and modern funding agency. More than two years ago, the main German science funding agency signed the “Declaration on Research Assessment” DORA. The first point of this declaration reads “Do not use journal-based metrics […] ↓ Read the rest of this entry…
Posted on November 29, 2023
at 13:32
Comments Off on German funder DFG: Why the sudden inconsistency?
No matter how well-intended (and we all know to which place the road leads that is paved with good intentions!), transformative agreements (such as DEAL in Germany) are generally the wrong tool at the wrong time for making publicly funded […] ↓ Read the rest of this entry…
Jeffrey “predatory journals” Beall famously catapulted himself out of any serious debate with an article in the journal TripleC, entitled “The Open-Access Movement is Not Really about Open Access“. In it, Beall claimed that OA proponents don’t care about access, […] ↓ Read the rest of this entry…
On May 23, the Council of the EU adopted a set of conclusions on scholarly publishing that, if followed through, would spell the end for academic publishers and scholarly journals as we know them. On the same day, the adoption […] ↓ Read the rest of this entry…
Data broker RELX is represented on Twitter by their Chief Communications Officer Paul Abrahams. Due to RELX subsidiary Elsevier being one of the largest publishers of academic journals, Dr. Abrahams frequently engages with academics on the social media platform. On […] ↓ Read the rest of this entry…
There are those who demand journal peer-review be paid extra on top of academic salaries. Let’s have a look at the financials of that proposal. The article linked above confirms common rates of academic consulting fees, i.e., anything between US$100 […] ↓ Read the rest of this entry…
