Until today, I was quite proud of myself for not caving in to SIWOTI syndrome like Mike Taylor did. And then I read his post and caved in as well. What gets us so riled up is Elsevier’s latest in […] ↓ Read the rest of this entry…
Archive for science politics
Open Access (OA) pioneer and OA journal eLife founding member and sponsor, the Max Planck Society just released a white paper (PDF) analyzing open access costs in various countries and institutions and comparing them to subscription costs. Such studies are […] ↓ Read the rest of this entry…
For ages I have been planning to collect some of the main aspects I would like to see improved in an upgrade to the disaster we so euphemistically call an academic publishing system. In this post I’ll try to briefly […] ↓ Read the rest of this entry…
In a paper published in Nature Neuroscience now over a year ago, the authors claimed to have found a very surprising feature, which was long thought to be a bug. In my blog post covering the hype in the paper and […] ↓ Read the rest of this entry…
UPDATE, 10-02-2015: After a hint from a user on Twitter, I now know that it is possible to open a PDF document in several windows, one for text, one for legends and one for figures. Figures and legends occupy one […] ↓ Read the rest of this entry…
This is a post loosely based on an article appearing today in the German newspaper “Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung” by Axel Brennicke and me. The raw data for our analysis is available. Please do let us know if you find a […] ↓ Read the rest of this entry…
Skinner used the term “schedules of reinforcement” to describe broad categories of reward patterns which come to reliably control the behavior of his experimental animals. For instance, when he rewarded rats for pressing a lever at a given interval after […] ↓ Read the rest of this entry…
I recently was sent a report from a university-wide working group on the publishing habits within the Freie Universität Berlin. I don’t think this document is available online, but I think I’m not doing anything illegal if I publish some […] ↓ Read the rest of this entry…
Arguably, there is little that could be more decisive for the career of a scientist than publishing a paper in one of the most high-profile journals such as Nature or Science. After all, in this competitive and highly specialized days, […] ↓ Read the rest of this entry…
This is an easy calculation: for each subscription article, we pay on average US$5000. A publicly accessible article in one of SciELO’s 900 journals costs only US$90 on average. Subtracting about 35% in publisher profits, the remaining difference between legacy […] ↓ Read the rest of this entry…












