Update, Dec. 4, 2015: With the online discussion moving towards grantsmanship and the decision of what level of expertise to expect from a reviewer, I have written down some thoughts on this angle of the discussion. With more and more […] ↓ Read the rest of this entry…
Archive for science politics
Why our Open Data project worked, (and how Decorum can allay our fears of Open Data). I am honored to Guest Post on Björn’s blog and excited about the interest in our work from Björn’s response to Dorothy Bishop’s first […] ↓ Read the rest of this entry…
This is a response to Dorothy Bishop’s post “Who’s afraid of open data?“. After we had published a paper on how Drosophila strains that are referred to by the same name in the literature (Canton S), but came from different […] ↓ Read the rest of this entry…
Over the last few months, there has been a lot of talk about so-called “predatory publishers”, i.e., those corporations which publish journals, some or all of which purport to peer-review submitted articles, but publish articles for a fee without actual […] ↓ Read the rest of this entry…
Science has infected itself (voluntarily!) with a life-threatening parasite. It has given away its crown jewels, the scientific knowledge contained in the scholarly archives, to entities with orthogonal interests: corporate publishers whose fiduciary duty is not knowledge dissemination or scholarly communication, […] ↓ Read the rest of this entry…
Last week, I spent two days at a symposium entitled “Governance, Performance & Leadership of Research and Public Organizations“. The meeting gathered professionals from all walks of science and research: economists, psychologists, biologists, epidemiologists, engineers, jurists as well as politicians, […] ↓ Read the rest of this entry…
The recently discussed scenario of universal gold open access brought about by simply switching the subscriptions funds at libraries to have the libraries pay for author processing charges instead, seemed like a ghoulish nightmare. One of the few scenarios worse […] ↓ Read the rest of this entry…
Lately, there has been some public dreaming going on about how one could just switch to open access publishing by converting subscription funds to author processing charges (APCs) and we’d have universal open access and the whole world would rejoice. […] ↓ Read the rest of this entry…
In the last “Science Weekly” podcast from the Guardian, the topic was retractions. At about 20:29 into the episode, Hannah Devlin asked, whether the reason ‘top’ journals retract more articles may be because of increased scrutiny there. The underlying assumption […] ↓ Read the rest of this entry…
Currently, our libraries are paying about US$5000 per peer-reviewed subscription article. What is more difficult to find out is where all that money goes. Which steps are required to make an accepted manuscript public? Because of their high-throughput (about 1200 […] ↓ Read the rest of this entry…












