When peer review turns to trolling
In University Affairs, environmental scientist Ryan Bullock looks at his career-worth of experience subjecting his research to peer review: “The trolls have ...
All posts tagged with journals
Big data approaches to scientific career success
Undark recently published an article by Viviane Callier, looking at recent research on scientific career trajectories: “What Matters Most on the Road to Scie...
Self-citation quantified
I always feel a little bit bad when I have to cite my own prior work for a new research paper. As scientists develop career trajectories, self-citation becom...
Supplementary data loss
My inbox this morning has an article by Diana Kwon in The Scientist, looking into the data decay from the supplementary materials of published scientific art...
How much do scientific societies fear Plan S?
An article in Science looks at some of the debate over a funder-driven initiative to require open access publication of the research they fund: “Scientific s...
Will biological anthropologists start publishing in American Anthropologist again?
Adam Van Arsdale and Mary Shenk put out a call in American Anthropologist for more biological anthropologists to submit their work to American Anthropologist...
Should authors pay to submit their papers?
An article by Tim Vines in The Scholarly Kitchen looks at the pay-to-submit model of open access publication: “Plan T: Scrap APCs and Fund Open Access with S...
Will science funders provoke a universal switch to open access publishing?
Tania Rabesandratana writes a long piece in Science describing the push for universal open access to the scientific literature: “Will the world embrace Plan ...
What keeps astronomers from publishing their results?
An article in Science by Daniel Clery investigates the mystery of why half the astronomers who are granted telescope time never seem to publish their results...
Time to publish peer referee comments?
A meeting at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute last week asked whether journals should start publishing the reviews they receive on papers. As reported by ...
Link: Sci-Hub profiled
Verge has a long article on Sci-Hub, focusing on its founder, Alexandra Elbakyan: “Science’s Pirate Queen”.
Should anyone be worried about the number of scientific research papers that are never cited?
Nature looks at the myth that a large fraction of scientific research goes uncited in a piece by Richard Van Noorden: “The science that’s never been cited”. ...
Nature Genetics wants more context for citations, but doesn’t notice that bad context comes from word limits
Nature Genetics has a remarkable editorial in the current issue that makes a point of criticizing citation practices by authors in “articles we have recently...
Is there a trade-off between publication impact and open approaches?
Two Dutch biomedical researchers discuss how they are trying to move their institution away from mere quantity of research and citations, and toward real cli...
Link: Referee troubles
Leonid Schneider posts a fairly typically depressing story from a peer referee from Frontiers in Neuroscience. The story is basically an editor pressuring th...
Link: Sustaining open access databases
Cameron Neylon considers some of the challenges in keeping open data access initiatives sustainable over the long term: “Squaring Circles: The economics and ...
Why the new Wellcome Trust open review journal may be the science publishing future
John Bohannan in Science writes one of many stories about the Wellcome Trust establishing a new open access journal, in which peer review follows the posting...
Link: Costs of scientific publishing
Jonathan Tennant and colleagues have a new review of the impacts of open access scientific publishing: “The academic, economic and societal impacts of Open A...
Link: The origin of peer review
Nature has an essay by Alex Csiszar recounting the first episode of peer review by the Royal Society, negotiated between William Whewell and John Lubbock on ...
Link: Michael Eisen comments on open access and PLOS financials
Michael Eisen writes about the economics of running PLOS in two blog posts, both worth reading for those who care about the future of scientific publishing. ...
Peer review under the microscope
The Frontiers Blog has provided a timely review of some of the new models of peer review that are being tried in different branches of scientific publishing:...
Should journals do post-pub review?
Nikolai Slavov recently published an opinion piece in eLife arguing the advantages of post-publication review of scientific papers: “Point of view: Making th...
Link: Open access and APC double-dipping
From Leti Kleyn, in the South African edition of The Conversation, a call for better institutional open access archives: “Why it’s getting harder to access f...
Homo naledi on Wellcome Trust 10 open access facts
The Wellcome Trust blog has a post celebrating 10 years of the Trust’s mandatory open access publication policy, with 10 facts about the impact of its open a...
Quote: Peer review as practiced today is a form of hazing
I’m citing this 2011 opinion piece by Hidde Ploegh (“End the wasteful tyranny of reviewer experiments”) in a later post, but I wanted to single out this part:
What sequences deserve a peer-reviewed publication?
David Roy Smith asks whether sequencing mitochondrial DNA is still worth a scientific paper: “Opinion: Too Many Mitochondrial Genome Papers”.
How long until paleoanthropologists must deposit data upon submission?
Genetics journals have for years routinely required sequence data to be deposited in a public database at the time that an article is published. Increasingly...
On the importance of saying you’re wrong
Lior Pachter writes this week on his blog about the reactions and commentary around a post-publication peer review exercise he conducted on a 11-year-old pap...
High recent admixture reported for Oase 1
Some readers have asked me what I think of the reporting from the recent Biology of Genomes conference, that Qiaomei Fu and colleagues from Svante Pääbo’s gr...
Open peer review: a note from a physicist
I’d like to take note of this post by Sabine Hossenfelder, “Open peer review and its discontents”. She reflects on a growing cultural divide in science betwe...
A return for reviewers on open access
This interview came out in October of last year, but a reader only recently brought it to my attention: “A Pay-it-Forward Approach to Open Access Publishing:...
Link: Paleolithic archaeology journals compared
Global Palaeo News has an interesting table of acceptance rates and publication times for journals in Paleolithic archaeology published by Elsevier: “Publish...
Thinking of preprints in biology
At the end of 2014, the arXiv preprint server published its one millionth article. Richard Van Noorden reports on the milestone for Nature News: “The arXiv p...
Link: The plagiarism problem in science
Michael Lesk (2014) has a commentary on a new paper (Citron and Ginsparg 2014) that uncovers widespread plagiarism among published scientific papers. Lesk di...
Changing the currency of academic science
John Ioannidis is well known as a critic of the way science has usually been practiced. I’ve linked to his work before (“Link: John Ioannidis and the scienti...
Link: John Ioannidis and the scientific workforce core
I’ve had this link on my desktop for a while, a paper by John Ioannidis and colleagues in PLoS ONE: “Estimates of the Continuously Publishing Core in the Sci...
Time to trash anonymous peer review?
This week’s Science magazine is organized on the theme of science communication. In addition to the John Bohannon “sting” operation I discussed in the last p...
"Open access spam" and how journals sell scientific reputation
John Bohannon is a reporter for science magazine, who has been engaged in an investigative report for the last year about “open access” journals: “Who’s afra...
Fear and the impact factor
Mark Johnston, editor-in-chief of the journal, Genetics, recently published an editorial decrying scientists’ reliance on “impact factor” of journals to make...
When sequencing genomes is too boring for journals
Sequencing bacterial genomes is now the scope of project routinely undertaken by undergraduates just learning how to do research. What was once an empirical ...
What should be the shape of the science journal landscape?
Michael Eisen, one of the founders of the Public Library of Science, has thought a lot about how to make the system of scientific publishing better. He has p...
Cultural Anthropology, open access
From Brad Weiss: “Cultural Anthropology will go Open Access in 2014”.
Immediate publishing
Michael Eisen: “The Glacial Pace of Change in Scientific Publishing”.
"We find it hard to see what publication would achieve at this stage"
Theoretical physicist Terry Rudolph shares a story about preprints and the editorial process at a top science journal: “Guest Post: Terry Rudolph on Nature v...
The costs of publication delays
Joe Pickrell has written a valuable post on Genomes Unzipped about the future of publication in genetics: “The first steps towards a modern system of scienti...
PeerJ set to launch
PeerJ founder Peter Binfield answers questions for Publishers’ Weekly: “Scholarly Publishing 2012: Meet PeerJ “.
This is totally serial
Michael B. Eisen: “The solution to the serials crisis on campus”
Turning around the profits
The absurdity of academic publishing is starting to get attention from the mainstream press. From The Economist: “Open sesame”.
Quote: Alok Jha on the cost of journals
Alok Jha, in The Guardian: “Academic spring: how an angry maths blog sparked a scientific revolution”.
Failure to replicate
What if you set out to replicate a series of 53 “landmark” clinical trials in cancer treatment and found you could confirm only 6 of them? If you’re C. Glenn...
Wiki into journal
PLoS Computational Biology has started a new collaboration with Wikipedia, in which short review articles called “topic pages” will be peer-reviewed, given j...
Open science interview
NPR’s Science Friday interviewed open science advocate Michael Nielsen last week: “Can science be done without secrecy?” I like the headline.
Open access op/ed in NY Times
Molecular biologist Michael Eisen, writing in the New York Times: “Research bought, then paid for”.
Counting citations and career fitness
Philip Ball: “The h-index, or the academic equivalent of the stag’s antlers”.
Tenured inertia on publishing
Danah Boyd rants “Save Scholarly Ideas, Not the Publishing Industry”. This is a well-worn topic here on my blog, but she hits on a useful theme: People with ...
Is Nature Genetics something more than the GWAS Catalog?
I always look through the table of contents of Nature Genetics, which I have delivered to my inbox. Over the last couple of years, the journal has included a...
How many scholars are copyright pirates of their own work?
Ryan Anderson has been interviewing anthropologist Jason Baird Jackson about open access publication (“Anthropology & Open Access: An Interview with Jaso...
Looking for pseudo-books
Jason Baird Jackson posts some insights on how traditional journals can turn to open access tools (if not become open access), and how a startup online journ...
Can Watson navigate the medical literature?
Last week, Computerworld reported that IBM’s famous “Watson” supercomputer is moving to its next challenge: prescribing cancer treatments for the WellPoint h...
Agitating for open science
Cameron Neylon in New Scientist: “Time for total scientific openness”.
Open access barriers
Richard Poynder discusses how Open Access policies may be perversely costing universities even more money, in the lead-in to an interview about the Wellcome ...
Make journals work better
George Monbiot writes in the Guardian with some sobering statistics about academic publishing: “Academic publishers make Murdoch look like a socialist”
An academic journal copyright story
In a post from earlier this summer, info/library scientist Jeffrey Pomerantz describes his attempts to secure a less restrictive copyright agreement for a sc...
Open science link
David Dobbs writes about the structural barriers to more open science: “Free Science, One Paper at a Time”. Summing up a large collaboration on Alzheimer’s r...
Retractions and grants
Pascale Lane reviews a paper about retraction rates in top journals: “Papers ‘Not Meant to Be Factual’”.
Kin selection strikes back
Last year I noted the publication of a paper in Nature by Martin Nowak, Corina Tarnita and Edward O. Wilson, which claimed that kin selection is not a suffic...
Mailbag: More on megajournals
Re: Megajournals
Open access megajournals
The Occasional Pamphlet reflects on the new megajournal trend in open access: “A ray of sunshine in the open-access future”. PLoS ONE is being joined by SAGE...
Scholarly communication
Savage Minds:
Why don't universities cut out the middleman?
I’ve been reading several different conversations about the future of science (and social science) academic publishing.
PLoS Blogs
PLoS now has blogs. The announcement accentuates that they have an equal representation of scientists and science journalists.
Guardian science blogs
The Guardian now has a small network of science blogs. Their launch announcement includes this surprising factoid:
The price of erudition
Did you know that the three-volume Handbook of Paleoanthropology is a thousand dollars from Amazon?
Mailbag: Human enterprises
Re: “Experts are usually wrong”
Experts are usually wrong
Do high rejection-rates perversely make some journals more likely to be wrong?
AnthroSource sleeps furiously
Savage Minds’ crew has been discussing the future of publishing in the American Anthropological Association recently. Rex Golub compares Open Folklore to Ant...
Down with supplements
The editor of the Journal of Neuroscience, John Maunsell, has announced that the journal will no longer permit authors to add “supplementary” material to the...
Fluffing the science
Bora Zivkovic on a heavily-trod topic (“Why is some coverage of scientific news in the media very poor?”) describes some of his work sifting through press co...
Malapa embargo story
Ivan Oransky writes “Embargo Watch”, which reports on issues related to journal embargoes and science reporting. His story about the Malapa embargo “break” l...
Online papers
A propos to the “open access” theme, reader Bram Hessels writes in with a link to his “People with Online Paleoanthropology Papers” page.
Citing papers you've never read
William Webber:
Academic publishing notes
On academic publishing, Jason Hoyt:
ACS ends print journals
Ars Technica’s John Timmer writes about the decline of print science journals, as the American Chemical Society abandons the format. Some reminiscences:
The next scientific publishing
Michael Nielsen writes that the scientific publishing industry is set for a “disruption”. It’s an interesting read, and in a sample, he strikes on the same a...
Nature: Don't worry, be bloggy
This week’s Nature has a surprising editorial about the value of scientific blogging:
Data supplements driving me crazy
I’m about to pull out my hair reading “supplementary information” for papers.