The expensive route to open access in Nature journals
The eLife editorial on preprints that I referenced yesterday (“Moving toward preprint reviews at eLife”) is only one of the big changes in science publishing...
The eLife editorial on preprints that I referenced yesterday (“Moving toward preprint reviews at eLife”) is only one of the big changes in science publishing...
The journal eLife has adopted a new editorial policy expecting all submitted papers to be first posted to a preprint server like bioRxiv. The policy is annou...
In University Affairs, environmental scientist Ryan Bullock looks at his career-worth of experience subjecting his research to peer review: “The trolls have ...
Undark recently published an article by Viviane Callier, looking at recent research on scientific career trajectories: “What Matters Most on the Road to Scie...
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...
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...
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...
Adam Van Arsdale and Mary Shenk put out a call in American Anthropologist for more biological anthropologists to submit their work to American Anthropologist...
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...
Tania Rabesandratana writes a long piece in Science describing the push for universal open access to the scientific literature: “Will the world embrace Plan ...
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...
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 ...
Verge has a long article on Sci-Hub, focusing on its founder, Alexandra Elbakyan: “Science’s Pirate Queen”.
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 has a remarkable editorial in the current issue that makes a point of criticizing citation practices by authors in “articles we have recently...
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...
Leonid Schneider posts a fairly typically depressing story from a peer referee from Frontiers in Neuroscience. The story is basically an editor pressuring th...
Cameron Neylon considers some of the challenges in keeping open data access initiatives sustainable over the long term: “Squaring Circles: The economics and ...
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...
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...
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 ...
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. ...
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:...
Nikolai Slavov recently published an opinion piece in eLife arguing the advantages of post-publication review of scientific papers: “Point of view: Making th...
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...
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...
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:
David Roy Smith asks whether sequencing mitochondrial DNA is still worth a scientific paper: “Opinion: Too Many Mitochondrial Genome Papers”.
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...
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...
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...
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...
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:...
Global Palaeo News has an interesting table of acceptance rates and publication times for journals in Paleolithic archaeology published by Elsevier: “Publish...
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...
Michael Lesk (2014) has a commentary on a new paper (Citron and Ginsparg 2014) that uncovers widespread plagiarism among published scientific papers. Lesk di...
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...
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...
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...
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...
Mark Johnston, editor-in-chief of the journal, Genetics, recently published an editorial decrying scientists’ reliance on “impact factor” of journals to make...
Sequencing bacterial genomes is now the scope of project routinely undertaken by undergraduates just learning how to do research. What was once an empirical ...
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...
From Brad Weiss: “Cultural Anthropology will go Open Access in 2014”.
Michael Eisen: “The Glacial Pace of Change in Scientific Publishing”.
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...
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 founder Peter Binfield answers questions for Publishers’ Weekly: “Scholarly Publishing 2012: Meet PeerJ “.
Michael B. Eisen: “The solution to the serials crisis on campus”
The absurdity of academic publishing is starting to get attention from the mainstream press. From The Economist: “Open sesame”.
Alok Jha, in The Guardian: “Academic spring: how an angry maths blog sparked a scientific revolution”.
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...
PLoS Computational Biology has started a new collaboration with Wikipedia, in which short review articles called “topic pages” will be peer-reviewed, given j...
NPR’s Science Friday interviewed open science advocate Michael Nielsen last week: “Can science be done without secrecy?” I like the headline.
Molecular biologist Michael Eisen, writing in the New York Times: “Research bought, then paid for”.
Philip Ball: “The h-index, or the academic equivalent of the stag’s antlers”.
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 ...
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...
Ryan Anderson has been interviewing anthropologist Jason Baird Jackson about open access publication (“Anthropology & Open Access: An Interview with Jaso...
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...
Last week, Computerworld reported that IBM’s famous “Watson” supercomputer is moving to its next challenge: prescribing cancer treatments for the WellPoint h...
Cameron Neylon in New Scientist: “Time for total scientific openness”.
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 ...
George Monbiot writes in the Guardian with some sobering statistics about academic publishing: “Academic publishers make Murdoch look like a socialist”
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...
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...
Pascale Lane reviews a paper about retraction rates in top journals: “Papers ‘Not Meant to Be Factual’”.
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...
Re: 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...
Savage Minds:
I’ve been reading several different conversations about the future of science (and social science) academic publishing.
PLoS now has blogs. The announcement accentuates that they have an equal representation of scientists and science journalists.
The Guardian now has a small network of science blogs. Their launch announcement includes this surprising factoid:
Did you know that the three-volume Handbook of Paleoanthropology is a thousand dollars from Amazon?
Re: “Experts are usually wrong”
Do high rejection-rates perversely make some journals more likely to be wrong?
Savage Minds’ crew has been discussing the future of publishing in the American Anthropological Association recently. Rex Golub compares Open Folklore to Ant...
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...
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...
Ivan Oransky writes “Embargo Watch”, which reports on issues related to journal embargoes and science reporting. His story about the Malapa embargo “break” l...
A propos to the “open access” theme, reader Bram Hessels writes in with a link to his “People with Online Paleoanthropology Papers” page.
William Webber:
On academic publishing, Jason Hoyt:
Ars Technica’s John Timmer writes about the decline of print science journals, as the American Chemical Society abandons the format. Some reminiscences:
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...
This week’s Nature has a surprising editorial about the value of scientific blogging:
I’m about to pull out my hair reading “supplementary information” for papers.