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...
Surveillance of people with infectious diseases is a public health measure, yet such surveillance can lead to serious injustice. In an editorial in the Amer...
In Nature this week, Noah Planavsky and coworkers, including the present director of the National Museum of Natural History, Kirk Johnson, have an opinion pi...
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...
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 ...
Ars Technica has a very nice long profile of the Rising Star project by Lydia Pyne: “Rising Star found a new species—now it wants to find a new way for paleo...
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”.
Are you curious about open science, but don’t really know what it means? The September issue of The SAA Archaeological Record includes an article that review...
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...
Research on human evolution may have the worst history of data access for any field of science funded by the National Science Foundation. NSF has spent milli...
I’m jazzed this morning because eLife has published a paper by Fidelis Masao and colleagues describing new footprint trails from the famous site of Laetoli, ...
The North Carolina School of Science and Mathematics (NCSSM) is a science-focused high school. They have put on Flickr a large series of Creative Commons (CC...
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...
Lee Berger gave the luncheon plenary lecture at the meeting of the American Association of Physical Anthropologists last Saturday, covering the recent discov...
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. ...
Oh, look – I’m in the New York Times today, in this great article by Amy Harmon on the increasing adoption of preprints by biologists:
From chapter 2 of Sharing Publication-Related Data and Materials: Responsibilities of Authorship in the Life Sciences, a publication of the National Research...
In September our team announced the discovery of the new species, Homo naledi. The species comes from the Dinaledi Chamber, deep within the Rising Star cave ...
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...
Todd Hanson comments on whether the Rising Star project may be a sign of a future of digital convergence in paleoanthropology: “From Cave to Rave: What Digit...
Some paleoanthropologists claim that they share data very widely, because they are exchanging datasets with other researchers to accomplish particular resear...
This is a reblog of my current article on the Africa edition of The Conversation, “Homo naledi fossil discovery a triumph for open access and education”, whi...
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:...
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...
Experimental psychology has recently become embroiled in a controversy about whether replication of high-profile findings should be a serious goal of new res...
Barbara King devoted a recent NPR blog post to highlighting some professional acrimony in Current Anthropology: “Did Humans Evolve On The Savanna? The Debate...
Rising Star team advance scientist Elen Feuerriegel has another new post on the Rising Star Expedition blog, discussing her work with the collection after th...
Today’s blog post on the Rising Star Expedition blog provides an FAQ about the expedition’s results so far: “What We Know and Don’t Know So Far”.
My first Rising Star Expedition update has been posted on the expedition blog: “In the hot seat”.
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...
A link from a reader: “‘Required reading’: As textbook prices soar, students try to cope”.
I was on the road when this announcement came out, but now that I’m back to regular blogging I want to share it more broadly:
Via a reader, this article in the New York Times about the American Historical Association’s vote to recommend that newly-minted PhDs be allowed to hide thei...
Jacquelyn Gill is a paleoecologist who writes at her blog, The Contemplative Mammoth. Today she ponders a paradox: at the same time that pollen data are more...
Stephen Downes, widely recognized as one of the original inventors of the “MOOC” concept, on why courses should be open: “MOOC - The Resurgence of Community ...
The Coursera blog today relates a remarkable story: “Not Impossible: The Story of Daniel, a 17 Year Old with Severe Autism & His 6 Completed Coursera Cou...
The White House is looking to recognize people who are leading in open science efforts, either by providing free access to data or by using data that is alre...
A new paper in the Journal of Human Evolution by Matthew Skinner and colleagues Skinner:Kromdraai:2013 announces the new availability of an open archive of m...
Jason Antrosio has composed a short report on the “Anthropology Blogosphere 2013 Ecology of Online Anthropology”. I appreciate his kind words about my work ...
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...
Today, Svante Pääbo’s group at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology released high-coverage sequence data from a toe bone from Denisova Cave...
From Brad Weiss: “Cultural Anthropology will go Open Access in 2014”.
This is big education news, from the California legislature: “Measure Seeks Campus Credit For Web Study”.
From Eli Dourado at The mlaut: “Binge Learning is Online Educations Killer App”.
The White House this week announced a new policy on public access to results from federally funded research. The announcement has gotten
Amy Brand comments on journal citation metrics and tenure and promotion, from the viewpoint of a university administrator Brand:appointments:2013. The piece ...
Cameron Neylon comments interestingly in Nature on the intellectual property drawbacks of publications that are free to access but not to reuse: “Science pub...
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...
Ewen Callaway reports on the increasing use of the arXiv preprint server by geneticists and biologists: “Geneticists eye the potential of arXiv”. With the ne...
I’m in Java, and even though I’m ahead of most of the world’s time zones, I’m behind on the news. This news from the University of Witswatersrand is an excit...
PeerJ founder Peter Binfield answers questions for Publishers’ Weekly: “Scholarly Publishing 2012: Meet PeerJ “.
This merits some attention: “Neuroscientists reach major milestone in whole-brain circuit mapping project”.
The New York Times has an article by John Markoff today, pointing to several disputes over the standards for data release with scientific papers. “Troves of ...
Michael B. Eisen: “The solution to the serials crisis on campus”
Carole McGranahan describes a memorable case where academics shut down public discussion of their work: “Dialogue with the Public: Adam Yauch and Academic Sn...
The absurdity of academic publishing is starting to get attention from the mainstream press. From The Economist: “Open sesame”.
I don’t have much time to come up for air this week, it’s been an incredibly busy and exciting meeting so far. But I wanted to take a moment to pass along th...
I’ve arrived in Portland, Oregon today for the annual meeting of the American Association of Physical Anthropologists. This is really a central highlight of ...
Alok Jha, in The Guardian: “Academic spring: how an angry maths blog sparked a scientific revolution”.
PLoS Computational Biology has started a new collaboration with Wikipedia, in which short review articles called “topic pages” will be peer-reviewed, given j...
The New York Times writes today about “Big Data” and its effects on disparate fields of science and public policy: “The Age of Big Data”.
Last month, the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy solicited comments concerning open access publication policies for federally funded resea...
NPR’s Science Friday interviewed open science advocate Michael Nielsen last week: “Can science be done without secrecy?” I like the headline.
As ScienceOnline2012 gets underway later this week, the New York Times is running an article about open science: “Cracking open the scientific process”. The ...
I submitted the following essay in response to the Request for Information on Public Access to Digital Data Resulting from Federally Funded Research from the...
Molecular biologist Michael Eisen, writing in the New York Times: “Research bought, then paid for”.
This seems incredible, from Jonathan Eisen: “YHGTBFKM: Ecological Society of America letter regarding #OpenAccess is disturbing”.
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 ...
Ryan Anderson has been interviewing anthropologist Jason Baird Jackson about open access publication (“Anthropology & Open Access: An Interview with Jaso...
My essay in Anthropologies (“What’s wrong with anthropology”) is cited by Monalisa Gharavi in a review for Social Text of David Graeber’s new book, Debt: The...
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...
Paul Krugman comments on how the growth in academic blogs in economics is a continuation of publication trends that long predate the World Wide Web: “Our blo...
Casts!
Anthropologies is an online project organized by Ryan Anderson that brings together voices reflecting the state of the discipline today. The current volume h...
Inside Higher Ed reviews and interviews an author who argues that the scholarly monograph shackles academics to an obsolete model of communication:
The international version of Der Spiegel is running an English-language profile of the traveling CT-scan project from Jean-Jacques Hublin and the Max-Planck ...
Cameron Neylon in New Scientist: “Time for total scientific openness”.
I really like e-books quite a lot. It’s easy to take a device like the Kindle, load up books, and read them. It holds your place for you, and multiple device...
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”
Re: “Textbooks leaving students behind”
The Chronicle of Higher Education reports on a survey of nearly 2000 undergraduate students on 13 varied college campuses:
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...
Last week I wrote a lot about the radiocarbon chronology of late Neandertals in Europe (“Neandertals didn’t disappear before 40,000 years ago”, “Neandertals ...
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...
Ewen Callaway writes in Nature News this week on open access science in paleontology: “Fossil data enter the web period”. I write about this topic quite a lo...
Jason Goldman covers the acquisition of Gombe chimpanzee records from the Jane Goodall Institute by Duke University (“Digitizing Jane Goodall’s legacy at Duk...
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...
Nature this week carries a story by Ewen Callaway titled, “The rise of the genome bloggers”. The main subject is Dienekes Pontikos, whose “Dodecad Ancestry P...
Nature’s Gene Russo has a nice article this week about scientists’ attitudes toward colleagues who do lots of public outreach: “Outreach: Meet the press”.
Last week I linked to Genomes Unzipped participant Joe Pickrell (“Ancestry unzipped”), who was working through the ancestry calculations that made his genome...
I’ve been reading several different conversations about the future of science (and social science) academic publishing.
Did you know that the three-volume Handbook of Paleoanthropology is a thousand dollars from Amazon?
Twenty Million Papers in PubMed: A Triumph or a Tragedy?
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...
NPR has a story about public analysis of data from NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter:
Science Insider reports that the National Science Foundation is going to make a “data management plan” a requirement of every grant application.
I’m just back from the physical anthropology meetings. What a lot of interesting things there were – a few in the sessions, and many outside of them!
In pursuit of my DIY genomics posts, I’ve been playing around with the Galaxy bioinformatics web tools. The team responsible for the South African genomes pu...
Following up on the editorial by Ralph Cicerone, calling for more effective data sharing, an editorial in the Guardian by computer scientist Darrel Ince rein...
Science has a one-page editorial by National Academy of Science President Ralph Cicerone. He alludes to the climate change scandals of the last few months, a...
Irritation of the day: Archaeology papers in $150 edited volumes. Why did you spend all that time writing the article that nobody is going to read who didn’t...
Another problem with “online methods supplements”:
Benedict Carey describes the live online dissection of the brain of Henry Molaison (“Building a Search Engine of the Brain, Slice by Slice”). There’s a lot o...
The Obama Administration’s Office of Science and Technology Policy is running a forum on public access to federally funded research. There seem to be ongoing...
There are three skulls from putative “hominins” that date to 3.5 million years or earlier. Every one of these skulls is known now from extensive reconstructi...
A propos to the “open access” theme, reader Bram Hessels writes in with a link to his “People with Online Paleoanthropology Papers” page.
I would love to be able to say that the Ardipithecus pelvic and cranial reconstructions were open access.
OK, as you know I do this thing where I read the supplementary information in papers. I hate doing it; think they should put the stuff in the actual paper wh...
thanks for your pellucid ardipithecus blognote--it was enormously helpful in digesting the reports.
I’m all in favor of self-educating – most of my genetics I learned on my own. So I was interested to see what you can really learn from free online sources l...
On academic publishing, Jason Hoyt:
Further drawbacks of databases in anthropology, after my post mentioning the issues. I’ll point to Martin Rundkvist’s discussion of “Open Source Dendrochrono...
Putting science back in its proper place, Congress has taken up a bill to eliminate the requirement that publicly-funded research be freely accessible by the...
Mark Weiss from NSF appeared at the AAPA business meeting to discuss recent changes in the funding guidelines from the Physical Anthropology program. The mo...