A mixed bag post from us — can you separate out the significance of research results from their validity? What will the collapse of the Humanities mean for scholarly publishing writ large? And a new draft set of recommended practices for communicating retractions, removals, and expressions of concern.
eLife’s recent announcement that it will reinvent itself as a “service that reviews preprints” has generated much discussion over recent weeks. But what are the primary drivers and goals, and what might we all learn from this bold experiment?
Major scholarly publishers have made substantial investments in preprints in recent years, integrating preprint deposit into manuscript submission workflows.
Michael Eisen’s bold visions for eLife emerge on Twitter. We consider two of his proposed initiatives.
Many of the finest scholarly publications can boast of exemplary editorial programs, but the advent of Gold Open Access, especially when mandated by funding agencies, may make this kind of editorial activity a thing of the past.
Are the APC levels set for high-end OA journals too low to be sustainable? Are there other ways that might help high-end OA journals pay their way?
Publishing a histogram of a journal’s citation distribution won’t alleviate Impact Factor abuse. At best, it will be ignored. At worse, it will generate confusion.
If Thomson Reuters can calculate Impact Factors and Eigenfactors, why can’t they deliver a simple median score?
The display of new types of information is a constant challenge for scholarly publishers. A look at how filmmakers portray texting and computer use offers some insight into effective interface design.
A trend toward shaming journals that promote their impact factors needs to be rolled back. Impact factors are journal metrics. It’s the other uses that need to be curtailed.
The lack of an Impact Factor is one reason that new journals have difficulty attracting submissions. Some journals, such as eLife and Cell Reports, qualify for an Impact Factor based on partial data. This post explores how that happens.
Adding to the discussion of APCs, eLife’s financials suggest that being competitive with some major journals means the journal is expensive to run.
Businesses are using more data than ever to inform decision making. While the truly large Big Data may be limited to the likes of Google, Amazon, and Facebook, publishers are nonetheless managing more data than ever before. While the technical challenges may be less daunting with smaller data sets, there remain challenges in interpreting data and in using it to make informed decisions. Perhaps the most daunting challenge is in understanding the limitations of the dataset: What is being measured and, just as importantly, what is not being measured? What inferences and conclusions can be drawn and what is mere conjecture? Where are the bricks and mortar solid and where does the foundation give way beneath our feet?
As requested, here is a summary of all the things found so far through the FOIA requests regarding PubMed Central — from eLife to BMC to JMLA to conflicts of interest to coverups. It’s quite a fetch.
The editor of eLife, on the eve of accepting his Nobel Prize, publishes an article designed to give his journal a competitive advantage. Unfortunately, the errors, lack of disclosure of his incentives, and inappropriate dismissal of incentives made the social graph light up with derision.