Happy Labor Day: Workin' Man Blues
What better way to start your Labor Day weekend then with a little Merle Haggard?
Ask The Chefs: "What is ‘International’ in Publishing Strategy Today?"
The chefs are asked about international publishing strategy and so are you. Tell us how you’d answer today’s question!
Instruction Junction — The Ballooning Lists of Editorial Policies, and the Burdens They Create
Long “Instructions to Authors” filled with ancillary policies and undifferentiated requirements don’t help authors, staff, or editors. As the graveyard for unmade decisions, they’ve only gotten longer and more opaque. Maybe it’s time to clean yours up!
Going to the Beach with a Public Intellectual
This year’s beach reading will be spent with books by public intellectuals. Unfortunately, writing for the general public is not valued within the academy, to the detriment of public education.
Interview with Gordon Nelson — Public Access Policies, Open Access, and the Viability of Scientific Societies
An interview with the President of the Council of Scientific Society Presidents, on the unintended and potentially damaging consequences of public and open access mandates and embargoes.
Luddite Horses and Why Your Job May Soon Cease to Exist
A sobering look at the coming “robot revolution”, and how for many jobs in the future, humans need not apply.
The Mystery of a “Partial” Impact Factor
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.
An Interview with Amy Brand on a Proposed New Contributor Taxonomy Initiative
We’ve got DOIs (digital object identifiers) to help identify research articles, images, and other digital objects, and ORCIDs (Open Researcher and Contributor IDs) to help disambiguate the authors of those objects. Now there’s a new initiative to create a contributor taxonomy that identifies who’s done what in the creation of published research – find out more in our interview with Amy Brand, one of the brains behind the concept.
The Virtue of Rumor and Groundless Speculation
There is a rumor, based on no or scant evidence, that Google is preparing to launch a platform for scholarly communications, which could threaten established STM publishers. A publisher should react to this by reviewing its own internal operations and value proposition. In particular, the role in certification should be strengthened.
How Much Does It Cost eLife to Publish an Article?
Adding to the discussion of APCs, eLife’s financials suggest that being competitive with some major journals means the journal is expensive to run.
In Science, Should the Majority Rule?
HBO’s John Oliver offers a numerically representative debate about climate change. While he accurately skewers how the media presents science, this “majority rules” approach may not be the best way to judge what’s right or wrong.
Housecleaning at the Directory of Open Access Journals
The DOAJ is kicking out hundreds of predatory and scam publishers that found their way into the directory, and tightening standards to ensure that they don’t sneak back in. Which makes things a bit awkward for a community that, for years, has been insisting that predatory OA publishing isn’t a problem worth worrying about.
And the New Maxwell Perkins is . . . Google!
Google recently disclosed that they give Web sites higher ranking if they are encrypted. This is but one example of how Google serves as a gatekeeper of the Internet, making cultural decisions in the name of technological elegance.
A Day at the Beach — How the Messiness and Unpredictability of Journals Thwart Granularity
Attempts to use new measurements to more finely predict or represent journal quality are bound to falter because of some qualities inherent to journals themselves.
If a Monkey Takes a Photograph, Who Has The Copyright?
Monkey Copyright… of all the juxtapositions of words; I never thought I’d be entering that particular two word combination into Google. This particular search combo was prompted by (what else) a selection of updates in my twitter feed about a […]