It was a little while back now that a controversial blogger attacked one or more of the authors of the Scholarly Kitchen for being former academics, questioning whether such people should be working in publishing. In today’s post, Phill Jones argues that such rhetoric contributes to a stigma that is damaging to the health of academia.
Whether or not you attended this years APE (Academic Publishing in Europe) conference yourself, find out what three of the Scholarly Kitchen chefs thought of the meeting – our overall impressions and key take-home messages.
It’s easy to think that scientific ethics are straightforward and that results that aren’t robust end up in the literature because some people give into the temptation to cheat. The reality is more complex. If you were in this situation, what would you do?
Criticisms of altmetrics often seem to be equally applicable to other forms of research assessment, like the Impact Factor. Phill Jones suggests that is not because of a fundamental opposition to altmetrics but a fear that it will suffer the same pitfalls. The solution is to engage more with a somewhat neglected set of stakeholders; Informaticians.
Last week, Jeffery Beall wrote a highly critical blog past of Brazilian publishing co-operative and citation index SciELO. The post generated significant backlash in the blogosphere and on Twitter. Important aspects of the discussion seemed to get drowned out in all the furor: the motivation for SciELO’s founding in the first place and the need to protect local excellence in scholarly research.
The number of funding agencies asking researchers to make their data available is increasing and more than half of researchers globally are already doing so. With enforceable mandates finally starting to arrive, how long can we continue to think of the jury still being out on open data?
Late last year, Nature Publishing Group embarked on an experiment to allow users to share content. Some commentators accused NPG of using controlled sharing to snoop on customers. In this post, Phill Jones explores the difference between aggregated usage data and spying on users.
In the final part of a series on library publishers, Phill Jones explores the relationship between library publishing and institutional repositories against a background of funder data sharing mandates.
Librarians have been acting in a limited way as publishers since well before the internet, but over the last 5 years or so, a revitalized librarian-publisher movement has emerged. This new wave of library innovation may have had its origins partly in a desire to disrupt traditional publishers, but it’s beginning to make a positive impact on the landscape of scholarly communication in some unexpected ways.
Guest Chef Phill Jones returns to discuss the lessons learned at the Frankfurt STM panel meant to introduce publishers to the realities of the lives of postdocs.