Revisiting a Book Review: How Economics Shapes Science by Paula Stephan
Revisiting our review of Paula Stephan’s book after her keynote talk at the SSP Annual Meeting.
Revisiting our review of Paula Stephan’s book after her keynote talk at the SSP Annual Meeting.
A review of top journals in 18 fields show they are on a variety of platforms, suggesting cognitive burden for users which may be driving them to aggregated options with unified user experiences.
Open access (OA) publishing seeks to eliminate paywalls for users. It has largely succeeded, but new diversions and distractions built into the commercial Internet may create new barriers that will be harder to deal with.
Algorithms behave in ways even their creators can’t understand, yet they dominate how we share and see information. Do we need a “Three Laws for Algorithms”?
Science’s historical progress can’t be assumed. It has to be reclaimed, re-established. That’s more difficult in a fragmented information space geared for extremism.
The information war requires changes — new research priorities, new personal and professional boundaries, higher editorial hurdles, and a hardened infrastructure.
Most journals have adopted rapid publication processes, but with the rise of preprint servers and new trends among readers, maybe they can return to a slower, more considered pace.
Funders have shifted their focus, and are funding, investing in, or launching initiatives that compete with publishers and constrain researchers. What changed?
Do scholarly and scientific publishers risk more than they realize when they embrace modern media spectacle and seek to marginalize the PDF?
The new book by Tom Nichols, “The Death of Expertise,” is not perfect, but it is an important exploration of existential threats to science, education, and representative democracy.