The new book, “Weapons of Math Destruction,” calls out many worrying trends in the application of big data, with particularly salient entries on higher education rankings, for-profit universities, the justice system, insurance, and employment.
This summer’s blockbuster movie “Ghostbusters” is, amazingly, about academic peer review and the quality of scholarly publishing. Is it possible that the specialized world of scholarly communications now has mass appeal?
Annual reports from publishing organizations always have a marketing slant, even when they are required filings with governmental bodies. But some are more marketing-oriented than others, and should not be mistaken for transparency, but rather tend toward rationalization. eLife’s recent report, challenging others to be as transparent, is itself opaque and purposeful.
Internet security seems to be crumbling before our eyes, and our media and leaders are not immune and lack a crucial understanding of how vulnerable a totally digital world can be. The answer may lie with analog technologies.
A proposal to substitute graphs of citation distributions for impact factors introduces many problems the authors don’t seem to have fully grasped, including unintentionally bolstering the importance of the very metric they seek to diminish.
With a new partnership with F1000, Wellcome embraces sketchy peer review standards, deep conflicts of interest, and financial support of a private, commercial enterprise. Worse, the entire thing seems redundant, avoidable, and unnecessary.
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.
Dr. Margaret Ann Armour’s keynote on diversity in academia and publishing, from the SSP’s 2016 Annual Meeting.
Expectations of free content are entrenched, but artists, authors, and publishers are all hurting because of it. The basic problem? It’s leading to a lack of trust in the future.
A breakdown of the mechanics of the TED Talk.
Many of the popular tools that we use everyday require two-step authentication. It seems odd that universities, who store data much more valuable than cat videos, recipes, and selfies, are slow to require it. That may change shortly.
What does it mean for libraries to be competitive and “entrepreneurial”? And is the very concept a Trojan horse for neoliberalism? Does it matter?
The general fragmentation of media and society has profound implications, and may explain to some extent the fragmentation being seen in higher education and scholarly publishing.
The technology developed to create a crypto-currency may be used to solve two intractable problems in scholarly publishing: authenticating users and counting usage.
When entities like Sci-Hub invite you to share your network credentials in order to help create free access to licensed scholarly publications, they’re asking for more than access to research. What they’re asking for may also give them access to your email account, your course management program, your tax documents, and more. Here are some things to think about before you decide to share that network user ID and password.