The Academic Publishing in Europe (APE) meeting in Europe is 10 years old, but feels as fresh and frisky as some of the meetings in the US used to. This report touches on some of the most interesting threads of two days’ worth of interesting presentations and conversations.
The emerging spectre of cyberwar and cyberterror has real implications for academic and scientific publishers, who already deal with the side effects and may become targets in the future.
A recent study finds that academic press offices exaggerate claims in their press releases about published research. Worse, the vast majority of these find their way into subsequent reporting.
With increased pressure from funding bodies and others for researchers to make their data open, as well as their research articles, it’s important to understand who is already sharing what data, how, why – and why not…
The idea of “reanalysis” needs to be rethought, if recent examples are any indication of what this trend could do to science.
This year, Thomson Reuters suspended six business journals for engaging in a citation cartel. Should the authors be held responsible for the malfeasance of their editors? We propose a new solution to punishing the community for the poor decisions of the few.
The recent “right to be forgotten” case raises a corollary issue for scholarly publishers — are you managing your archives so that users have been given the “right to ignore”?
Libraries do not have the luxury (or the mission) of selecting books solely based on their intrinsic quality. In order to do their work, the students and scholars served by the library need access to books that are highly relevant to their interests. How do the variables of quality and relevance interact with each other when it comes to library book purchasing?
Guest Chef Elisabeth Jones offers a critical analysis of a widely-distributed statistical chart that seems to show a doubling in the unit cost of monographs since 1985.
An alien landing in the scholarly and scientific publishing world today, reading all the opinions about how to make things more efficient and effective, might be forgiven for thinking there are only authors, readers, librarians, and reviewers. After all, those […]
Organizations seeking change will often turn to an individual to bring about that change. The challenge for such a change agent is how to move the organization forward without breaking it.
Last fall in the New Yorker, Jill Lapore bemoaned the current relationship between intellectuals and the general public, which she feels is “more vexed than ever” — in part because of a system that rewards academics for outrageousness and for lousy writing. Does she have a point?
Hysteria over a supervolcano leads to speculation about the eruptions of misinformation all around us. And, why exactly are we seeing so many recycled news stories in social media these days?
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.
Reproducibility of research results, and the lack of availability of negative results have both been deemed “crises” for the research community. But proposed solutions for each seem at odds with one another.