Even with the protections of traditional copyright, an author may lose control of his original work and see it misappropriated and used for hateful ends. So is it any wonder that many authors have concerns about being required to publish under CC-BY?
As online systems for discovering and distributing content have grown, so too has the need for unambiguous identification of people and the parties exchanging that content. Several systems have been in development in the past couple of years, notably the Open Researcher and Contributor ID (ORCID) and the International Standard Name Identifier (ISNI) system. How these two systems relate, engage each other, and serve community needs isn’t always clear. In hopes of alleviating some of the confusion, I sat down with Laura Dawson from Bowker to discuss the International Standard Name Identifier, how it relates to ORCID, and other issues surrounding identity management systems.
PLOS has set a new policy, requiring authors to make all data behind their published results publicly available. This has been met with a great deal of controversy from the research community. Thoughts on why this policy and why now…
Editors keep allowing nonsense and gibberish to be published in their journals and conference proceedings. How many exposés and sting operations will it take before scholarly publishing begins effectively to police itself?
Businesses are using more data than ever to inform decision making. While the truly large Big Data may be limited to the likes of Google, Amazon, and Facebook, publishers are nonetheless managing more data than ever before. While the technical challenges may be less daunting with smaller data sets, there remain challenges in interpreting data and in using it to make informed decisions. Perhaps the most daunting challenge is in understanding the limitations of the dataset: What is being measured and, just as importantly, what is not being measured? What inferences and conclusions can be drawn and what is mere conjecture? Where are the bricks and mortar solid and where does the foundation give way beneath our feet?
Despite the feeling that the factory has turned out just another from the same template, Gladwell’s new book turns out to be refreshing, surprising, and thought-provoking.
When novel, newsworthy results are discovered to be wrong, is that still news?
A recent announcement from the UK government highlights the unanswered economic questions behind its open access policy.
Adam Etkin describes the workings and rationale for scoring papers and journals based on the rigor of peer review they received prior to publication.
The US government’s new appropriations bill contains a public access mandate for research articles funded by some agencies.
The vaccine-autism papers were a hoax. But a lingering controversy around the diagnosis of a celebrity’s child and her insistence on preserving her version of the facts only shows how stubborn misinformation can be.
The story of a teenage science whiz who used free information sources to create a novel cancer screening test may be full of holes. Whether it is or not, it no longer seems the clear, happy story the media wanted to tell.
A new poll finds that trust in scientists and science journalists is fairly low. But are the two questions separable when it comes to the general public?
As requested, here is a summary of all the things found so far through the FOIA requests regarding PubMed Central — from eLife to BMC to JMLA to conflicts of interest to coverups. It’s quite a fetch.
As the scholarly communication environment changes, so does the monograph–and the nature of scholarship itself. A few years from now, what will these terms even mean?