SXSW Interactive — Where the Geeks (and Geek Watchers) Go
SXSW 2013 is heavy on hardware, invention, lessons about taking risks and exploring, usability, and discussions about how best to achieve authority and credibility.
Stick to Your Ribs: Skeuomorphic Publishing — How to Fit a Square Peg Into a Round Hole
Digital publishing continues to borrow its shape from its predecessors in print. Truly creative individuals are necessary to work with new media on their own terms.
Glass Houses and Straw Men — An Attempt to Assess the Quality of Statistical Analyses Fails Its Own Test
Do higher impact journals do a better job with their statistics? A study with a sexy title proves to be poorly designed and poorly reported.
One Down, One to Go: Edwin Mellen Press Blinks One Eye
Edwin Mellen Press drops one of its suits, but does so in a bizarre way, raising more questions.
Ignorance As Argument — A Chemist Alleges Publishers Exploit Typography for Money
A chemist complains about publishers exploiting authors through typesetting controls, but fails to understand exactly what it is and why it’s important.
The eLife Story Continues — Evasions Seem the Best We Can Expect
The continued silence from major funders involved in the eLife-PubMed Central scandal is creating a noise all its own.
Tesla, Journalism, and the Limits of Data — A Lesson in Context and Interpretation
An electric car’s data versus a journalist’s experiences — and neither proves sufficient for the task of telling us exactly what happened.
Open Access 2.0: Access to Scholarly Publications Moves to a New Phase
A reprint of an essay from 2008, which attempts to describe the evolution of open access publishing, Written before the astounding success of PLoS ONE, it outlines the link between open access publishing and the still-persistent traditional model.
Validation vs. Filtration and Designation — Are We Mismarketing the Core Strengths of Peer Review?
Narrowing the definition of peer review to only validation standards, we may be exposing peer review in its least flattering light, while ignoring the more reliable and powerful ways in which peer review serves science.
Extension and Conflation — How the NLM’s Confusing Brands Have Us All Mixed Up
The National Library of Medicine has a couple of powerful brands, but they’ve become conflated and compromised by poor brand management. Ultimately, their brand value is derived from the value of the MEDLINE brand, which may now be spread too thin.
Don't Shoot the Messenger — Keeping Our Eye on the Real Meaning of the eLife-PubMed Central Scandal
Attacks — both overt and covert — from OA advocates and NIH/NLM phantoms come in the wake of the posts revealing how eLife and PubMed Central coordinated activities and kept secrets.
Pulling the Wool Over Their Eyes — The PubMed National Advisory Committee and Conflicts of Interest
Conflicts of interest at PubMed Central have been mismanaged, and seem to have led to loading the National Advisory Committee with Wellcome representatives, among other things.
Netherlands Heart Journal Editor Delivers Dutch Citation Treat
Editors have learned how to exploit a simple loophole in the calculation of the Impact Factor. Is it time to close that loophole?
The New Face of the Professional Society
The professional society is becoming unmoored from its publication benefits. Will publication benefits in an open access environment become a centerpiece of a new breed of membership organizations?
The Shadow of the MOOC Grows Longer
Will massive open online courses (MOOCs) disrupt higher education? With recent announcements, the potential seems to be growing.