Funders and governments are exerting their influence in scientific publishing through monetary and financial threats, and are willing to slow science in order to accomplish OA goals.
Creating a centralized database for disclosing conflicts of interest (COI) is an easy sell. Deciding who is responsible and accountable for its funding and support is a much harder problem.
Funders — corporate, governmental, and philanthropic — have different priorities, yet they are now reaching into scientific publishing, wearing OA as a glove that fits. This post explores the problems this is creating and might create if allowed to perpetuate.
In this first part of a three-part series, the intrusion of governments into scientific publishing is contemplated — its causes, current state, and possible effects.
As new metrics are explored, not everything equates to “impact.” Getting our terms right will help us get our thinking straight.
There is an unstated theory of the e-book, which assumes that a book consists only of its text and can be manipulated without regard to the nature and circumstances of its creation. This is only one theory of many, but it is now the prevailing one.
With OA gaining momentum and hybrid and full OA policies becoming more common, article-level metadata and other standard approaches are necessary to facilitate discoverability.
Putting metrics and altmetrics into perspective can help us separate secondary signals from primary signals, and may lead to a greater appreciation of alternatives to metrics, or alt2metrics.
An attempt to entice citations from authors leads to a memorable story for the holidays.
The recently departed WSJ Health Blog taught us all lessons — and this blogger the lesson of standing up for what is clearly a better way of doing things.
One of the layers of impropriety regarding PubMed Central’s handling of eLife is its mismanagement of conflicts of interest.
Framing “altmetrics” as alternative may limit their potential — they have to be “alternative” to something already in existence. How do we move new measures robustly into the mainstream?
A new study suggests a weakening of the relationship between a journal’s impact factor and the articles published therein. An unorthodox analysis and unwillingness to share data for validation purposes raises serious questions about how seriously to take this study.
Polling techniques that changed with the times proved to more accurately predict the outcome of the 2012 elections. The loser? One of the biggest names in polling.
As communications in science begin to incorporate data elements more routinely, the standards for describing these, versioning these, and preserving these have to be considered. And we will all have to learn how to use data labeling processes correctly.