“Common Knowledge” and How False Facts Become Entrenched
Some scientific “urban legends” get debunked in today’s video. How does incorrect “common knowledge” become established?
Revisiting: A Parable of Innovation in Publishing — A Mostly True Story
Joe Esposito looks back at a 2011 post offering a parable of the role in innovation in publishing and makes the case that we should not criticize companies that try and fail to do new things.
Revisiting: Why Aren’t There More Women at the Top in Scholarly Publishing?
Alice Meadows revisits a post from 2013 that looked at how the scholarly publishing field fares in terms of the number of women in leadership roles. Nine years later, has anything changed?
Guest Post – Plan S and Scholarly Publishing: Some Lessons Learned
Sally Ekanayaka reviews a webinar featuring several key players in implementing Plan S and asks what lessons have been learned?
The Burden of Knowledge: A Historian Reviews Popular Period Movies
How infuriating is it to watch a movie about your area of expertise and realize just how wrong it is?
Libraries and the Contested Terrain of “Neutrality”
Are libraries “neutral”? That question is way too simplistic to serve as anything other than a political football.
Guest Post — Research Integrity: Ensuring Trust in Global Research
A look at developments in research integrity, and the attempt to build a universal culture of ethical and responsible practice in research as well as systems within the overall research ecosystem for such a culture to flourish.
How Do We Make Research Assessment More Responsible? – A Multi-stakeholder Discussion
A report on the SSP Publisher-Funder Task Force’s meeting of senior researchers, university administrators, funders, publishers, and representatives from other organizations on the topic of Responsible Research Assessment for the 21st Century.
Revisiting — Journalism, Preprint Servers, and the Truth: Allocating Accountability
In light of the recent anniversary of the January 6th attack on the US Capitol, we revisit Rick Anderson’s post on how journalists flag unsupported claims and blatant falsehoods, and whether preprint platforms should do the same.
Guest Post — Towards Standardizing Plain Language Summaries: The Open Pharma Recommendations
Adeline Rosenberg offers a look into the value of providing plain language summaries in research papers, and the standards created for doing so.
Does the World Need an Academic Integrity Awareness Index? An Interview with Helen Zhang
An interview with Helen Zhang on the proposal for an Academic Integrity Awareness Index.
Revisiting: A 2008 Look at Open Access
A look back at Joe Esposito’s 2008 essay on Open Access — what has come to pass and what has changed since then?
Actions on Retractions: An Interview with Jodi Schneider
In today’s post, Alice Meadows interviews Jodi Schneider of the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign about the work she’s leading to reduce the inadvertent spread of retracted research.
The dawn of the age of duplicate peer review
Simultaneously submitting an article to multiple journals is considered an ethical violation. But the growth of preprints means that many articles are undergoing simultaneous yet parallel peer review processes. Will duplicate peer review become the norm?
Revisiting: Theory of the E-book
Joe Esposito revisits his 2012 post on the 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.