Publishers often slap labels on activities that are complex, expensive, and high-value. Worse, we often accept people calling these activities “value-add” when they are core functions of how scientific information shared.
Are we all talking about the same thing when we say “open access” — and do we all mean the same thing when we talk about an “open access future”? Short answers: “yes (kind of)” and “no way.”
Journals and funding agencies are focusing on data availability as a route to better experimental reproducibility. But the data is only part of the equation. A new set of NIH guidelines is a great start toward making methodologies better documented and more available.
Simple things are often more complex than we initially think, and the push for faster publication may be an expensive and risky trend to follow too much further.
Organizations need to encompass multiple perspectives on where a business is headed. It’s usually the case that the staff is not in agreement on that direction, but that could be a very good thing.
Guest Chef Phill Jones returns to discuss the lessons learned at the Frankfurt STM panel meant to introduce publishers to the realities of the lives of postdocs.
With the appellate court’s rejection of the district court’s decision in the Georgia State University fair-use case, we have yet another twist in this six-year-long saga of copyright litigation. It’s clearly a setback for GSU–but what about for fair use?
Proposals to get more money to younger researchers shine a light on the aging cadre of academic researchers and the lack of succession we risk with current practices.
The annual update to the list adds some important items overlooked on prior versions, including design, enforcement of editorial policies, and Board interactions.
The idea of “reanalysis” needs to be rethought, if recent examples are any indication of what this trend could do to science.
Revisiting Joe Esposito’s post on the real world concerns of the research community. Although many people claim to know what scientists want, the author’s own ongoing survey has come up with results that are at odds with most conventional wisdom. This post summarizes those findings and identifies a near-universal view held by many scientists.
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.
A new book by the creator of xkcd takes crazy questions about science and tackles them with verve, humor, great illustrations, and great examples of how to break down even the strangest problems.
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?