Guest Post, The TEF: How Publishers and Booksellers Can Engage with Higher Education Assessment
Linda Bennett and Annika Bennett of Gold Leaf discuss the results of their recent study of stakeholder views on the UK’s Teaching Excellence Framework.
Ask The Chefs: What Did You Learn At This Year’s SSP Annual Meeting?
This year’s SSP Annual Meeting was a record-breaker. Come see what the Chefs learned at the meeting and tell us what you learned, if you were there in person or virtually!
Reverse Engineering JCR’s Self-Citation and Citation Stacking Thresholds
Now we know how suppression decisions are made, should metrics companies suppress titles at all or simply make the underlying data more transparent?
Detours and Diversions — Do Open Access Publishers Face New Barriers?
Open access (OA) publishing seeks to eliminate paywalls for users. It has largely succeeded, but new diversions and distractions built into the commercial Internet may create new barriers that will be harder to deal with.
How Much Citation Manipulation Is Acceptable?
Is citation manipulation a moral problem or an accounting problem?
Guest Post: Charles Oppenheim Asks How Big a Problem Are Articles that Should Be OA but End Up Behind Paywalls
In recent years, observers have noticed that articles for which an APC has been paid are not always made freely available. How pervasive is this problem? A Scholarly Kitchen reader investigates.
Continental Drift: The Power (and the Struggles) of an Outsider’s View in Science
A video highlighting the work of Alfred Wegener, an outsider to the world of geology, who discovered continental drift.
Does Sharing of an Unpublished Thesis Create Enough Harm to Imprison Someone?
Charlie Rapple highlights the case of Diego Gómez, a Columbian researcher facing prison for sharing someone else’s thesis via Scribd. The case was brought by the thesis’ author, but publishers’ policies may partly be responsible.
Updating Asimov — How Do We Regain Control In the Digital Age?
Algorithms behave in ways even their creators can’t understand, yet they dominate how we share and see information. Do we need a “Three Laws for Algorithms”?
Intellectual Property, Long Story Short
Intellectual property is arguably the most important and least clearly understood concept in the world SK readers live and work in. Siva Vaidhyanathan’s new book is an important introduction to IP’s development and discontents.
Decline and Fall of the Editor
Many of the finest scholarly publications can boast of exemplary editorial programs, but the advent of Gold Open Access, especially when mandated by funding agencies, may make this kind of editorial activity a thing of the past.
The Information Landscape — How Do We Tackle the Problems Caused by Silicon Valley?
Science’s historical progress can’t be assumed. It has to be reclaimed, re-established. That’s more difficult in a fragmented information space geared for extremism.
The Stars Are Aligning for Preprints
An overview of recent events and the current state of preprints in the scholarly communications landscape.
Four Ways of Rationalizing Infringement: or, How to Defend a Pirate
It may seem as if it would be difficult to defend or justify a blatant piracy operation like Sci-Hub. But it can be done, if you’re willing to overlook certain facts and advance certain tenuous moral arguments.
Updated Figures on the Scale and Nature of Researchers’ Use of Scholarly Collaboration Networks
A new survey provides an updated view of how and why researchers are using scholarly collaboration networks. Charlie Rapple shares key findings.