After many and long conversations among colleagues within and beyond the Scholarly Kitchen
about what researchers need to know about scholarly publishing, Alice Meadows and Karin Wulf compiled a list of what we think to be the most urgent issues.
John Oliver looks at the complex issues surrounding the current battle over encryption.
There seems to be a significant disagreement between academic libraries and their own host institutions with regard to an important rule change proposed by the Department of Education. That disagreement has implications that go way beyond the rule itself.
With no clear benefits to researchers, a frustrating user experience, and no penalties for non-compliance, ClinicalTrials.gov is becoming increasingly irrelevant to clinical researchers and the world at large with each passing day. What does this mean for public access to research results? Is an obligation to patients putting themselves at risk in trials being breached? Why has it failed to live up to its potential?
After a few weeks of blistering comment sections on Scholarly Kitchen posts, it’s probably time to review the most common logical fallacies employed in arguing on the internet.
Sci-Hub sets a reprehensible example, but publishers cannot be content simply to stamp out such services. In order to evolve the industry into the future, publishers have to provide services that make Sci-Hub and its ilk seem old-fashioned and inconvenient to use.
Sci-Hub is a pirate website that enables users to access content that is held behind publisher paywalls. This is how it works.
A remarkable story (with a remarkable punchline) from the great geneticist, Mary Claire-King.
An interview with librarian and open access skeptic Jeffrey Beall. He discusses his work, the criteria for declaring an organization a “predatory publisher,” and how he would fix the scholarly communications system.
Kent Anderson returns to update his essential list of just what it is that publishers do.
The New York Public Library has now opened up hundreds of thousands of their digitized public-domain documents to unrestricted access and reuse, encouraging members the general public to exercise all the rights in those documents that the law gives them. Why aren’t more academic libraries doing the same thing?
Victoria Belmont talks about what happens when something you do online is taken out of context and becomes part of the internet’s permanent memory.
It’s easy to think that scientific ethics are straightforward and that results that aren’t robust end up in the literature because some people give into the temptation to cheat. The reality is more complex. If you were in this situation, what would you do?
The broad online availability of theses and dissertations creates difficult tensions between the individual rights of authors, the rights of educational institutions, and the responsibilities that both have to global scholarship and the collective good. How can we resolve those tensions?
The recent editorial board defection from an Elsevier journal brings up issues raised in Todd Carpenter’s 2013 post on editorial boycotts and declarations of independence. They generate a lot of heat, but what do the data say about the actual success of the new journals compared to the journals that were overthrown.