Conferences in our sector are increasingly articulating Codes of Conduct. Are they just box ticking? Charlie Rapple tackles her own skepticism and finds that articulating acceptable behaviors may state the obvious, but can serve a useful purpose nonetheless.
Google wins in court (again) as the Second Circuit of Appeals rules that its mass book digitization program qualifies as fair use. But Google is a commercial entity! And their files might get hacked! And their library partners are even more susceptible to copyright pirates than Google is! Yes, said the court, but. . .
Charlie Rapple reports on “Think. Check. Submit.”, a campaign to help researchers learn who they can trust when they are seeking to publish their work.
Revisiting Kent Anderson’s 2014 post on the importance of editors–how much of what we see as a failure of “peer review” is really a failure of editorial oversight?
A proposed coalition aims to help authors identify reputable service providers. In this Q&A with Donald Samulack, the justification and way forward for such an effort is discussed.
Amazon was recently criticized harshly in an article in the New York Times. The piece raises the question of whether the hard-charging culture of the tech industry is what we want.
Predatory publishing is a big and complex problem; so is calling out and shaming deceptive publishers by means of blacklisting. Is that something we should even do, and can it be done fairly, constructively, and helpfully? Yes, and here are some suggestions how.
Should kids be helped to delete evidence of indiscretion, or should they stop posting such evidence in the first place? Charlie Rapple considers the new iRights campaign
As the scholarly communication world becomes more complex and the issues we deal with become more politically and emotionally fraught, it becomes increasingly essential that we be able to tell the difference between anlaysis and advocacy. What markers can we look for to help us discriminate between them?
A conversation with COPE’s Charlotte Haug.
When we talk about impact and metrics and understanding the customer, we are actually talking about surveillance data. We should have an open debate about what this means.
Scholarly publishing is virtually unique in that it has significant representation by both for-profit and not-for-profit publishers. This alters the very nature of this segment of publishing, making the not-for-profits more business-like and forcing the for-profits to behave at times like mission-based organizations.
Should the fast and loose rules of startup company business models and the spin-oriented language of advertising be given free rein in the scholarly community?
Those who argue that “predatory” behavior is not only a problem among author-pays OA publishers have a good point. But this raises another question: is the term “predatory” itself really useful in the context of scholarly communication?
Nature conducts an experiment in paid fast track peer review, and the research community responds with concerns over creating an unfair tiered system for publication.