The emergence of the Authors Alliance is causing consternation among some members of the traditional publishing community, most notably the Authors Guild, which has already issued a sharply-worded critique. But what is the Alliance actually going to do? They’re not really saying.
At a time when more research articles are more readily available to more readers globally than ever before, it’s crucial we are confident that those papers meet the highest standards and, that on those occasions where they don’t, there is a sound system in place to revise or retract them. So what can we do to make the publishing process more sound?
Building a reputation can take decades for a society, publisher or journal. Unfortunately, the influential “seals of approval” in the industry are easy to spoof leaving some authors confused and deceived.
Are university presses really “under fire,” or are they simply experiencing the natural consequences of doing the wrong things at the wrong time in a marketplace that has evolved away from them?
Technological trends have enabled experiments in publishing. But now that we’ve seen plenty of experiments, is it time to bring them under control?
Discourse about new ideas in publishing can be broken by the appetite to make exquisitely insightful remarks about things to do not yet exist. To work on truly new things, we have to stop performing the role of the skeptic.
Frontiers issues another statement about why the “Recursive Fury” paper was retracted, raising once again questions about why it was retracted, but shifting the focus more and more to how it was retracted.
Privacy, trust and managing the cultural record bubble to the surface of growing concerns.
Revisiting Kent Anderson’s 2012 post about how comments and letters probably shouldn’t be branded as “post-publication peer review”.
Two ways to leverage scarcity in the computer world are worth examining, because they represent baffling new ways for the rich to get richer.
Retracting a paper identifying a link between climate change deniers and conspiracy theorists provokes more conspiracy theories, but it turns out the real impetus for retraction is disappointingly parochial and explicable.
Axiomatically more complicated than copyright, built to provide no legal cover, and possibly put in place by the technocrats in Silicon Valley, does Creative Commons make sense for the creative class?
Even with the protections of traditional copyright, an author may lose control of his original work and see it misappropriated and used for hateful ends. So is it any wonder that many authors have concerns about being required to publish under CC-BY?
As university presses become more involved with D2C marketing, they are going to confront the need for clearly articulated privacy policies. The time to put those policies in place is now.
Data sharing and publication is a topic we need to consider carefully, and weigh the risks, costs, and benefits, as well as the complexities.