Book Wars: The Digital Revolution in Publishing
This substantive work from John B. Thompson provides a historical overview and analysis of technological and legal challenges to publishing practices in the 21st century.
Experimental Sleight-of-Hand and Choice Blindness
An experimenter uses a bit of magic in their research protocol to expose how stubbornly we want to justify the decisions we’ve made.
Pluralism vs. Monoculture in Scholarly Communication, Part 2
Calls for a monoculture of scholarly communication keep multiplying. But wouldn’t a continued diversity of models be healthier?
Revisiting: How to Be A Good Peer Reviewer
Revisiting Jasmine Wallace’s 2019 primer on best practices for peer reviewers.
Preprints Are Not Going to Replace Journals
At a recent meeting, a debate was held on the motion: Preprints are going to replace journals. I was asked to oppose the motion and this post is based on my arguments.
Guest Post — Open and Faster Scholarly Communication in a Post-COVID World
Liz Bal from Jisc discusses the scholarly publishing lessons learned from COVID-19, and how they can be applied to make research communication more efficient and effective.
Making the Case for a PID-Optimized World
In the second of two posts on persistent identifiers in scholarly communications, Phill Jones and Alice Meadows share information about a new cost-benefit analysis showing the value of widespread PID adoption
Jargon
How much jargon is too much jargon?
Guest Post — BioASQ for the Win: Inside the Healthiest Competition You’ve Never Heard Of
A look at BioASQ — an annual competition to develop AI systems to help drive medical progress.
Revisiting: Dear Reader, Are You Reading?
What does it actually mean to read digitally? Revisiting a 2018 post in light of the ongoing, pandemic-fueled drive to digital.
Guest Post — The 10,000-watt Bulb: How Preprints Shine a Light on Misconduct
Michele Avissar-Whiting of Research Square discusses the value of preprints for uncovering unethical and fraudulent research behaviors early in the publication process.
How One Society Is Supporting Peer Review Excellence in their Community: An Interview with Laura Feetham of IOP Publishing
In today’s post, Alice Meadows talks to Laura Feetham of IOP Publishing about their work to improve peer review quality in the physical sciences through their ongoing peer review excellence program.
Revisiting: Challenges for Academics in the Global South — Resource Constraints, Institutional Issues, and Infrastructural Problems
Revisiting a 2018 post discussing that for social science and humanities researchers in many parts of the world there are significant barriers to conducting and sharing research, in some cases more so than for science and medicine. In this revisited guest post, Dr. Naveen Minai provides a perspective as a gender studies researcher in Pakistan.
Guest Post — Space and Grace in Open Access Publishing
We should strive for open but also be realistic about the options truly available to researchers and discuss them transparently and honestly.
Experiences Behind the Data: Making Human Sense of Pandemic Usage Reports
As publishers and librarians draw conclusions from the last year of usage data, we must look to qualitative analysis to round out the picture of the human conditions behind the quantitative trends.