Quantifying Consolidation in the Scholarly Journals Market
We all know the journals market has rapidly consolidated over recent years. But where’s the data? I set out to find some numbers to put behind the common sense.
Can You Really Know Your Customer If You Only See Them One Silo At A Time?
Functional silos lead to customer data silos. Can you get a full view of customer engagement without re-architecting your whole organization?
This Year’s Nikon Small World in Motion Video Microscopy Winners
Some beautiful winners in this year’s Nikon Small World in Motion video microscopy competition.
Smorgasbord: eLife and Significance vs. Accuracy, The Collapse of the Humanities, and a new NISO Draft on Retractions Standards
A mixed bag post from us — can you separate out the significance of research results from their validity? What will the collapse of the Humanities mean for scholarly publishing writ large? And a new draft set of recommended practices for communicating retractions, removals, and expressions of concern.
AI and Scholarly Societies
Robert Harington provides a template for scholarly societies wondering how to grapple with the overwhelming and omnipresent prospect of an AI future.
The 33rd First Annual IgNobel Prize Winners
It’s that time of year again when the big science prizes are awarded. No, not those prizes.
Ask the Chefs: What is the Single Most Pressing Issue for the Future of Peer Review?
What is the single most pressing issue for the future of peer review in scholarly publishing? In advance of Peer Review Week, we asked the Chefs.
The Best Explanation I’ve Seen for How Machine Learning Works
How machines learn, as demonstrated by a pile of matchboxes playing tic-tac-toe.
Having the Courage to Explain Research in Plain Language
The Curse of Knowledge is when we assume everyone else understands what we’re talking about, when they don’t. Good communication happens when we have the courage to make it simple.
Inequities in Grant Funding Start Early: How Can We Address Them?
Inequities are rife in the research process, starting with the pre-award process. Based on feedback and input from researchers, research managers, and others a new report looks at the challenges and makes recommendations for how funders and institutions can address them.
Shared Infrastructure and the Recent Downtime at the University of Michigan
When the University of Michigan was forced to disconnect from the internet last week, it resulted in disruptions to several key services it provides to the broader research community, such as the University of Michigan Press, HathiTrust, and ICPSR. What can we learn from this experience?
Guest Post — Can Inadequate Corrections Turn Misinformation into Disinformation?
Could the failure of a journal to visibly correct known errors in a publication, thereby propagating false information, be considered disinformation?
Guest Post – Was ChatGPT Set Up to Fail? Choosing the Right Tools and the Right Prompts is Essential for LLM Discovery
Was a recent Scholarly Kitchen piece analyzing the capabilities of ChatGPT a fair test? What happens if you run a similar test with an improved prompt on LLMs that are internet connected and up to date?
Guest Post — The Paradox of Hyperspecialization and Interdisciplinary Research
How does the shift to interdisciplinary research reshape the very foundation of how knowledge is generated and applied across various fields and what do the different stakeholders in academia need to do to balance the depth of specialized knowledge with the breadth of interdisciplinary understanding?
Critical Archives
Studying the way we’ve studied the past is mutual work. Archivists and librarians, and scholars using their collections, have each been producing critical archives scholarship that too often remains within disciplinary and professional siloes.