The Global Gold Open Access "Flip": A Realistic Plan or Magical Thinking?
Is a flip to a Gold OA world as easy as a recent paper suggests?
Ask The Chefs: How Has The Move To Distributed Networks Impacted Scholarly Publishing?
The digital era has increasingly led to distributed networks and a move away from centralized locations for both people and data. As our ability to communicate, participate, and share has increased, how has our ecosystem changed?
Proof of Concept, Proof of Program, and Proof of Scale in Scholarly Communication
New scholarly-communication initiatives have to do more than just demonstrate proof of concept: they have to demonstrate ongoing sustainability (what we might call “proof of program”) and the ability to create desirable products in the amounts needed (what we might call “proof of scale”). What do these look like when they’re achieved, and how are some recent initiatives doing?
Viva VIVO! Thinking More Broadly About the Scholarly Communications Infrastructure
Inspired by this year’s VIVO conference, this post looks at why we need a better understanding of how the scholarly research infrastructure works today in order to keep improving it for the future.
Revisiting: The Editor — A Vital Role We Barely Talk About Anymore
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?
Extreme Bias: How Rejection Clouds The Eyes of Researchers
The publication experience of authors may come down to a single factor: was the manuscript accepted?
Is it True that Most Open Access Journals Do Not Charge an APC? Sort of. It Depends.
We often hear that the majority of open access journals charge authors no fee for publication. Is that true? Well, it depends on how you count journals.
You Keep Using That Word, I Do Not Think It Means What You Think It Means
A look at common terms that are improperly used to describe science.
A Social World: Society Membership, Social and Economic Rewards and Human Behavior
How do shifts in cultural and economic views on social behavior affect the decision of a student, or researcher when deciding whether or not to join a relevant academic society? What social and economic forces are involved in an academic’s collaborative life, publishing life, and teaching life? Robert Harington delves into a fascinating report from the World Bank, entitled World Development Report 2015: Mind, Society and Behavior and its relevance for publishing and academia.
Revisiting: Is Access to the Research Paper the Same Thing as Access to the Research "Results"?
Is access to the research paper really the same thing as access to the research results themselves? Are funding agencies creating a false equivalency by confusing the two? And does this confusion favor researchers in some fields over others? Revisiting a 2013 post to re-examine these questions.
Ask The Chefs: What Is The Future of Membership Organizations? Does Being a Member Still Matter?
Looking to the future, do membership organizations still fit in? How can they maintain and extend their relevance?
Scholarly Kitchen Podcast: Ivan Oransky and Retraction Watch
In this episode, Retraction Watch co-founder Ivan Oransky talks with podcast host Michael Clarke about the causes, trends, and problems with retractions of scientific research papers.
A Single User Account
Academics’ expectations for user experience are set not by reference to improvements relative to the past but increasingly in comparison with their experiences on consumer internet services and mobile devices. The best solution for research, teaching, and learning would be a single account for each user, controlled by that individual, and accepted portably across services and platforms.
Summertime and the Reading Is Easy
My nominee for a summer reading book, Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore. This is a humorous book set in San Francisco. It playfully describes the clash between the new technology and the old world of printed books.
Scholarly Kitchen Podcast: "101 Innovations" and Scientific Workflow
Jeroen Bosman and Bianca Kramer, librarians at Utrecht University, talk with podcast host Stewart Wills about their 101 Innovations project.